Edward G. Robinson

To a degree Edward G. Robinson was fortunate to have had the career he did.  He was 5'5" tall with a lived-in sort of body (he loathed exercise) and a face that to call it plain is a compliment.  A romantic leading man he was not and he knew it as well as his bosses.  Fortunately he was a supreme craftsman, giving beautifully measured performances that commanded one to watch his every move.  Additionally, he landed at a studio that was the perfect match.

He was born Emmanuel Goldenberg in Romania in 1893, the fifth of six sons.  His father was a builder.  The family had talked of moving to America but never acted on it until one of the sons was attacked by an anti-Semitic mob.  Robinson said the move to New York at age 10 is when his life began.

As a young teenager he discovered museums and art galleries and he could not stay away from them.  He had never known such pure pleasure.  He always imagined he would live a life devoted to art and collecting great pieces.

For years he spoke of wanting to be a rabbi and soon that changed to being an attorney.  But once he took up acting in city college, he never looked back.  He was so good that the American Academy of Dramatic Arts offered him a scholarship.  It was there he decided to change his name.  Years later he would bemoan that he had no idea why he picked a name so long which took him forever to sign autographs.  The "G" was simply a salute to his birth surname.

The fact that he spoke nine languages may have helped him get a foot in the stage door on Broadway but it was mainly raw talent that electrified people.  He would appear in over 50 plays, both on Broadway and on the road, and also made a few films, none of which stood up to his later work.

In 1929 he married Gladys Cassell, the daughter of a noted sculptor.  She was aristocratic, attractive, intelligent and mentally disturbed.  They had a son who took after his mother and together they made life a living hell for Robinson for decades.

While he was on Broadway starring in his latest play and collecting great notices, top Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis popped in back stage and offered Robinson a contract with the studio. Robinson neither liked nor much appreciated Hollywood and wasn't too keen on making movies either.  He certainly didn't think much of the eight films he'd already made over a 14-year period and not much of that would change during Robinson's golden Hollywood years.

WB was the crime studio in those days.  Man oh man did those folks love their gangster tales.  On the payroll were Paul Muni and James Cagney who were there a bit earlier than Robinson with Humphrey Bogart and George Raft waiting in the wings.  Hey, you mugs.  Robinson might have been of a small stature but he was so much bigger with a tommy gun and of course there was that frightening snarl.  Due to his work at the studio in the 1930s, he will forever be known as one of the movies' great gangsters.

And that was cemented forever more with Little Caesar (1931).  Of course the fact that mobsters were running all over the country at the time made this film a must-see for many.  Frankly the story wasn't anything out of the ordinary... a smalltime thug wants to make it big... but Robinson's performance under Mervyn LeRoy's taut direction was simply stunning.  And there was his great exit line... Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?  He was gangster extraordinaire and the role made him a Hollywood star, something he really never completely understood.  He was also nearly 40 years of age when the movie was made.  A fun footnote is that in real life the actor hated guns.

WB, knowing a good thing when they saw it, soon had Robinson starring in one crime drama after another... The Little Giant, Smart Money (with Cagney), The Hatchet Man,  The Man with Two Faces,  Bullets or Ballots, Kid Galahad, I Am the Law, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse and Blackmail.

The Whole Town's Talking (1935) is also a crime flick but it is a comedy directed by John Ford, no less, and costarring comic genius Jean Arthur.  Robinson plays dual roles... a milquetoast clerk and the public enemy no. 1 whom he facially resembles.  The comedy comes from the clerk trying to cash in on the resemblance.  I think it's one of the actor's best roles.

I've always been entertained by numerous flicks based on San Francisco's rowdy Barbary Coast and what could be better than one called... are you ready?... Barbary Coast (1935).  Miriam Hopkins stars as a roulette wheel operator who is in the grips of her boss (Robinson) and the man she loves (Joel McCrea).

Robinson and I had something in common... neither of us could stand Hopkins.  He got so tired of her upstaging him, rewriting her lines and generally causing trouble that when a scene called for him to slap her, he slapped her so hard that she was knocked off her feet.  Oooh I'll bet that felt good.  Oh wait, hold it, I mean that's awful.

In 1935 his only child was born, Edward G. Robinson Jr.  There were probably many days he would wish he never had children.

