Edward G. Robinson: Hollywood's Literal OG — Little Caesar, the Blacklist Era, and the Man Behind the Movie Gangster

When They Were Making It

This episode explores the complex life of Edward G. Robinson, tracing his journey from a Romanian Jewish immigrant to a Hollywood icon. It d

Key takeaways

• Robinson's performance in 'Little Caesar' established the modern cinematic gangster archetype.
• His support for anti-fascist organizations led to a period of 'grey-listing' in Hollywood during the Red Scare.

Main topics

• Early life and immigration
• Creation of the gangster archetype

Notable quotes

At Ellis Island, I was born again.

Conclusion

A profound look at how an artist navigates fame, political peril, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Washington, D.C., April 30, 1952. In a congressional hearing room, members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities sit behind a raised desk. Before them is a witness table, a microphone, and movie star Edward G. Robinson. The committee has spent years asking people in Hollywood about communism. Now it has one of the most recognizable faces in American cinema sitting before it. It's the third time Robinson has appeared before the committee. He hasn't been called to appear. He's asked to. And he's not here to name names, not in the way that phrase has come to mean. He's not here to protest the hearings, or fight back, or dare the committee to do its worst. He's here to make a retreat, one he hopes will save his career. Robinson has spent more than 20 years making that career, out of playing almost anyone. Doctors, newspaper editors, lawyers. Men with money, men without it. Good men, bad men. But the type he is most known for, the one he spent most of his career trying to shake, is the gangster. His breakthrough Hollywood hit, Little Caesar, helped establish its prototype. Short, sharp-eyed, a cigar clenched between his teeth, his voice pushed into a hard-edged accent. But during all that time, while he was building one of the most recognizable criminal types in American movies, Robinson was building something else, too. A political life. Over those past two decades, Robinson has loudly and publicly lent his name, his money, and his celebrity to political causes of every kind. At the time, he believed he was supporting anti-fascism, war relief, liberal causes. But he wasn't always discerning about the organizations behind them, or the ones he was attaching his name to. And by now, some of those same organizations have been identified as communist fronts. So the question before the committee is not simply what Edward G. Robinson has supported, it's whether he knew what exactly he was supporting. The question has already begun to cost him. The major studios are wary. The work has gotten smaller. So that's why he's here. Over the duration of the hearing, he will insist that he has never been a communist. He will accept that some of the organizations he supported were communist fronts. And he will say, explicitly, that he was duped, used, and misled. More than that, he will publicly step back from the political life he has spent years building. By the time the hearing nears its close, the committee will seem to have accepted Robinson's explanation. One of the congressmen will go so far as to say the evidence provided only seems to prove that Robinson was a very choice sucker. For the moment, as humiliating as that is, it almost seems like a victory. It isn't. Because, in the end, it's not Congress that will have the final say on Edward G. Robinson. It's Hollywood. And Hollywood has already made up its mind. Speaker 1 (4:34) Welcome to When They Were Making It. I'm your host, Patrick Rankin, and this is the podcast that dives deep into the glorious, often messy, and utterly human stories behind Hollywood's greatest films and the legends who created them. Today, we're exploring Edward G. Robinson, the stage-trained immigrant actor who helped create the modern screen gangster. spent decades fighting to prove he could be more than that, and just as he seemed to be getting there, got pulled into Hollywood's anti-communist panic, turning his fight for better parts into a fight for his very place in the industry. Speaker 1 (5:24) Emmanuel Goldenberg was born on December 12, 1893, in Bucharest, Romania. He was one of six children born to Yashaya and Sarah Goldenberg, a Jewish family living in a group of buildings around a courtyard on Strata Cantamere. Yashaya worked as a builder and tinsmith. Emmanuel, known as Manny, grew up in a world that was close and crowded. His parents, five siblings, and the families who shared that courtyard. At home, the Goldenbergs spoke Yiddish. At school, Manny learned Hebrew and German. Romanian, of course, was all around him. Unlike most children his age, Manny paid close attention to voices, accents, and the small differences between one person and another. He was interested in performance, too. His father once took him to see a silent western, and both of them came away thinking films were a passing fad. But the stage was something else. At a Bucharest café, Manny saw a Romanian production of Around the World in 80 Days. He loved it. Later, he remembered watching the actors and assuming they were simply making up the words as they went. For a while, at least, it was an ordinary enough