ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

blanche-2 Edward G. Robinson stars in "The Last Gangster," with a cast that includes Lionel Stander, Rosa Stradler, James Stewart, John Carradine, and Sidney Blackmer. As older men, Stander and Blackmer would be known for the TV show Hart to Hart (no mistaking that voice) and Rosemary's Baby, respectively.Robinson is Joe Krozac, a powerful, ruthless mob boss who does not tolerate anyone moving in on his territory.Joe takes a trip to Europe and returns with a bride, Talya (Rosa Stradner). Talya doesn't speak much English so she really doesn't know how Joe makes his living.When she becomes pregnant, Joe is crazy with joy, absolutely obsessed with the idea of having a son, whom he dreams of taking over his crime business.Joe, alas, taking a page out of Al Capone's book, lands in jail for ten years for tax evasion. He is determined to be a model prisoner so he can get out on time. When Talya brings the baby to see him, he only cares about the baby and not her.When her son is called baby mobster in the newspaper, with a photo, Talya becomes disillusioned and stops bringing the baby. She also divorces Joe. Meanwhile, Joe left a lot of money somewhere and his old friends want it as soon as he's released.This film went the typical gangster route until the end, and it's really very sweet. Robinson was such a wonderful actor - he could play a wimp or a bully, do drama and comedy - he was a real treasure.James Stewart had an early role in this film. I thought he looked on the young side for Rosa Stradner, even though he was five years older. Toward the end of the film, I guess to show the passage of time, he has a mustache someone stuck on him, and it looks dreadful.Rosa Stradner did a good job as an insecure woman from another country who marries the wrong man. She was married to Joseph Mankiewicz, during which time, she didn't work in the early years while he was out having affairs with Judy Garland and Linda Darnell. But they stayed married, and she did a film, The Keys of the Kingdom, in which she was marvelous. At the age of 45, an alcoholic by now, she committed suicide. Very sad. Supposedly the line from the Mankiewicz screenplay of All About Eve - "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night" was inspired by Rosa.You won't have to fasten your seatbelts for this, but thanks to Robinson, it's good.

sol **SPOILERS** Coming home to America from a trip to the "old country" with and old fashion ask no questions young wife big time hood Joe Krozak, Edward G. Robinson, is back in business as he puts out a contract on the Kile Boys who've been muscling in on his Brooklyn rackets. Taking out three of the four Kile brothers in a hail of bullets Krozac will later in the movie pay dearly for not finishing off Acey Kile, Alan Baxter. Who'll be hounding him all throughout the film until he finally meets up with Krozac who he catches in a weak moment with his guard down.With the State D.A not being able to indite the cunning Krozak on anything substantial the Feds then take a crack on him slapping Kozack with an air-tight tax evasion rap. That lands him in the "Big A" the Federal Prison on Alcatraz Island. While all this is going on Krozac's wife Talya, Rose Stradner, gave birth to Joe Jr the apple in Krozack's eye. Krozack hope's his boy will grow up to be as big a hoodlum, if not bigger, as he is and eventually take over his coast-to-coast crime syndicate and empire.Two things happen that opens the very naive Talya's eyes about her husband and has her then leave him for another man former San Francisco sleazy tabloid reporter Paul North,James Stewart. When going to see Krozack in prison Talya is hurt over him slobbering over Joe Jr so much that he doesn't notice that she's even there. Later Talya gets very hurt when North,in order to get the "Big Story", slipped a toy gun on little Joe as his mom was holding him and had it photographed by his newspaper. Talya going to the tabloid's office to complain about the treatment she and Joe Jr got from it's reporters is shocked to find out that her sweet and loving husband Joe Sr is the biggest and baddest gangster in America. Paul seeing how hurt and destroyed Talya is over what he did to her makes it up by quiting his job on the tabloid in protest and later marring Talya and adopting young Joe, renaming him Paul North Jr, as his step-son.It's now ten years later and Joe Krozac is up for release and thinking that he'll slip back in to action as boss of his crime syndicate. Instead he has a big surprise coming in the form of his #1 and right-hand man Curly, Lionel Stander. Curly has been making big plans of how the syndicate is to do business over these last ten years and it's his boss Joe Krozac who doesn't figure in any of them.Better then you would expect 1930's gangster flick with Joe Krozac finding out the hard way who his friends really are. In the end Krozac sees what a failure he would have been to his son Joe Jr, or Paul North Jr, if he weren't put behind bars and had him follow in his foot steps. Resentful at first to both Talya and Paul North for taking his young son away from him Krozac learns how they made Joe Jr, Douglas Scott, into an upstanding and law abiding young man with a bright future to look forward to. This compared to what he would have done by leading Little Joe into a life of crime and violence. With him ending up, like Joe Krozac, either behind bars or six feet under not by dying in bed but from the result of a police shoot-out or mob hit.Instead of a welcoming committee from his gang members Krozac finds himself kidnapped and worked over by Curly & Co. in order to find out where he stashed millions of dollars of mob money just before he was sent up the river. Krozac being forced to talk when Joe, or Paul, Jr was kidnapped and threatened with death by the now Curly Gang who were later gunned down in a shoot-out with the cops. Thrown out in the cold, together with Joe Jr to find his way back home it was Krozac's stay with both his son and his former wife Talya and her new husband Paul North that made him finally see the light. But not in time to turn his criminal life around when his past, in the from of crippled and vengeful hoodlum Acey Kile, caught up with him one rainy night in a dark and lonely alley.

RCorder91 I saw "The Last Gangster" (1937) for the first time last night (7/18/2006) and found it to be a fairly entertaining film. Edward G. Robinson's acting,as per usual in gangster movies of this type, carried the film. It had its weak moments (like Rose Stander's acting) and its unlikely moments(like the final shooting scene), but it remained fairly entertaining just the same. There was one rather strange item about the film. One of the 1930s more identifiable "bad guy" actors (Edward Pawley) appeared only briefly in this film (in the scene where the mob tortures Robinson's character)and didn't have a single line of dialog! I found this rather odd after having seen Edward Pawley play featured roles such as: Public Enemy Number One in "G-Men", the head of a gangster mob in "King Solomon of Broadway", a crazed and rebellious convict in "Each Dawn I Die", a prominent gangster in "Smashing The Rackets" and in "Eyes of the Underworld", Bogart's bad-guy partner in "The Oklahoma Kid, et cetera. Perhaps this lends some additional credence to what some critics have claimed to be poor directing of this movie. Perhaps, also, the fact that there was no love lost between Robinson and Pawley had something to do with it. Interestingly, Pawley went on to replace Robinson as "Steve Wilson" in the long-running and highly popular radio drama series, Big Town, in the 1940s.

jaykay-10 The movies have always relied on clear-cut heroes and villains to either engage the sympathy or incur the animosity of members of the audience: simplistic, and far removed from real life. Much more thought-provoking are the occasional characters such as the lead in this film, an egotistical, tough-as-nails crime kingpin and killer, who nevertheless emerges convincingly as a man capable of sympathy and single-minded devotion. The scenario is to be commended for making the complexities and seeming contradictions in this character altogether believable. Of course it is the performer who must make this come alive on the screen, and here Edward G. Robinson succeeds brilliantly. In a gallery of great performances by such a fine actor, this one deserves to be much better known.