Our Live Tweet #Noirvember movie for Sat., Nov. 21: Lawrence Tierney in THE HOODLUM (1951)

The name of this week’s The Gangsters All Here movie gets straight to the point. The movie is called The Hoodlum — a title so generic, it’s the movie equivalent of slapping a white-with-black-lettering label on a can of beans. But there’s nothing generic about the guy who plays the title role…

It’s Lawrence Tierney!

The Hoodlum is directed by Max Nosseck, who directed Tierney in his breakout role in Dillinger (1945). But by the time of this movie, both Tierney’s and Nosseck’s careers had hit bottom — Tierney due to a lot of jail time earned by off-screen drinking and brawling, and Nosseck because he went from Dillinger right b;lkack to the B- and worse-type movies he’d previously been doing.

One could almost say that the bitterness of these two men burst forth in this movie and made it work. Tierney plays Vincent Lubeck, a career criminal whose career is so vast, it’s lovingly detailed in the movie’s prologue. Lubeck gets paroled due to a lucky break, but he still comes out of jail declaring that life has never given him a chance and will continue to not do so. So when Lubeck gets a good look at both (a) a loot-filled armored car that passes his way every day, and (b) his brother’s sob-sister-and-virginal girlfriend, what do you think are the chances that he’ll try to nab both?

On a scale of 1 to 5 fannies, I give this movie a 4-½. Tierney sizzles from start to finish, and the movie is uncompromising in nearly every aspect of its subject matter (especially for 1951). I deduct a half-star only because the movie begins with that weariest of tropes, a plea to the jailhouse warden from the convict’s elderly mother. But if you stick with the movie right to the end, you’ll see that even this cliche gets turned on its head.

Our Live Tweet movie for Sat., Nov. 14: Lizabeth Scott in TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949)

Usually, our The Gangsters All Here movies start out with the main characters already established as gangsters. But this week’s movie, Too Late for Tears, takes a different approach. What if a set of a particular set of circumstances was dropped in an Everyman’s lap to make him turn into a gangster?

Actually, in this case, it’s not an Everyman, but an Everywoman — social-climbing housewife Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott). And it’s not one circumstance, but sixty thousand of them. One night, Jane and her milquetoast husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy) are driving along a dark highway in their convertible, when a passing car happens to drop a satchel in their back seat. Upon further examination, the Palmers discover that the satchel contains $60,000 ($584,000 in 2015 dollars, if you’re counting).

Alan is all set to surrender the money to the police. But then Jane opens the satchel and spreads the money out on their bed — just so that she can get a look at it — and suddenly…

Not even some very assertive outside forces — in the forms of Dan Duryea and Don DeFore — can deter Jane in her lust for lucre. Besides being a riveting film-noir, the movie poses an interesting question: Just how many (or few) steps would it take us to let the gangster within us run wild?

No doubt about it — on a scale of 1 to 5 fannies, this movie gets a 5. A tightly woven screenplay by Roy Huggins (who went on to create a little TV series named “The Fugitive”) is mounted on the able shoulders of Lizabeth Scott, who runs with it to the finish.

Our Live Tweet Movie for Sat., Nov. 7: PLUNDER ROAD (1957)

Watching Plunder Road, I recalled the late film critic Roger Ebert’s four-star review of Brian DePalma’s excellent 1981 thriller Blow-Out. Describing how the lead character reconstructs a crime right in front of our eyes, Ebert wrote, “We [the movie’s audience] are challenged and stimulated: We share the excitement of figuring out how things develop and unfold, when so often the movies only need us as passive witnesses.”

Plunder Road gives you the same feeling of excitement. It’s the story of five men who pull off what is breathlessly described by radio newsmen as the biggest gold heist in history. The thrill of it is that we get to see it happen. The movie takes no shortcuts; its first 15 minutes show the robbery taking place in staggering detail. And it’s that attention to detail that keeps the movie riveting: Will the thieves pull off their intended goal of getting their stolen gold halfway across the country — where they can melt it down and throw the law off their trail — or will simple human frailty slip them up?

On a scale of 1 to 5 fannies, this movie definitely earns a 5. Most of the gangster movies we’ve shown up to now were filled with non-stop talk and endless exposition, but this movie never gives away any more than it has to, always leaving you eager to find out what happens next. This is thriller movie-making at its best.