childhood. But Romania was not an easy place to be a Jewish family. At some point during Manny's childhood, one of his brothers was struck in the head with a rock by some other schoolboys for being Jewish. The injury was serious enough that the brother would years later, die in America, according to some accounts, from the attack's effects. For the Goldenbergs, the assault was part of a larger reality. Romanian Jews faced restrictions that shaped almost every part of life, citizenship, work, and the possibility of a secure future. Like many Jewish families in Romania, the Goldenbergs began looking towards somewhere else. Somewhere that, from across an ocean, promised the freedom and security Romania did not. America. The family began making moves toward the United States, though not all at once. By most accounts, Manny's older brothers went first, then his father, finding work in New York, wherever he could, and sending money home. It was in early 1904, when he was 10 years old, that Manny followed, leaving Bucharest and crossing the Atlantic. Later, he would put it simply, At Ellis Island, I was born again. Life, for me, began when I was 10 years old. The Goldenbergs settled on Manhattan's Lower East Side, in a neighborhood filled with families just like them. Jewish families from Russia, Poland, and Romania, as well as Italian, Irish, and German immigrants. Manny arrived in America knowing very little English. It was at school in New York that he began to learn it. And he learned fast. He began making speeches for family and friends. His favorite was Theodore Roosevelt's Second Inaugural Address, which he memorized and would recite from beginning to end. It wasn't just languages Manny had an aptitude for. He was smart, and he worked hard. As he got older, Manny was accepted into Townsend Harris Hall, a selective preparatory school attached to City College. From there, he went on to City College itself. By then, he'd begun to imagine what his future might look like. He wanted to go into law and become a criminal lawyer. to defend people who had been abused and exploited. That plan lasted for a while. But then another ambition, always there in the background, began to take over. Manny liked to perform. He liked memorizing those speeches and standing before people. He had grown up surrounded by the different languages and voices and took to them well. And he'd never forgotten the feeling of watching actors on a stage in Bucharest. So it was during his time at City College, while still a teenager, that Manny decided he wanted to act. He applied for a scholarship at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. For his audition, he performed The Quarrel Between Brutus and Cassius from Julius Caesar, two men arguing about loyalty, honor, and betrayal. He won the scholarship. It was at some point during these early years studying acting at the Academy that Emanuel Manny Goldenberg decided to change his name and began calling himself Edward G. Robinson. Later, he would say he'd chosen Edward after King Edward VII. Robinson was a name he'd heard in a play, one whose ring and strength he liked. And the G stayed for Goldenberg. It wasn't a complete break with the old name. Years later, government records would still list him as Manny Goldenberg. But on stage, he was Edward G. Robinson. Under that name, he began looking for work. And it came quickly. It wasn't glamorous, not at first, but it was work. In April 1913, Robinson made his professional stage debut in Binghamton, New York, playing a small role in a stock production of Paid in Full. From there, he joined the Orpheum Players in Cincinnati, staying for 22 weeks. He played whatever was needed, sometimes more than one part in the same show. In Alias Jimmy Valentine, he took on two roles, changing costume and character between them. It was an apprenticeship in, well, being useful. Robinson learned how to move quickly between accents, disguises, and types. How to be the person a company needed for one scene, then someone entirely different in the next. After Cincinnati, he joined a touring production of Kismet, playing Nazir, a guide. The tour took him as far as Ottawa and Montreal before it closed in late 1914. It was in September 1915 that Robinson reached Broadway for the first time. He had a small part in a war play called Under Fire, and once again, the production gave him a chance to put his knack for voices and accents to use. Across the one show, he played a French spy, a Belgian peasant, a Prussian soldier, and a Cockney private. Later, Robinson would joke that he'd become something like the League of Nations. For the next few years, the stage kept finding similar work for him. He played a Filipino in The Pawn, a German soldier in Drafted, a Swede in The Deluge, and a French-Canadian in The Little Teacher. It was far from leading man material. Robinson was, instead, becoming something else. An actor who could play almost anyone. In 1918, Robinson stepped away from the little teacher to enlist in the Navy as the United States continued its fight in Europe. He trained at Pelham Bay in the Bronx and applied for naval intelligence, but he was never sent overseas. After the armistice, he returned to the stage. The parts kept coming. In First is Last in 1919, He played an Anglo-Saxon for the first, and he later said only, time in