And though he stood all but five-foot-seven in his stocking feet, and was a tad on the squat side, Edward G. Robinson possessed an unarguably larger than life presence. In fact Robinson proved to be one of the most inspired character actors that Hollywood ever turned out. Born Emanuel Goldenberg in Bucharest, 1893, his acting career would commence on the New York stage, and his silver screen debut came in the year 1923. His career defining moment was indubitably in Mervyn Le Roy's seminal Little Caesar (1930), and it was practical insurance that the actor secured a place in the pantheon of the great screen mobsters.
Ultimately Robinson was offered similar parts, as the case in Tod Browning's Outside the Law in the same year, but Mr Robinson was too canny an actor to permit himself to be typecast, and so he would begin to make an equally formidable mark in such films as 1931's Five Star Final, as a cantankerous newspaper editor, and with Howard Hawks' memorable Tiger Shark (1930), in which he portrayed a fisherman. Once Robinson had established the breadth of his range, he would feel confident about matriculating on to the crime genre once again, with striking roles in The Last Gangster (1938) and Bullets of Ballots in 1936; where he played with natural aplomb - a detective.
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| The things he did for love - Robinson on pedicure detail for Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street. |
In the Forties, Robinson appeared in a spate of films that conveyed his range and versatility and profundity as a thespian. His impressive stint as a wry insurance investigator in Billy Wilder's noir anthem Double Indemnity (1944), an idiosyncratic portrait of a man dedicated to his work but with a compassionate affection for his murderous associate. And even more awe-inspiring were his two staggering performances for Fritz Lang respectively in The Woman in the Window (1944) and 1945's Scarlet Street. In both of these films, Robinson would touchingly delineate a defeated everyman figure, lured into crimes he didn't want to commit, which included a murder by a fetching femme fatale (Joan Bennett) an archetypal black widow who seems to promise him the moon and fulfill the frustration of his dreams. The actor's restrained yet volatile performances perfectly aligned with Lang's American-period expressionism. Robinson would return to the gangster shtick, a genre he helped get on the celluloid map with Key Largo (1948) where he was effectively pitted against steady colleague Humphrey Bogart as both partook in a good old-fashioned and slightly wordy acting duel.
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| Emanuel Goldenberg |
Edward G. Robinson left our earth in 1973 when he would succumb to bladder cancer, but this little giant wouldn't be leaving us without an indelible stain on our memories - he was married to his second wife Jane at the time of his death, Robinson was seventy-nine.