Our Live Tweet movie for Sat., Oct. 31: CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN (1955)

You didn’t think The Gangsters All Here was going to ignore Halloween, did you? Darned if we didn’t dig deep in the vaults and find an honest-to-gosh gangster-zombie movie for ya!

Creature with the Atom Brain chronicles the only-slightly-hard-to-swallow tale of Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger), an exiled American gangster who has sworn revenge on the former cohorts who squealed on him. With the help of ex-Nazi-but-nevertheless-mad-scientist Dr. Wilhelm Steigg (Gregory Gaye), Frank returns to America and gets his vengeance. Dr. Steigg is able to use atomically charged brains to reanimate corpses, whom Frank then uses to wipe out his old enemies. (It’s a bit like Plan 9 from Outer Space [released four years later], but with the backing of Columbia Pictures to give the movie a thin veneer of legitimacy.)

Luckily, there’s a relentless good guy on the case, in the form of habitually pipe-smoking police scientist Chet Walker (Richard Denning from Creature from the Black Lagoon) — who, in best ‘50s chauvinistic style, seems just as interested in slapping his wife on her behind and demanding a cold martini from her as he does in solving the strange case of multiple murders. And speaking of behinds…

On a scale of 1 to 5 fannies, I’d give this one a 3. It’s not quite as bad as anything that writer-director Ed Wood ever cooked up, but it’s not for lack of trying. You’ll be amazed at how nonchalant people are when they’re accosted by monotone gunslingers with huge stitches across their foreheads.

1. When this movie was first released, it was banned in Sweden and Finland (giving those countries far more points for good taste than I previously would have).

2. The movie’s title inspired a same-named song (by a performer named Roky Erickson), which in turn provided the name for an alternative rock band from Antwerp, Belgium.

Our Live Tweet movie for Sat., Oct. 10: Charles Bronson in MACHINE-GUN KELLY (1958)

To The Gangsters All Here Rogues Gallery of Walter Matthau, Steve McQueen, Dick Powell, James Cagney, and Hugh Beaumont, we now add Charles Bronson! In his first starring role, Bronson plays the title role of George “Machine-Gun” Kelly, a tough-talking, fist-waving gangster who nevertheless shrinks at the sight of any symbols of death. Kelly can spit out some neat lead with his Thompson gat, but just wave your poison-icon tattoo at him and he shrinks like a little kid!

On a scale of 1 to 5 fannies, I rate this movie a 3. It’s not a perfect gangster movie, but it has enough disparate elements to keep you fascinated, not the least of which is a crazily incongruous score by “Gilligan’s Island” composer Gerald Fried. And where else will you get the chance to see Charles Bronson and “The Dick Van Dyke Show’s” Morey Amsterdam share scenes in a movie?

Live Tweet movie for Sat., Oct. 3: RAILROADED! (1947)

All right, you mugs! I’ve been spoiling you rotten the last couple of weeks, showing you gangster movies from big studios like Columbia and Warner Bros. with stars like Richard Widmark and Jimmy Cagney. This week we’re going back to Poverty Row studio PRC, where the closest you’ll get to a big-name star is Beaver Cleaver’s dad, Hugh Beaumont!

Railroaded! is the 1947 saga of innocent teenager Steve Ryan (Ed Kelly), who gets framed for a robbery that happened to involve the (stolen) laundry truck that Steve drives for a living. Since Steve was unfortunate enough to leave his monogrammed scarf in the truck, the cops seize upon this weak link as though it was gold-star Exhibit A just to get Steve, who has no previous record of any wrongdoing, behind bars in record time.

We find out soon enough — well sooner than clueless cop Mickey Ferguson (Beaumont), anyway — that the real culprit is Duke (John Ireland), a monotone, paranoid criminal with a fetish for using perfumed bullets. (Yes, you read that right.) Ferguson starts examining the clues and ends up getting caught in a love triangle between Steve’s sister Rosie (Sheila Ryan) and Duke.

The most surprising name in the credits is that of director Anthony Mann, who went on to better efforts such as Winchester ‘73 (1950, with James Stewart). Mann tries hard here, but he fills the screen with such ultra-noir-ish shadows, you’ll have trouble telling the heroes from the villains.

On a scale of 1 to 5 fannies, I give this one a 3. The movie’s style doesn’t completely overcome its routine substance, but you’ll have to love the way that the cops ignore 57 varieties of the Ryan family’s civil rights in order to make their case against Steve stick.

