Product Description

Packin' A Punch...and Packin' Heat! On the heels of the success of the Warner Bros. Gangster Collection, the Warner Bros. Tough Guys Collection delivers six all new to DVD Classics featuring Hollywood's greatest Academy-Award? winning Tough guys - James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36205 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-07-18
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 6

Amazon.com
Say "Warner Bros. in the '30s" and you're talking, first and foremost, about the tough, gritty, urban, street-smart movies that help define that American decade for us. Which means you're talking about James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart: unpretty but charismatic guys with lived-in faces, and bodies that always seemed cocked, ready to spring. When one of them entered a room, he owned it, no matter how many people were there already. Their most celebrated habitat was the gangster picture. The genre didn't originate with them, but they, more than anybody else, defined it, gave it a face and a silhouette and a heartbeat.

The films in this set were produced half a decade and more after Little Caesar and The Public Enemy made stars of Robinson and Cagney, respectively, and after repeal had begun to lend Prohibition the patina of nostalgia. The studio's gangster franchise was evolving, and so were the careers of its top stars. When it came to toughness, the boys could still dish it out, and take it, too. But increasingly they were doing it on the other side of the law-and-order divide.

Cagney was first to reform. In 1935's "G" Men he plays a lawyer put through college by the avuncular neighborhood crimelord. After a law-school pal turned F.B.I. agent is murdered, Cagney abandons his (resolutely legit) one-man practice and joins the Bureau. The film memorializes several big moments in F.B.I. legend, but what's grabbiest is the personal drama growing out of Cagney's lingering underworld friendships. William Keighley directs the murders and shootouts with jolting ferocity, Barton MacLane and Edward Pawley supply flavorful villainy, and there are times when Sol Polito's cinematography literally glows (all these films have been restored, but "G" Men looks especially terrific). One gripe: The movie should have been presented without the F.B.I.-classroom intro tacked on for 1949 reissue (which belongs under "Special Features").

In Each Dawn I Die (also Keighley, 1939), Cagney teams with George Raft making his Warners debut. It's mostly a prison picture, with muckraking reporter Cagney behind bars after being framed by crooked politicos. Career felon Raft has little sympathy for him till Cagney proves to be a stand-up guy, whereupon the two bond in mutual loathing of sadistic guards, rat-fink convicts, and the endlessly malleable system. The movie boasts one indelible scene (involving a movie screening for the cons), some evocative prison workhouse detailing, and a fine Cagney performance as always. But it's undone by a script cluttered with melodrama and contrivance.

Bullets or Ballots (Keighley yet again, 1936) is much more satisfying. Again we get two icons for the price of one, with Robinson as a tough but square-shooting police detective and Bogart as the ambitious number-two man to a big-time racketeer. Bogart's effectively the co-star, albeit fourth-billed behind Robinson, Joan Blondell, and Barton MacLane. But it's Eddie G.'s movie, and he walks the line beautifully as an honest cop who, unjustly jettisoned from the force, signs on with the mobster he's long pursued. Despite a rhetorical reference to "ballots" as the public's means of combatting crime, it's bullets that get the job done. Bullets and fists: the movie makes clear that Robinson has beaten confessions out of people plenty of times, just as it has no illusions about the empty symbolism of crime commissions and grand juries.

The only other Bogart vehicle in the set is San Quentin (Lloyd Bacon, 1937), a scrap-work effort below the standards of everybody involved. Bogart's a small-time crook whose arrest at a nightclub occasions a meet-cute for his big sister Ann Sheridan and Army training officer Pat O'Brien--who's on his way to become yard captain at the penitentiary where Bogart will be interred! O'Brien tries to reform the lad, but with corrupt/sadistic guard Barton MacLane on one side and sociopathic con Joe Sawyer on the other, Bogart never has a chance. Neither does the viewer.

Lloyd Bacon, normally one of Warners' zippiest directors, is back on his game with A Slight Case of Murder (1938), a delicious gangster comedy. Robinson plays beer baron Remy Marco, who craves respectability as a legitimate businessman once beer is legal again. Problem is, nobody has ever had the heart to tell him his product tastes like varnish, and soon the bank is out to foreclose on his brewery. At which point Remy learns that his summer home upstate is full of fresh gangland corpses.... Based on a play by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay, the picture gives a trio of glorious goons--Allen Jenkins, Edward Brophy, and Harold Huber--a rare chance to shine as Marco's house staff.

City for Conquest (1940) ought to be the showpiece here. It's the longest and most ambitious entry, with prestige-picture scale and production values (including Polito and James Wong Howe as cameramen) and a cast including Cagney, Ann Sheridan, Arthur Kennedy, Frank McHugh, Donald Crisp, Anthony Quinn, Jerome Cowan, and--in his first of only two film performances--future directorial giant Elia Kazan. Working-stiff Cagney loves his gifted musician brother (Kennedy) and childhood sweetheart (Sheridan), a dancer with her own aspirations for the limelight; he becomes a boxer in order to pay for the brother's musical education. Triumph and tragedy ensue. The film's avowed aim, and Kennedy's, is to create an urban symphony of New York and the many little people striving against all odds to rise; there's even a one-man Greek chorus--Frank Craven, the Stage Manager of the recent Our Town--to hammer the theme periodically. But over the previous decade Warners' honest, hard-charging, small-scale movies had collectively achieved that "symphony," without the pompous flourishes Anatole Litvak's direction brings to the project. Here's hoping DVD showcases more of them. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Warner Bros. Pictures Tough Guy's Collection
If you remember Million Dollar Movie or the Late Show (New York & N.J.) You will love this box set, Picture quality and sound are excellent. This is a "MUST HAVE" in any collection. ...

