3. Larceny, Inc. (Lloyd Bacon, 1942)

I sometimes wonder if Edward G. Robinson hasn’t appeared in more masterpieces than any actor I can think of. In more ways than one, he is the exact opposite of George Raft: Raft was basically a gigolo dancer who made good, a street guy who desperately wanted to have class even though he admittedly just didn’t have it. A similar conflation of the gutter and Park Avenue can of course also be observed in Eddie G., who famously made a career out of playing hoodlums and heavies, although in real life he was really a gentle and educated art collector instead. The two also seem to be their own opposites when it 
comes to sniffing out career opportunities. Raft’s career started out very promising, but never really took off after that, mainly because he had an awful hand in picking movie roles: thinking they were beneath him, he said no to parts that made other people world famous – his declining of the role of Sam Spade in John Huston’s ‘The Maltese Falcon’ may have been the stupidest one, especially since we all know it sent the career of Humphrey Bogart through the roof. Eddie G., on the other hand seems to have had more sense: the fact he has been steadily employed throughout his long and versatile career obviously hasn’t hurt him any, but also his choice of movies has been impressively consistent.

Few movies show off the two sides of Eddie G better than ‘Larceny, Inc’, an amazing little gangster comedy directed by Lloyd Bacon in 1942. There are of course other films that do this, like the great ‘Little Giant’ where Eddie G. plays a lowly gangster wanting to have style and dignity but all the while never realizing he’s always aiming a little too high (he proudly proclaims for instance that “he’s now reading the great philosopher Pluto!”). This collision of two different worlds is immediately established at the very beginning of ‘Larceny, Inc’, where we see Eddie G. and Broderick Crawford play baseball, thereby implying they must be professional players and this will somehow be a sports picture. But after a protracted and rather hilarious exchange between Eddie G and Crawford, our little hero turns his back against the camera and reveals he’s not wearing a regular sports outfit but a Sing Sing prison shirt. With this, we’re obviously back to familiar Robinson territory with him playing yet again a gangster who this time though is in fact gifted with a certain eloquence and persuasion Raft could never muster – in one of the very first sequences he almost literally talks the prison warden out of his clothes!

‘Larceny, Inc’ is really a laugh a minute picture, directed with wonderful fluidity by the always reliable Lloyd Bacon and brilliantly acted by a fine ensemble cast, which also includes Jack Carson, Jane Wyman and Anthony Quinn. For this reason alone it would be worth mentioning and seeing, but there is more to it than that. It came at a point in movie history where the genre for the first time is becoming self-reflexive; with this, the gangster picture followed a traditional pattern,  because when a genre is born it takes a while for the rules and conventions to form and only after it has become a well-known commodity, it can become aware of itself with the passing of time. So, after an onslaught of gangster pictures in the early thirties, the genre started to become self-reflexive in the early forties, a movement which culminated in Raoul Walsh’s ‘White Heat’ from 1949. Virtually all gangster pictures could be described as a commentary on the American Dream fused with an Icarus complex: while the rags to riches story is always considered typically American, and trying to get what you want is usually considered a good thing, there’s always the chance that by doing so you fly too close to the sun. This idea finds an almost perfect expression when Eddie G. gives a guy a badge and flashlight and simply states “you are now working for the gas company”, thereby reducing the American Dream to a gag. 

Of course, humor has not been entirely absent from the gangster genre – in fact arguably just about every gangster figure is in at least some ways rather comical and is often portrayed that way. The afore mentioned ‘Little Giant’ for instance already is a gangster comedy, although you could say it’s barely a gangster picture anymore with the humor arising solely from the overreaching of a character who almost by accident just happens to be a gangster. And that’s a striking difference with a picture like ‘Larceny, Inc’, where the humor mostly comes from within the genre itself: the gangster picture now can laugh at itself. The movie also uses humor to say things which are normally considered off-bounds. It’s an old trick of course, because humor often enables one to get away with much more than a traditionally dramatic situation can and ‘Larceny, Inc’ seems well aware of this. The humor is used as some kind of leveling out: it makes the gangsters seems a little less larger than life (there’s no Scarface or Rico here) and the picture makes quite sure the viewer never forgets the humanity of its gangsters. As a result the gangster is brought much closer to the law-abiding civilian instead of being miles apart like in the earlier gangster movies.

With this human characterization of the criminals, ‘Larceny, Inc’ can be situated in a long line of other comic gangster pictures, like ‘Big Deal on Madonna Street’ or ‘Clockers’. But this one doesn’t focus so much on just a collection of bumbling criminals, even though obviously it has got that too. ‘Larceny, Inc’ is kind of unique in that the comedy comes mainly from the difference between how gangsters treat society and how normal citizens do it. Early in the movie Eddie is told the police has destroyed all their illegally obtained jukeboxes and he screams out in horror: “it’s not the jukeboxes so much, as the wanton destruction of private property”! It’s the twisted logic of the gangster and one that is both frightening and humorous at the same time. Still, gangsters often do get more out of life, because they just go for what they want, instead of most respectable citizens who can do nothing more than be passive onlookers. 

For instance, even though he doesn’t want to accomplish it, Eddie G. does in fact gets the street cleared, something the civilians had been aiming at for a long time unsuccessfully. It’s really the thematic heart of the movie and one that tears open the basic incongruity behind the American Dream: getting what you want may be considered a good thing, but it also means you will have to go further than the man standing next to you and this will make you vulnerable because it means you have to stand out. And of course, there’s always the guy next to you willing to go further, thereby creating a dizzying vortex and reducing society to an animalistic system of predators and prey. That is why we need rules and codes of course, to fight off this chaos (which of course what almost all Westerns are about), but at the same time these rules can also stifle. There’s no easy answer to this problem, because where do you draw the line? There is obviously comfort in numbers, but progress cannot be made without someone tearing himself away from the pack and daring to go where other people never dared to go. Which probably can also explain the difference between George Raft and Eddie G. as actors: Raft wanted to soar above the rest, but his inherent uncertainty prevented this because it made him cling to accepted mainstream norms. Eddie G. on the other hand dared to take risks and was able to steer his own course.  

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