How they entered lives of crime

Born in the depths of the Depression and Prohibition eras, the Hollywood gangster movie offers a compact distillation of the social ills and anxieties of 1930s America. Warner Bros., the studio most closely associated with the genre, has already dug into its archives for two fine box sets of tough-guy flicks (released in 2005 and 2006). Like the earlier collections, Volume 3, out Tuesday, reveals the shifting moral and sociological assumptions behind these crime movies while showcasing the fruitful early careers of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, the era’s thuggish leading men of choice. (Their respective 1931 breakthroughs, William Wellman’s “The Public Enemy” and Mervyn LeRoy’s “Little Caesar,” both classics of the form, can be found in the first Gangsters Collection.)

Repentance is the implicit theme connecting many of the films in the new set. All three of the movies with Cagney in the lead role feature him as a reformed gangster whose attempts to go straight are the source of both conflict and comedy. He reinvents himself as a tabloid reporter-photographer in “Picture Snatcher” (1933), as the superintendent of a juvenile reformatory in “The Mayor of Hell” (1933) and, in a mildly meta twist, as a Hollywood star in “Lady Killer” (1933). But Robinson undergoes the most dramatic transformation of all, finding salvation as a green-thumbed monk in “Brother Orchid” (1940).

The earliest film in the set, “Smart Money” (1931), marks the only on-screen pairing of Robinson and Cagney. The former, fresh off the triumph of “Little Caesar,” plays a small-town barber and amateur cardsharp turned gambling mogul; the latter, in a supporting role, is his smart-mouthed sidekick. Notable for a curious homoerotic frisson between the Robinson and Cagney characters, the film establishes a world of corruption, where even the law is enforced by dubious methods.

Four of the six titles predate the 1934 enforcement of the Hays Production Code, as should be apparent from their avoidance of right-versus-wrong didacticism (next to the other films, the hokey “Brother Orchid” sticks out as a post-Code redemptive fantasy). Lloyd Bacon’s “Picture Snatcher” and Roy Del Ruth’s “Lady Killer,” the shortest and snappiest of the films, whiz through their busy plots with an amoral glee and feature Cagney at his pugnacious best.

A spark-plug presence whose staccato delivery and kinetic gestures could perk up even the most wilted material, Cagney was also capable of fleeting moments of vulnerability. At his most brutish, he remained oddly likable, which allowed his characters to get away with contemptible behavior. His on-screen roughness with the ladies became something of a trademark. “Lady Killer,” in which his bid to escape a criminal past propels him to movie stardom, reunites Cagney with his “Public Enemy” costar Mae Clarke -- the recipient of a grapefruit in the face in that film, she’s dragged around by her hair this time.

In “Picture Snatcher,” an affectionate ode to the gutter press, Cagney’s shameless proto-paparazzi antics are presented as the epitome of pluck and guile. His big coup comes when he smuggles a camera into Sing Sing Prison, strapped to his ankle, and scores a photo of a murderess being electrocuted. (The inspiration was the 1928 execution of killer Ruth Snyder, captured in a snapshot by an enterprising New York Daily News reporter.)

By far the darkest film of the lot (and the only one with neither Cagney nor Robinson), “Black Legion” (1937) stars Humphrey Bogart, who was then still a few years shy of mega-stardom. (He also has a small role in “Brother Orchid,” as Robinson’s upstart rival.) Less a gangster movie than a socially conscious cautionary tale, “Black Legion” was based on a real incident and an actual offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan.

When Bogart’s family man and factory worker misses out on a promotion that goes instead to a Polish immigrant, he joins a secret society committed to upholding an “America for Americans” by any means necessary. It’s a nightmarishly bleak vision of nationalist fervor stoked by male working-class impotence. And given the xenophobic overtones of today’s debates over immigration, it remains as topical as ever.