Seeing Double: Reflections on Edward G. Robinson (Preview)
by Art Simon

I have been thinking about Edward G. Robinson lately, thinking about how he seems left out whenever the scholarly or critical conversation turns to the pantheon of studio-era actors. Among Robinson’s fellow Warner Bros. stars, Humphrey Bogart has long held the title of coolest—tough as Spade and Marlowe, romantic opposite Bergman and Bacall. James Cagney has been celebrated for being a gangster and a hoofer, the Public Enemy and Yankee Doodle Dandy. John Garfield has, since before his untimely death, been the darling of the left. What’s more, author J. Hoberman once dubbed him the Jewish Brando. Robert Sklar honored all three of these men when he surveyed their careers in his book City Boys (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). And in his own time, Robinson watched as Paul Muni was celebrated as the most versatile actor in town, not just on the Warners lot. Muni was remarkably successful at transforming himself, through makeup and accent, into an array of historical figures—Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola, and Benito Juarez, to name the most obvious.

To paraphrase Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944), a film Robinson claimed as one of his favorites, I’m not here to knock the other fella’s merchandise. Bogart, Cagney, Garfield, Muni—they are all great. My guess is Sklar left Robinson out of City Boys because he had not been born in America, but in so many other ways he would have qualified. His first home in the United States was on Broome Street when it belonged to the storied Lower East Side, and he lived his young adult life in the Bronx. Or perhaps it was because Robinson’s screen career didn’t start in earnest until he was thirty-six, so he never really was classifiable as a boy at all. Robinson was harder to pin down and it is precisely this quality of his that I want to explore. To put it simply, there is something singular about Robinson’s duality, that is, how within films and across his oeuvre he was so often characterized by split identities and, moreover, how this feature of his persona became thematized during his career.

This split defined the man long before he first went on the stage and eventually before the cameras. In fact, he felt compelled to use the first paragraph of his autobiography, All My Yesterdays (NY: Hawthorn Books, 1973), to inform his reader that, “What begins here and will go on for as long as my patience and memory hold out is the life and times not of Edward G. Robinson but of Emanuel Goldenberg.” The Romanian immigrant never left him even as he embraced the country that adopted him at the age of nine. Throughout his memoir, he consistently identifies his tough surface as his American facade, while the cautious, anxious, European Jew lived beneath.

To hear Robinson tell it, his competing selves informed the most important performance of his later years, that of Lancey Howard in The Cincinnati Kid (1965). In its climactic scene, two generations conclude their marathon collision—no guns, no fists, just poker. Audiences might have been ready, even eager, to see Steven McQueen, as Eric Stoner, the coolest actor of the decade, dethrone the aging studio-era star. As The Man, the best stud poker player in the country, Robinson sits across from McQueen, his face weary, even a little puffy, his tie pulled away from his throat, his elegant clothes now a little unkempt. But his poker face, still distinguished with its gray goatee, is very much intact. Ann-Margret’s body is framed behind McQueen’s profile, reinforcing how the film has also drawn this clash in sexual terms. The Kid is the object of desire for both Melba (Ann-Margret), with whom he has a brief dalliance, and Christian (Tuesday Weld), for whom he has something like genuine feelings. There are no bedmates pursuing Robinson during breaks in the match and the most obvious female companion for him is Lady Fingers, the backup dealer played by Joan Blondell, whose way to Lancey’s heart is a recitation of old acquaintances who have died in recent years, reminding him he is on the backside of life.

Lancey never projects weakness, but the effortless danger Robinson could suggest with just a stare has softened. And as if they sense this subtle change in him, the onlookers at tableside are convinced that The Man has met his match, that the torch is about to be passed. Seeing The Kid’s aces and tens, Lancey calls his $3,500 bet and raises him $5,000. Even The Kid thinks the old man is bluffing, that is, until he turns over a Jack of Diamonds and vanquishes a stunned McQueen with a straight flush. “You’re good, kid, but as long as I’m around you’re second best. You might as well learn to live with it.” For Robinson, Lancey embodied the balancing act he had managed throughout his career. “That man on the screen,” he wrote, “more than in any other picture I ever made, was Edward G. Robinson with great patches of Emanuel Goldenberg showing through. He was all cold and discerning and unflappable on the exterior; he was aging and full of self-doubt on the inside.”…

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Art Simon is professor of film studies at Montclair State University.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 1