his stage career. By then, the stage had competition in America. A new kind of acting career had begun to emerge, one that had already drawn many theater actors away from the stage. Motion pictures were no longer a passing fad, and while Hollywood was quickly becoming the center of the American film industry, films were still being made in and around New York. Robinson, though, did not feel that pull. For now, at least. The theater was where he wanted to be. Films, as far as he was concerned, were not yet much of an art form. The living theatre was the only theatre, he would later write, and all the rest was nonsense. So, over the next few years, that's where he continued building his career. He played in everything from Russian drama to Broadway comedies. It wasn't until 1923, when Robinson was 29 years old, that he finally made his first credited film appearance. It wasn't because he changed his mind about movies. It was something else. Something much simpler. The role was a part in The Bright Shawl, shot in Havana, and the pay was equivalent to 20 weeks of stage salary. The money was, well, great. The making of a film, however, was, as Robinson put it, silly and unrewarding. So back to the stage he went. And by then, there was no longer anything tentative about it. Robinson was not learning the business anymore. He was building a career in it. And a good one. That same year, Robinson began appearing with the Theatre Guild, one of New York's leading repertory companies. The work was a long way from the stock company parts of his early years. He appeared in Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine. then moved through plays by Shaw, Pirandello, and Dostoevsky. He worked alongside Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontan, and other actors at the Center of New York Theater. His personal life was coming together, too. That year, Robinson married Gladys Lloyd, an actress who had appeared with him in a comedy called Henry Behave the year before. By now, Robinson's life had begun to take on a settled shape. He still wasn't a star, but this was the career he wanted. Working in serious plays, taking on difficult character parts, and building a reputation as an actor who could disappear into almost any role. But his career was about to take a turn. A big one. That summer, Robinson appeared in Atlantic City in an early version of a comedy called The Kibitzer. It was the first time a production had been billed with Edward G. Robinson. But this was not the role that changed things. That was the racket. The Racket was a hard-edged drama about corruption and organized crime in Chicago. Robinson was cast as Nick Scarcy, a gangster whose name deliberately echoed Al Capone's nickname, Scarface. Robinson did not especially like the part. It was brutal, violent, and a long way from the serious character work he'd spent the past few years building toward. But even if he didn't like it, audiences did. The racket became a hit and ran for months on Broadway. It was even banned when the producers tried to bring it to Chicago, Capone's actual stomping grounds, where it was considered a little too close to home. But almost overnight, it made Edward G. Robinson a New York theater name. Robinson himself would point to the part as the beginning of something big. Boy, did that play change my life. It was a smash. From there, things went quickly. In 1928, the success took the racket on tour, first to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, studio executives came to see Robinson play Scarcey. They offered him film contracts. and Robinson turned them down. He still didn't want to leave the stage for the movies, especially not if it entailed picking up and leaving New York for Hollywood. When Howard Hughes bought the film rights to The Racket and made it into a movie in 1928, the role went to Louis Wohlheim instead. And, for the moment, Robinson stayed in New York. But the screen wasn't finished with him. At the end of 1928, while he was appearing on Broadway in A Man with Red Hair, Paramount offered him a role in a new sound picture, The Hole in the Wall. This time, he would not have to go west. The picture was being filmed at Paramount's Astoria studio in Queens, close enough for Robinson to make the movie while continuing to perform on stage. He played a con man known as the Fox, running a fake fortune-telling racket with a phony medium. When she dies, he recruits a young woman named Jean Oliver, played by Claudette Colbert, to take her place. It was not quite a gangster role, but it was close enough. Robinson playing a criminal, working a scam, and already showing the hard edge that Hollywood would soon want much more of. The hole in the wall wasn't a big picture, but it was a paramount picture, and it was Robinson's first talkie. Acting in sound pictures, he soon found out, was a completely different way of working than stage acting, lowering his voice, making his expressions smaller, and adjusting to scenes being filmed out of order. Robinson, worried the result would be terrible, skipped the preview. Claudette Colbert, who went, sent him a telegram afterward. We weren't too bad, baby. We weren't too bad. Over the next two years, Robinson would move back and forth between the stage and the screen. In early 1929, he returned to The Kibitzer, the comedy that had first