Live Tweet movie for Sat., Sept. 26: THE STREET WITH NO NAME (1948)

When a 1948 movie opens with a message crawl from J. Edgar Hoover, you can bet it’s going to be a love letter to the F.B.I. This week’s gangster-infested scumfest, The Street with No Name, tells how the Feds sent in one of their own to infiltrate a nasty gang and demobilize it — because, darn it, you know that’s what J. Edgar insisted upon!

When a crime wave blows through “Central City” (which looks suspiciously like Los Angeles), FBI Inspector Briggs (Lloyd Nolan) provides rookie agent Gene Cordell (Mark Stevens) with the new identity of “George Manly” (Note that last name!) and sends him undercover. Soon enough, “Manly” becomes part of Central City’s major gang, led by mastermind Alec Stiles. Don’t be fooled by that milquetoast name — we know right away that Alec Stiles must be bad, because he’s played by…

Richard Widmark!

Looks like the FBI and George Manly have their hands full with this one!

On a scale of 1 to 5 fannies, I rate this movie a 4. This is good-guys-vs.-bad-guys played to the hilt, the “good” represented by a ripe-for-parody monotone narrator and frequent unsubtle nods to the virtue of the FBI, and the “bad” represented by gangsters spouting endless street slang, hoisting drinks, and packing rods. Did I mention that Richard Widmark is in this movie?

Live Tweet movie for Sat., Sept. 19: James Cagney in KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE (1950)

First off, please note the new time for The Gangsters All Here Live Tweet. We’ve switched from 12 noon over to 2:30 p.m. EST on Saturdays, just before #SatMat. So enjoy a hearty lunch, and then join us for some gangster grittiness!

Secondly, we’re switching to our new time slot in style with 1950’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. This movie is so perfect for our Live Tweet, this week we’re not even bothering with a review. Instead, we’re only going to list the movie’s highlights.

A Warner Bros. gangster picture! Starring James Cagney at his sociopathic best! And Barbara Peyton at her masochistic lowest! With crooked cops! Sleazy lawyers! An outrageous body count! And an intro with a richly glorified cameo from William Frawley just before he hit it big with I Love Lucy!

You have to ask? On a scale of 1 to 5 fannies, this movie gets a solid . You won’t want to move from your seat from this one. Believe us, once Cagney & Co. get your nerves pulsating, the only part of you that won’t be moving will be your butt!

Follow our Twitter page @BMovieBoss, use the hashtag #GangstersAllHere to comment on the movie while it’s running, and your Saturday afternoon will be off to a bang! See you at 2:30 p.m. EST this Saturday!

Our Live Tweet debut movie for Sat., Aug. 29, 2015: Walter Matthau’s GANGSTER STORY (1959)

Now that I’ve had a taste of Live Tweeting to old movies, I’m thoroughly addicted. So starting this Saturday, Aug. 29, I’m going to host a weekly Live Tweet on Twitter.com. It’s titled The Gangsters All Here and will be devoted to the kinds of gangster movies that only Ed Wood would have been proud to write and direct.

To keep things simple for this Twitter debut, I’m going with a 1959 movie that’s generically titled Gangster Story. However, you’ll quickly find that it’s anything but routine. Its star and director is none other than Walter Matthau — yes, that Walter Matthau — who reportedly took the directing-acting gig on a dare. Based on the evidence of the final film, it’s a good thing nobody ever dared Matthau to jump off a cliff.

Matthau plays a down-on-his-luck escaped criminal who pulls off a bank heist when he’s desperate for money. The strange thing is how easily he pulls off a bank job that’s so elementary, he makes Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run look like a Mafioso.

The oddities don’t end there. Matthau cast his real-life wife, Carol Bruce, as a shy librarian who inexplicably falls for Matthau when he makes small talk with her in the library one day while trying to escape some hoods who are after him. And the movie’s pseudo-swanky theme song is written by Leonard Barr, whom TV viewers of a certain age (mine, sadly) will remember as a very abrasive comedian who often guested on “The Dean Martin Show” (primarily because he was Martin’s cousin).

Anyway, if you’d like to join the gang(sters) this Saturday, join me at my Twitter page, @MovieMovieBlogB at 12 noon EST. I will provide a link for you to watch the movie online for free via YouTube. If you want to comment about the movie at any point during its viewing, just use the hashtag #GangstersAllHere. I look forward to seeing you there!