Positive Tough Guy's Collection
This pack is very entertaining, with excelent movies. If you like noir or 30's films this is a must. All the movies are enjoyable, but are not truely GREAT. San Quentin and A Slight Case of Murder were the two worst of the pack I would only give these movies a 3 star rating. As for G men and Each Dawn I Die are marvalous films; and deserve a 4 star rating. Bullets or Ballots is a interesting movie featuring a feindish Bogart and a well known ruff and tough by the book cop played by Robinson. Its an OK flick but yet again a 3 star film. However, the real surprise was City for Conquest. I went into the movie thinking it would be the one I would dred; this was not the case at all. Though it has a few odd moments, for the most part the movie is brilliant. Without a dought one of Cagneys best preformances, and the movie mixes heart ach, boxing, and music into something that works. I would rank this as probably my favorite boxing movie. Maybe its from the way it peaks and falls and repeats until the passive yet memorable climax. This is defently a 5 star film and was a real treat. The whole set is well worth it if you like 30's humor and lingo.

Tough guys abound in a wide variety of films
This is a great and worthy companion to the Warner Gangsters Collection. However, this collection of films is much more varied than what you found in the Warner Gangsters bunch of films. It's not so much that we have a pre/post code comparison here of how Warner handled tough guys and gangsters in their films - there were only two precode gangster films in the Gangsters collection. Instead, we have WB's top three tough guys of the 30's - James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart - taking the lead in a variety of roles and films that often aren't about guys that are gangster tough, or even cop tough for that matter.

Edward G. Robinson stars in "Bullets or Ballots" and "A Slight Case of Murder". In the first film, he is the hard-working cop turned out to pasture by a past associate the minute that associate gets a promotion. Now, suddenly past offers for employment by underworld figures in return for big bucks look pretty good. Will Robinson's character turn against the system and department he has worked for his whole career? In "A Slight Case of Murder" Robinson ably shows his hand at dark comedy as a gangster who is made legitimate by the end of prohibition. Now he can sell his beer legitimately. The only problem is, nobody has the heart to tell him that his beer is awful.

James Cagney, Warners' number one gangster picture star of the 30's, shows up in three films. In "G Men" he is a lawyer who decides to go to work for the F.B.I. His education was bought and paid for by a local mobster, and thus his new associates are suspicious of him although Cagney's legal career has been on the up-and-up. This is an action-packed film with Cagney as a new G-Man who eventually has his loyalties to his old friends somewhat tested. "Each Dawn I Die" has Cagney as a crusading journalist set up on a manslaughter charge and wrongly sent to prison by the corrupt officials he was trying to expose. Month after month passes as he is sure he will be vindicated and released - but nothing happens. Only his convict friend - played by George Raft - who escapes while Cagney is inside, can find the witness that can free him. But will Raft's character bother to keep his promises once he is out? Cagney gives a top-notch performance of a straight guy turned bitter and hopeless as he realizes he may never get out of prison. Cagney's final film in the set "City for Conquest" is a very good film that has little or nothing to do with tough guys and a lot to do with tough breaks and melodrama, all of which Cagney's character gets. He and Ann Sheridan are sweethearts in a tenement district. Ann seeks escape from poverty with her dancing skills, Cagney with his boxing. Unfortunately, Cagney's character runs across a corrupt boxer who rubs a corrosive material into his gloves to temporarily blind Cagney so he can win the match. It works a little too well as Cagney's blindness is more than temporary. This film is a real tear-jerker that is a favorite of mine.

Finally, Humphrey Bogart headlines a very short "San Quentin" at only 70 or so minutes in length. Bogart is a tough-as-nails convict who believes that his special treatment by Pat O'Brien - captain of the yard at San Quentin - may be because he is exchanging Bogart's treatment for his sister's romantic favors, to put it politely. However, Bogart's character has misunderstood the entire situation. The two knew each other and began falling for one another before Bogart's character even went to jail. He decides to escape and give O'Brien the 38-calibre reward he thinks he deserves for dishonoring his sister. Will he come to his senses in time?

Bogart shows up as a supporting player in "Bullets or Ballots" in this set and as a supporting player in several films in the Warner Gangsters Collection. It's hard to believe that Humphrey DeForest Bogart - now recognized as the greatest actor of the 20th century - had to spend a decade slumming at Warner Bros. in supporting roles before his talent was finally recognized for what it was in 1941's "High Sierra". The rest, of course, is history.

In summary, this really is a great set of films supplemented by Warner's Night at the Movies treatment, commentaries on the films by film historians, and various featurettes on the gangster genre. Highly recommended.