Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

following the invention and extension of sound. Little Caesar (1930) is regarded as a
seminal film in the sense that it cemented the standards for the gangster genre. Based on a
W. R. Burnett novel, the film is considered “the grandfather of the modern crime film” by
many film historians with its portrayal of an underworld character who rebelliously defied
conventional morality. Edward G. Robinson is a small-time crook named Caesar Enrico
Bandello, aka “Rico”, and along with his friend Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.),
leaves the country and makes his way to Chicago in search of fortune (fig. 14). Rico’s
catchphrase throughout the film “You can dish it out but you can’t take it” summons the
classic gangster story back to its bloody real-life roots in hard-men and corrupt police,
shysters and hoods. The world of the criminals seems to be mixed up with that of the
police detectives, themselves a mixture of the corruptible and incorruptible.
Figure 14. Little Caesar
The image that this type of films seeks to convey is one of a country struggling with
the Depression and the public’s awareness of the difficulties the American economy was
going through. On the other hand, these films also had a strong social message about the
myths of the self-made man: that crime does not pay and that the gangster is always beaten
in the end by the system. Even if the gangster figure in general and in Little Caesar in
particular is one of vitality and enterprise, a man who carved success for himself (creating
his own gang and climbing up the crime corporate ladder) to get away from the misery of
the Prohibition-Depression era, the film also shows that his unscrupulous ambition to move
up in the world (the idea of “can’t take it”) will lead him into a hail of bullets: “Mother of
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