It's somewhat surprising that it has taken this long for Warner Bros. to release the films that essentially built the studio on Blu-ray. The studio, which is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, has finally released the first wave of the gangster classics that helped the studio survive the Great Depression and be what it is today. This week, Ultimate Gangster Collection: Classics was released, bringing Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, The Petrified Forest and White Heat to high-def.
The earliest film in the set is Little Caesar, released just months before The Public Enemy in 1931. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Caesar features Edward G. Robinson as Rico and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as his friend, Joe. While Rico decides that the best way to make a name for himself in Chicago is by becoming a gangster, Joe disagrees st it tests their friendship. While Robinson does pull a stunning performance, Caesar is still firmly planted in the early talkie era. Still, I have to applaud any film that tells its story with such control – in just 79 minutes, the audience sees Rico's rise, fall and ultimate defeat. So, take that Godfather, with your 200-plus minute runtime.
The Public Enemy escapes the conventions of the early talkies. Even though it was released months after Caesar, it feels years ahead of its time. James Cagney explodes onto the screen and Jean Harlow defines sexy for an era of moviegoers. Then there's the directing by William A. Wellman. Like Josef Von Sternberg, Wellman was one of the rare directors who didn't miss a beat when talkies came in. That the director of Wings also made The Public Enemy should come as no surprise. Wellman saves the stark brutality of silent films for The Public Enemy, unitizing shadows and camera angles in ways others could not.
In an effort to get Humphrey Bogart in the set, Warner Bros. made the easy choice to go with Archie Mayo's The Petrified Forest form 1936. This film is very different from any other in the set. Robert E. Sherwood's 1936 Broadway hit is set in the desert, with the gangster – Duke Mantee (Bogart) – really taking a secondary role. It's more about the wayward intellectual Alan Squier, played by Leslie Howard, who wanders into a desert cafe and meets waitress Gabrielle Marple (Betty Davis). Their potential romance is thrown off course when Duke, an escaped convict, comes in and holds them and the other cafe patrons hostage.
While some early talkies that were adapted from plays often merely feel like filmed plays, The Petrified Forest is really the first play to successfully make the transition without boring the audience. It is kept in one setting to keep the sense of claustrophobia that the characters cannot escape. Add in stunning performances from Howard, Bogart and Davis and this is one engrossing early talkie.
The studio did produce plenty of other great gangster pictures in the late 1930s, but those are all glossed over in this set. Instead, the last film is Raoul Walsh's masterpiece, 1949's White Heat. It is easily the best film in the set, giving those who haven't had the pleasure of seeing it before a sample of how Cagney had developed into one of the finest actors of his generation. His performance as Cody Jarratt is possibly the best one he ever gave, even better than Yankee Doodle Dandy - the film that won him his Oscar. Cagney plays a total psychopath with a devotion to his mother in White Heat and is explosive in every scene.
White Heat should also be held in high regard as not just the closing of one cinematic genre – the classical Golden Age gangster movie – but also the beginning of the best era of film noir. Walsh directs two tense heist scenes at each end of the film, getting movie goers ready for a decade filled with the best heist sequences.
The Ultimate Gangster Collection: Classics gets a nice package design, with a hardcover sleeve and book. The discs are in a thick standard Blu-ray case. As for supplements, they are the exact same ones you'll find on the old DVDs. Warner Bros. didn't make a single new feature or commentary for the set and the 15-20 minute talking head pieces are all in standard def. A fifth disc is actually a DVD that includes the Public Enemies documentary that was included in a digi-book release of Goodfellas and in the original Gangsters DVD set.
This set only whets my appetite for more of Warner Bros.' classic gangster pictures on Blu-ray. Hopefully a volume two is around the corner with essentials like High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties and Angels With Dirty Faces. While the studio did release the films in the set individually, if you plan on buying all four anyway, I'd get the set. All four of these films are great - especially White Heat. If you haven't seen these movies for whatever reason, you will be shocked by how fresh they remain, even 80 years later.
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image: Daniel S Levine