Machine Gun Kelly

A Prohibition-era stickup man hides behind a Thompson and a nickname — until his ambitious moll pushes him into a kidnapping that his nerves can’t finish. Roger Corman’s 1958 gangster picture for American International Pictures is the film that gave Charles Bronson his first leading role: not yet the granite avenger of Death Wish, but a twitchy, death-haunted crook bossed by Susan Cabot’s Flo. Corman, already a couple of dozen cheap features into his career and still a few years from the Vincent Price Poe cycle, shot it in ten days with Floyd Crosby behind the camera and released it on a double bill with The Bonnie Parker Story. Tight, black-and-white, and unexpectedly psychological, it is AIP crime at its leanest — and the reel that made Bronson a star.