By this time he had become an avid art collector and the future would see it grow even more.  He said every painting he had was his favorite.  He had the badminton court removed and replaced it with an art gallery which was designed by the Chicago Institute.  He also extensively remodeled his home with the result that it more resembled a museum than a private home.

With the arrival of the forties, Robinson's career took a different direction.  He once said that he knew he'd always be remembered as a gangster and while he would still play bad guys, none of them had machine guns.  While he branched off into more comedies, he also managed some family stories, a biography and a war drama, he was always best playing dark characters.  Either they were outright nasty or they were good guys whose dark sides were occasionally in view. 

However, he did it, whatever allowed him to go dark so convincingly, he sure nailed it.  Throughout his childhood and other times, he could get fiercely angry.  It was often not displayed but it was volcanic inside.  Surely he drew upon those experiences for his explosive behavior as a villain.

And the funny thing is that in his life off the screen and away from the studio, he was anything but a thug.  Everyone perceived Edward G. Robinson as having great humanity and culture, charming, well-read, well-spoken, well-dressed.  His home on Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills was luxurious by anyone's standards and an invitation to spend time there was coveted... or maybe it was depending upon one's politics.  More on that comment to come.  

Many critics found his title role in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) to be the most distinguished of his career. Paul Ehrlich (1845-1915) was a German bacteriologist who pioneered modern immunology and chemotherapy.  He discovered a cure for syphilis at a time when the public was horrified to hear anything about the disease.  It was his favorite of all his roles.

He is a former crime boss in Brother Orchid (1940) who finds the mob is out to get him and he goes undercover as a priest.  It's played strictly for laughs and costars Bogart and Ann Sothern look to be having as much fun as Robinson.  

He sure is a bad apple in an exciting tale of Jack London's The Sea Wolf (1941).  The moody melodrama focuses on a seafaring captain who is vicious to his crew and three fugitives found along the way.  Ida Lupino and John Garfield are two of them.  Both felt great awe for Robinson whose performance dominated the film.

As highly thought of as he was away from work, there are those on the job who thought he was tough to work with.  He had a highly-elevated sense of how to work and did not always suffer fools gladly.  If he thought he wasn't being treated with the respect he deserved, ripples could occur in his calm waters.  Once in awhile a costar or a director, be it a man or a woman, just rubbed him the wrong way.  We discussed Miriam Hopkins.  George Raft was another.

Manpower (1941) was the movie the two made together, rivals over Marlene Dietrich.  In real life Robinson and Raft were like tomcats vying for the attentions of the sultry German.  The bisexual actress really drove folks crazy with her charms.  Perhaps the boys were all tommed up or something but they got into an altercation on the set that ended in a fistfight.  

The Manpower trio

Raft, of course, had his issues with the other WB gangsters... Cagney, Muni, Bogart, too... not just Robinson.  Raft felt the studio treated them with more respect than they accorded him.  Any combination of them could logically be up for the same part.  By and large they were all short-statured lads who had a battle to fight and they armed themselves with a glib, if not occasionally hostile attitude, and a knockout wardrobe.  All of them skirted handsome so something else had to take its place... education, wealth/toys, virility, power, who's carrying the big stick at the moment, who got the newest great role?  It was a dog-eat-dog world.

Muni left Warners first, actually not long after Robinson arrived.  Bogart's fame came more or less after the others had left.  They used to get the plumb parts and now it was Bogie's turn.  Bogie would secure his skyrocketing fame and acquire a cult status.   Cagney retired early.  Raft never made it to the top of the WB ladder.  It was rare that his roles weren't offered to one of the others first.  Robinson had the longest career and was a damned good actor.  Any film he made was a little more prestigious because he was part of it.

By 1941 wife Gladys's manic-depressive behavior had gotten out of hand and Robinson put her in a sanitarium for awhile.  He questioned how their marriage could last but it would... for 15 more years.  

By the time he made Double Indemnity in 1944, he had left WB.  It was an amicable parting.  He was excited to try something new, work with people who worked at other studios but he questioned himself about why he would want a third-billed role in any movie.  Director Billy Wilder told him he would be paid as much as Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, he wouldn't have to work as hard, that his role might even steal the film and that at 50 years of age, he may need to be thinking about transitioning to character roles.  He wasn't ready for the rocking chair quite yet.

His part as the formidable, wily life insurance claims supervisor who comes to suspect his employee of contributing to the death of a policyholder along with the man's wife is great stuff.  I see it as the best role he ever had.  

