Before bad taste became Hollywood’s default operating principle, films could be relied on to entertain without insulting the viewer’s personal sensibilities (with one’s intelligence receiving an occasional insult sometimes being an exception to that rule, it must be admitted).

Mixing genres in films and television is nothing new; Tinsel Town was doing that long before the advent of sound. Some of you may be old enough to remember the outrage from critics about the then-new TV series Hogan’s Heroes. How dare they have fun with World War Two! fulminated the (almost entirely liberal) critics—but American viewers knew better, and the show had a long and respectable run.

When it comes to movies that combine two or more genres, the results can be unpredictable, at best. The film can go too heavy on one genre and too light on the other; in art, this is sometimes referred to as "lacking symmetry." The trick is to achieve a nice balance; the audience instinctively knows when the movie moves too far from that balance, and feels dissatisfied as a result.

Combining comedy with crime would seem to be one of the riskiest of endeavors (or, at least, it used to be before Hollywood abandoned good taste). Fun and fatality just don’t seem to mix. But there were a few films that successfully pulled it off, and kudos should be extended to all the writers, performers, and production people who could do it without grossing out the audience.

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Larceny, Inc. (1942)
Edward G. Robinson, Broderick Crawford, Jane Wyman, Jack Carson, Edward Brophy, Anthony Quinn, Harry Davenport, John Qualen, Grant Mitchell, Barbara Jo Allen, Jackie C. Gleason
Based on the play The Night Before Christmas by Laura and S. J. Perelman
BW-95 mins.

"Weepy, I don’t like the idea of going into a bank through the front door."

Edward G. plays J. Chalmers Maxwell, known to his associates as "Pressure." He and his not-so-bright pal Jug Martin (played to lunkheaded perfection by the greatly underrated Broderick Crawford) have just been released from prison and plan to go straight. All they need is some money to buy a dog track in Florida, but when Pressure applies for a loan at the bank he is turned down—the ‘c’ word: collateral. (Those were the days when bankers actually considered such things.)

Pressure figures that to get the dough he needs for his enterprise, why he’ll just have to extract it from the very bank that turned down his application, nyah. But he’ll need a cover, and finds it in a luggage shop located right next door. He buys the shop, not realizing until later that he has acquired a cash cow.

Oddly enough, in spite of a plethora of criminals, some with guns, nobody dies in this movie.

The entire cast is great, but this is still very much Edward G. Robinson’s show.

(If you’d like to read a detailed synopsis—with SPOILERS—go here.)

Next time: Red gets the brushoff.

—Mike Gray