Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)“Mother of mercy! Is this the end of Rico?” These are the last words of the dying gangster in the Warner Bros film that made a star of Edward G Robinson. In his classic 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”, Robert Warshow writes of Rico speaking of himself in the third person “because what has been brought low is not the undifferentiated man, but the individual with a name, the gangster, the success”. And he mentions that “TS Eliot has pointed out that a number of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes have this trick of looking at themselves dramatically”

Photograph: Public Domain