Fritz Lang made a smoky film noir, The Woman in the Window (1944), and Robinson is the lead as a mild-mannered professor who becomes obsessed with a woman in a portrait and then is plunged into a nightmare of murder and mayhem because, you see, she was not the woman he needed to meet.  Joan Bennett is wonderful as the mysterious object of his affection.   A year later Robinson, Bennett, Lang and Window costar Dan Duryea reunited for another noir, Scarlet Street. Oddly, it, too, is a tale of a mysterious woman and the man whose life falls apart after meeting her.   

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945) is just as sweet and tender as that title implies.  With little tear-inducing Margaret O'Brien, it would have to be.  Surely one of Robinson's most unusual movies up to this point, he plays a Norwegian widower who raises his daughter on a rural Wisconsin farm and deals with the woman he loves who doesn't want to live there.

I think his role in The Stranger (1946) is a little less appreciated than some of his other work and it shouldn't be.  He plays a war crimes commissioner who is tracking down a Nazi (Orson Welles, who also directed) who is hiding as a genteel professor in a New England college.  Loretta Young plays Welles's naive wife who gets psychologically tortured for being with him.  Welles made it clever and ever-fascinating and the three of them gave acting lessons for the ages.

All My Sons (1948) is another acting triumph for Robinson and is based on playwright Arthur Miller's work.  I thought it was a compelling story and certainly an unusual one.  He plays a man who years earlier committed a crime and framed his business partner for it.  Now his son is about to marry the still-living partner's daughter and the horrible past may be the wedding present.  

With henchman Dan Seymour & Thomas Gomez in Key Largo

After making five films and three shorts with Bogart, the two came together for their final, and in my opinion, best offering for 1948's

Key Largo.  For the first time Bogart was billed over Robinson but the latter was treated like royalty by his frequent costar.  Bogie said as far as he was concerned Robinson stole the movie from everyone. Robinson's Johnny Rocco returned the actor to his vicious thug roots, proving in no uncertain terms that he hadn't lost his panache.

The story of a war vet (Bogie) visiting the Florida family hotel of a dead war buddy to find it inhabited by a group of criminals at the same time a hurricane is expected is riveting entertainment.  Bacall was along for her final film with her husband and Claire Trevor won an Oscar as Robinson's alcoholic, diminished girlfriend. 

I see House of Strangers (1949) as the last of Robinson's starring (top-billed) roles in good films.  After this it was mainly costarring roles in big films or starring roles in B flicks.  This film noir is a tasty treat in which Robinson is the vicious, tyrannical head of a family of four sons who has raised them in an atmosphere of hatred and unhealthy competition and now is witness to the destruction.  Susan Hayward, Richard Conte and Luther Adler add to the undeniable allure.

When the Red Scare came to Hollywood in the early fifties it was inevitable that it would touch the life of Edward G. Robinson.  Since the 1930s the rabid liberal was an outspoken critic of  Nazism and fascism.  In the following decade he made financial contributions to as many as 850 political and charitable organizations.  He called for a U.S. boycott of all German-made products.  Of course he was an enthusiastic FDR supporter.  He worked overseas for the USO, made speeches at U.S. shipyards and defense plants and sold war bonds.

He supported civil rights with special attention to blacks.  He considered himself a champion of democracy.

He was never a communist nor a supporter of communism although he never ranted about the USSR the way he did Germany.  When it was discovered that a couple dozen of the organizations he donated to were communist fronts, there was a great Hollywood aha. 

When all the facts were presented to him, he said that he was duped and used but owned up to some careless decisions along the way.  When they threatened blacklisting it scared the hell out of the man with a crazy wife and a dangerously moody son and a need to make a lot of money to support how he lived.  He was asked to name names and he chose to do that.  Hollywood conservatives applauded him and liberals castigated him.  After his name was cleared, he wrote an article entitled How the Reds Made a Sucker Out of Me.

One thing is clear... his career never rebounded to its former glory.  He could go on and buy his paintings and live in his mansion while others would never work in the film industry again or would commit suicide.  I sensed no one ever forgave director Elia Kazan for naming names and I equally sense with Robinson people, in time, most more or less chose to forgive and move along.

