This film initiated the Warner Brothers gangster cycle, and made the names of both its star Edward G. Robinson and its director Mervyn LeRoy.  It also influenced innumerable later works such as The Godfather, The Untouchables, Goodfellas, and more recently The Departed.  Halliwell said:

‘Little Caesar is not merely of interest to the film archaeologist.  On its first release it must have had an electrifying impact, and it set the pattern for hundreds of Warner crime movies which were to come, using the same backlot streets, the same screeching automobiles, and no doubt the same foggy shadows.’

Joe Pesci’s psychotic characters in Goodfellas and Casino are an amalgam of Edward G. Robinson here and James Cagney in White Heat, a film whose plot also turns on a hoodlum’s betrayal by a close associate – as do both Donnie Brasco and Reservoir Dogs, although without the homosexual undercurrents of the older films.

‘Even today these sensational melodramas, torn from the headlines of another age, retain their power to thrill.’

Year: 1930