Baby Face Nelson

Like The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) three years later, Don Siegel’s Baby Face Nelson resurrects the prohibition era and its Tommy guns as if paying homage to the great gangster films that tilled the fertile soil from which film noir sprang. The fantastically versatile Mickey Rooney plays Lester Gillis, aka Baby Face Nelson, a trigger-happy ex-con who can’t avoid the thrill of crime, seemingly relishing in the blood and guts of it all. The story is unoriginal (standard fare about a gangster who flies too close to the sun and gets what he deserves), but the execution is beautifully done, particularly the chemistry between Rooney and Carolyn Jones, who plays his loyal, loving wife Sue (Jones will play another famous gangster’s wife two years later in 1959’s Al Capone). Hal Mohr’s cinematography provides a handful of noir flourishes, most notably the flashing neon sign outside a hotel window, and, as expected from a Siegel film, the action is relentless, perfectly culminating in the spill of blood in an anonymous country graveyard.