He was third-billed after Glenn Ford and Barbara Stanwyck in a very good B western, The Violent Men (1955).  He plays a ruthless, wheelchair-bound cattle baron who tries to run the small ranchers in his valley off their land.  Stanwyck, as his wife, is even more treacherous and is in love with her brother-in-law, played unsympathetically by Brian Keith.  A yummy shoot-'em-up.

He went through an acrimonious divorce with Gladys and she cleaned his clock.  He had to give her more than half of his artwork and had to sell his beloved home.  He later bought back the home and in the 18 years he had yet to live certainly bought many more paintings.  A year after the divorce he remarried and would remain so until his death.

He credits his re-entry back into Hollywood to Cecil B. DeMille, an outspoken Republican and overseer of Hollywood morals, who surprisingly gave Robinson fourth billing in the all-star cast of a little biblical picture he was making...  The Ten Commandments (1956).  He said about his playing Dathan that no villain ever had a better death than when an earthquake caused a fissure to open causing him to fall to his fiery death into hell.

With one of his Commandments costars, Vincent Price, Hollywood's other art maven, there were joint appearances on TV's The $64,000 Question as competitors in the art category.

His son caused so many problems around the home that both parents threatened to disown him.  His frequent scrapes with the law and arrests and violence toward them were even worse since they played out in the press.  Otherwise, the actor was enjoying his new wife, being back in plays and having a chance to do more good work in films.

Celebrating dual birthdays with Sinatra on Hole set

Originally I thought either he or Frank Sinatra was miscast as brothers in the comedy A Hole in the Head (1959) but when I left the theater I thought otherwise.  Sinatra plays a widower raising a precocious young son while trying to keep his Miami hotel open and flourishing.  He asks his brother to come help him with comically mixed results.  With Thelma Ritter as Robinson's sharp-tongued wife and Eleanor Parker as the object of Sinatra's affections (a far cry from their roles in The Man with the Golden Arm), I found this to be a delightful respite from real life.

Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) was not a success but I expect those of us who like behind-the-scenes, movie-within-a-movie titillation found something to like.  It surrounds the resurrection of Kirk Douglas's movie career in Rome with Robinson is his new director.  Claire Trevor was back again, this time as a shrew married to Robinson.

The Prize (1963) was little more than exceptional glossy entertainment with Paul Newman, Elke Sommer and Diane Baker at Stockholm's Nobel Prize awards.  Robinson has a yummy dual role as one of the recipients and his treacherous lookalike.  The film will provide the murder and mayhem.  You bring the popcorn.

He suffered a heart attack while filming A Boy Ten Feet Tall (1963) in Africa.  Brief appearances in three 1964 films, Good Neighbor Sam, Cheyenne Autumn and The Outrage, did little for his career but he was most impressive the following year in The Cincinnati Kid as the smooth, impeccably-dressed card shark Steve McQueen is desperate to beat.

As good as he was at his craft, a dean of screen acting, really, he sure worked with a mob (hey, a nod to the old days) of talented actors, directors and writers.  He wanted to work with them and they wanted to work with him.  No wonder his resume is so impressive.  

I thought he was much nicer looking as an older man, there was a statesman-like quality to him, always the cultured gentleman.  He had that signature goatee in his golden years as well.  Looking into his eyes was humbling.  It wasn't just that he fully lived his life but he paid attention to living his life and achieved wisdom.  It shows. 

Despite being almost totally deaf, he made his final big-screen film,

Soylent Green in 1973, a decent sci-fi entry about that faraway year, 2022, when the population has swollen to extremes and people line up for their rations of water and soylent green.  Robinson has a memorable death scene which would soon become even more memorable.

Astonishingly Robinson was never even nominated for an Oscar and in late 1972 the Academy advised him that they wanted to present him with a special one at the 1973 ceremonies.  He was terribly excited.  It would coincide with the biography he had completed, All My Yesterdays.  But he would not live long enough to see the book's publication and the Oscar was accepted by his wife.  He died of cancer in January, 1973.  He was 79 years old.

Fifteen hundred friends and coworkers attended his funeral and a crowd of some 500 gathered outside.  The American Film Institute named him #24 of The 50 Greatest Screen Legends.  Three of his films, Little Caesar, Double Indemnity and The Ten Commandments, were selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.  In 2000 his image appeared on a commemorative postage stamp as part of the Hollywood Legends series.

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A 50s film