Gangsters

Vintage: The Public Enemy (1931)

Vintage: The Public Enemy (1931)

The Public Enemy (released as Enemies of the Public in the United Kingdom) is a 1931 American all-talking pre-code crime film produced and distributed by Warner Brothers. The film was directed by William A. Wellman and stars James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods and Joan Blondell. The film relates the story of a young man’s rise in the criminal underworld…
Vintage: Little Caesar (1931)

Vintage: Little Caesar (1931)

Little Caesar released at the very beginning of 1931, was the first gangster “talkie” to truly capture that public’s fascination with a genre that has never really gone out of vogue since. The template for the classic gangster film is generally the rise and fall of the criminal and “Little Caesar” sticks to that script closely, telling the story of…
Glass Plate Female Mugshots from Australia

Glass Plate Female Mugshots from Australia

In 1990 the Historic Houses Trust rescued a remarkable collection of NSW Police forensic photographs from a flooded warehouse in Lidcombe. Created between 1912 and 1964, the archive contains approximately 130,000 glass plate negatives depicting crime scenes, police activities, forensic evidence and mug shots and may be the biggest police photography collection in the southern hemisphere. The Historic Houses Trust…
Behind the Scenes: Scarface (1932)

Behind the Scenes: Scarface (1932)

With “Little Caesar” and “The Public Enemy” proving hits, plenty of imitators lined up and one of the first, and best, came from producer Howard Hughes, who lined up an impressive roster of talent for his cautionary crime tale “Scarface” (sometimes subtitled “The Shame Of A Nation”). Writer Ben Hecht was underway on the script when he received a visit…
Behind the Scenes: Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

Behind the Scenes: Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

Angels with Dirty Faces is a 1938 American gangster film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, the Dead End Kids and Humphrey Bogart, along with Ann Sheridan and George Bancroft. The film was written by Rowland Brown, John Wexley, and Warren Duff with uncredited assistance from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
Vintage: Mug Shots of Al Capone (1930s)

Vintage: Mug Shots of Al Capone (1930s)

On March 27, 1929, as Al Capone left a Chicago courtroom after testifying to a grand jury investigating violations of federal prohibition laws, Capone was arrested by FBI agents on charges of having committed contempt of court by feigning illness to avoid an earlier appearance. In May 1929, Capone was sentenced to a prison term in Philadelphia, having been convicted…
40 Glass Plate Mugshots from the 1920s

40 Glass Plate Mugshots from the 1920s

These are wife killers, petty thieves, dealers of fake opium, hustlers – plucked from the street by the police of 1920s Sydney, Australia and photographed, fresh from the scene of the crime. These photographs reveal a lot more than the usual mugshot. The suspects strike poses. A few look disheveled and deranged, but some look decidedly guilty. They lean casually into…