Edward G. Robinson was born in Bucharest, Romania on December 12, 1893. Though he’d begun his Hollywood acting career years earlier (first appearing onscreen during the silent era), it was director Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931) – which next airs early on February 25th – that made him a star. Playing the title role of a diminutive gangster that wanted to be a big shot, Robinson gave his character Enrico Bandello an energy akin to James Cagney’s portrayal of Tom Powers in William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), released later that same year. Robinson’s bad guy is #38 on the American Film Institute’s top 50 villains list and his iconic ending line “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” is #73 on the AFI’s 100 greatest movie quotes list. But while Cagney quickly capitalized on his success and stayed in leading roles throughout his career until (quite literally) the very end, Robinson toiled a while longer and struggled to break free from his tough guy typecasting before morphing into a character actor extraordinaire. Though they each appeared in features with the other member of the Warner Bros.’s 1930′s racketeer triumvirate – Humphrey Bogart, the only film in which Robinson and Cagney appeared together was Smart Money (1931), which can be seen early on January 3rd (and again in February) on TCM. After making Smart Money (1931), Robinson worked again with director LeRoy in the Academy Award Best Picture nominee Five Star Final (1931) – airing February 6th – which was remade five years later with Bogart as the B programmer Two Against the World (1936), but is found on the channel’s schedule as One Fatal Hour (1936). Robinson plays a news editor that had worked hard to clean up his paper’s sleazy reputation before his bosses persuaded him to run a “what ever happened to” feature about a paroled murderess. It’s learned that she’d remarried and was living a quiet decent life – her daughter about to marry the son of wealthy parents – until the story runs, creating a scandal that leads to tragedy. Robinson’s character expresses guilt for what happens and rails at his callous bosses for their lack of shame, an emotion that seems as foreign to them as it must to today’s media editors, who would be sure to get every teardrop shed by the victims on the 6 o’clock news.

After a string of several unremarkable films except for John Ford’s crime comedy The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) and director Michael Curtiz’s boxing drama Kid Galahad (1937) with Bette Davis, Bogart and Wayne Morris (among others), Robinson emerged in a Wellman-Robert Carson story that was adapted by John Lee Mahin called The Last Gangster (1937), which provides a bookend of sorts to Little Caesar (1931) - “what if Rico had gone to jail” – and can be seen January 14th on TCM. The actor plays a convicted gang leader that returns from serving 10 years in the Rock (Alcatraz prison) for tax evasion to find that times have changed: his mob no longer fears nor respects him and only wants the location of his hidden stash, and his previously clueless foreigner wife now knows about his sordid past and has remarried a reporter (James Stewart!) that the gangster’s son believes is his father. The plot becomes a role reversed version of Mahin’s Oscar nominated Captains Courageous (1937), with the adult (Robinson’s character) coming of age because of the example set by his boy. Robinson then spoofed the mobster screen persona he wished to escape by playing a stereotypical “crime boss that yearns to go legit” (only to find how difficult that is to do) in two of the three comedies he did with director Lloyd Bacon: A Slight Case of Murder (1938) and Brother Orchid (1940). In the third – Larceny, Inc. (1942), which airs January 4th – Jane Wyman plays Robinson’s surrogate daughter that wants him to find a legitimate enterprise in lieu of returning to a life of crime, so he and his cronies (Broderick Crawford and Edward Brophy) buy a luggage business that they pretend to run while attempting to tunnel from its basement into the vault of the bank next door. Jack Carson, Anthony Quinn, and several of Warner Bros.’ familiar character actors play roles in this one.

Next week’s article includes Robinson’s transformation from gangster leads into supporting roles …