Ben Hecht’s thinly veiled take on Al Capone, given authenticity and bite from years as a Chicago newspaperman, is one of the most damning critiques of society ever put on screen, and thanks to an over-the-top performance by Paul Muni, and highly symbolic direction from master-in-the-making Howard Hawks, it may be the best criminal underworld film of all time. Muni is Tony Camonte, a violent psychopath who rises to the top of his South Side gang after murdering his boss, setting his sights on top dog Boris Karloff and the North Side bootleggers, but a brash cockiness and happy trigger finger is no match for his ultimate downfall, rabid jealously over the sexual escapes of his beloved sister, Ann Dvorak. Taken in context with its early ’30’s predecessors, “Little Caesar” and “The Public Enemy”, Muni’s Camonte is the most mentally disturbed, spitting out broken English through a grotesque smirk; that his downfall comes because of an incestuous infatuation with his sister (as opposed to Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney’s blind ambition to power), murdering her fiancée (George Raft), his best friend, in cold blood, speaks to the depravity of the character and what his world has made him. Hawks’ most overt symbolism, the recurring “X” theme every time a character is about to be assassinated, is obvious but visually striking, as is the stunning opener, Tony’s killing of his boss in shadows, with the camera traveling back and forth on the studio stage in a nearly five-minute unbroken shot, extremely rare for early sound cinema. So controversial in its day that producer Howard Hughes had to release the film without production code approval, and much to Will Hays and Joseph Breen’s consternation, the film was a tremendous success, and remains an uncompromising American classic of psychopathic violent behavior and deranged capitalist determinism.