Review of King of the Underworld (1939) by Alex B — 12 Jul 2015

Impoverished husband-and-wife surgeons, and an impoverished author, get caught up in organized crime. But they're all caught up in and impoverished by the crude characterizations in this movie. Strangely, although organized crime is the cause of their escape from poverty, it's portrayed very unsympathetically and easily outsmarted.

Organized crime here is nothing but a means used to achieve bourgeois success (though not for the gangsters). But what was the cause of their failure to be successfully bourgeois, the cause of their impoverishment, in the first place?