On the suggestion of somebody here (thwtguardian?) I ordered Le Samourai from Netflix and it arrives tomorrow.

Unfortunately I am not free to watch it tomorrow or Friday and Saturday is looking bad.

But soon, soon I will have a third entry.

I love that picture. The set looks like that drawing Jack Kirby did of his neighborhood for a comic I can't recall the name of now.Cagney's final scene is chilling, and you're right, the last scene and line are the goods. Love Ann Sheridan, too.

You might also like Dead End. No Cagney, but Bogey is excellent and so are the Dead End Kids.

And I would suggest watching any Michael Curtiz film. The guy can do any genre with panache. An eclectic oeuvre, I think they call it. The ones he did with Errol Flynn alone qualify him as an all-star, but when you throw in iconic musicals (Yankee Doodle Dandy; White Christmas); an iconic Western (Dodge City, worth it for the saloon brawl alone); iconic soap opera/noir (Mildred Pierce); An iconic prison picture (20,000 Years in Sing Sing); and top it off with Casa-frikkin'-blanca, you know why I called him the Jack Kirby of movies. Not the pioneer that the King was, but there wasn't a style of movie he couldn't do.

Essentially. The bunch in Dead End started in the B'way play. They were like crazy men making the movie, but they were signed for a couple of pictures and they proved popular. (Another good one: They Made Me a Criminal, with John Garfield.) Warners got tired of their constant misbehavior and they went to Monogram Pictures, about as low-rent a studio as there was.

There they evolved into the East Side Kids and finally the Bowery Boys (when Gorcey and Hall looked about 50) and made B features until the late 1950s.

Just watched the original Scarface film for the first time and found it fascinating.

First off, there's the obvious: Great artistry, compelling and surprisingly lovable yet utterly degenerate protagonist, and truly shocking content handled tastefully.

Then you've got Karloff in a lead role (I had no idea!) and the only detriment to the acting team being the sister, who utterly ruins every scene she's in.

But what really compels me is the dueling forces at work in the film: telling an amazing cinematic story, and honoring one's responsibility to society. I respect the idea of not wanting to romanticize the protagonist. After all, the Moroder/Paccino version adhered to that desire, and every generation of thugs since then has wanted to be Tony Montana. But each component they insert into the film to cut back on the romanticism feels as jarring as a high speed bump and, ultimately, ends with a brick wall. The lengthy cautionary intro, the completely random scene in which the newspaper man essentially lectures the audience about citizen responsibility, and finally the climactic ending, which absolutely does not jibe with the tragedy that was previously unfolding, instead depicting Tony as pathetic and almost laughable -- great social consciousness, but bad artistry. I've no doubt these were decisions made by the producer/studio and not the director.

Well, young in that he was about 45.

I'm completely there with you except on the ending. I felt it lacked poignancy.