I bought a "Platinum Collection" Mobster Movies collection. 16 movies all together. It was on sale for $9.99 and I had to check it out for the price. Anyone ever see these movies? If so, what did you think of them? I have alot of movie nights ahead of me.lol

Escape by Night(1937)
Gang Bullets (1938)
Gangster's Boy (1938)
The Racketeer (1929)
Baby Face Morgan (1942)
Boss of Big Town (1942)
Gangs, Inc. (1941)
Lady Gangster (1942)
The Chase (1946)
Crime, Inc. (1945)
Shoot to Kill (1947)
Woman on the Run (1950)
The Big Combo (1955)
Johnny One-Eye (1950)
Kid Monk Baroni (1952)
Port of New York (1942)

The only one I have seen is Crime Inc (1945). The transfer to DVD wasn't particularly good but watchable with an interesting plot about several fictional events which resemble events that happened in real life. The movie covers the period, presumably 1930s, when some gangsters belonged to a National Syndicate, and New York/Atlantic City locations. One gangster wants to stay independent and a contract is put on him. He evades this and kidnaps one of the Syndicate members, who owns a night club. He is paid $100,000 for the safe return of the Syndicate member.

The main character is a resourceful newspaperman who seems able to infiltrate both the police and the underworld. He decides to write a book about the Syndicate and its group of killers which he calls Crime Inc.

The part of Jud Stecker, hit man with Crime Inc., was played by Jack Gordon who prior to taking up acting was known as Irving 'Big Gangy' Cohen. He was in real life a hit man for the group of killers which the press nicknamed Murder Inc. He was well known as one of the few people who fled from a murder scene but was not hunted down and killed by the mob. He then rather foolishly appeared in the 1939 movie "Golden Boy" and was swiftly arrested by the police. He was acquitted of the murder and continued his acting career in this movie and as a double for Hoss Cartwright in the Bonanza tv series.

For anyone living in London the BFI Southbank is showing the following films in July:

Little Caesar
The definitive movie gangster, Rico Bandello is an outsider, a smalltime hood with an accent, a craving for respect, and ruthless determination. Robinson had enjoyed a big success playing Al Capone on stage (they shared a physical resemblance), and WR Burnett’s novel also draws on Capone’s vertiginous rise through the ranks, before contriving a more dramatic fall. Made on the cheap, the movie was a big hit, initiating Warners’ cycle of ‘torn from the headlines’ muckrakers.
USA 1930 Dir Mervyn LeRoy With Edward G Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr 80min PG
Thu 2 July 20:40 NFT2, Tue 7 July 18:30 NFT1, Fri 17 July 14:30 NFT2

The Public Enemy
Despite the title, this is a more sympathetic portrait of a charismatic slum kid who takes a wrong turn and pours his drive and ambition into racketeering. Cagney’s Tom Powers is unbridled energy, a human dynamo with a staccato speech pattern and a grin as quick as his fist. Loosely based on Hymie Weiss, an enemy and victim of Capone, Powers made Cagney a movie star overnight.
USA 1931 Dir William A Wellman With James Cagney, Edward Woods, Donald Cook, Joan Blondell, Jean Harlow, Mae Clark 83min
Fri 3 July 20:30 NFT3, Sat 11 July 18:30 NFT1, Wed 22 July 14:30 NFT2

Scarface
X marks the spot in this, the apotheosis of the urban gangster movies of the pre-Code era. Again the story is inspired by Al Capone, though screenwriter Ben Hecht threw in an incest theme as a tip of the hat to the Borgias. Muni’s Tony Camonte is every bit as brutish as Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in the remake, an almost childlike thug who brightens up when he gets his hands on his first Tommy gun: ‘Get out of the way, Johnny, I’m gonna spit!’
USA 1932 Dir Howard Hawks With Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, Karen Morley 93min
Sat 4 July 16:15 NFT1, Wed 8 July 20:40 NFT2

‘G’-Men
Legend has it that Machine Gun Kelly coined the term ‘G’-men, arrested without a shot being fired in the first major public relations coup for J Edgar Hoover’s Federal agents – or ‘Government Men’. At Hoover’s urging, Hollywood studios were prevailed on to stop glamorising outlaws – and so we find Cagney as an attorney who signs up to fight crime after gangsters kill his buddy. Don’t suppose that he’s any softer just because he’s on the right side of the law.
USA 1935 Dir William Keighley With James Cagney, Margaret Lindsay, Ann Dvorak 85min
Sun 5 July 16:00 NFT2, Mon 13 July 20:40 NFT2

The Roaring Twenties
If the early Warners crime movies came straight from the day’s headlines, Mark Hellinger’s expansive production takes a longer view, tracing a WWI veteran’s trajectory in the illegal booze trade after struggling with unemployment. If Cagney’s Eddie Bartlett goes to the bad his options were severely limited, and he remains capable of redemption. An obvious influence on Once Upon a Time in America.
USA 1939 Dir Raoul Walsh With James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart 105min PG
Sat 11 July 16:00 NFT2, Wed 15 July 20:45 NFT1, Tue 21 July 14:30 NFT2

Dillinger
John Dillinger was declared off-limits to Hollywood after assuming near-folkhero status during his cavalier crime spree of the early 30s. This curious, noir-inflected low budget effort from writer Philip Yordan exploits episodes like his daring prison break, but Lawrence Tierney’s chillingly callous portrait has nothing to do with the real bank robber. (Nearly 50 years later Tierney masterminded the robbery in Reservoir Dogs.)
USA 1945 Dir Max Nosseck With Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, Anne Jeffreys 70min PG
Fri 10 July 18:20 NFT2, Sat 18 July 16:00 NFT2

Baby Face Nelson
As a Warner Bros cutter, Siegel put together the montage sequences in The Roaring Twenties. Later, of course, he made Dirty Harry. This tight, expert crime thriller shows how much he had learned from his studio apprenticeship, and the brisk, unsentimental intelligence he brought to the table. But the real revelation is Mickey Rooney, utterly authentic as Dillinger’s sometime partner-in-crime, a trigger-happy hood at the mercy of his own psychosis.
USA 1957 Dir Don Siegel With Mickey Rooney, Carolyn Jones, Cedric Hardwicke 85min PG
Sun 12 July 16:00 NFT2, Tue 14 July 20:40 NFT2

Machine Gun Kelly
The success of Baby Face Nelson inspired a slew of gangster biopics, many connected with director- producer Roger Corman. This was his first stab at the genre, and he claimed it was Kelly’s anti-climactic demise that interested him. Shot in ten days, it’s a movie about a bully with a mommy complex – anticipating the Freudian hysterics of Bloody Mama. ‘Without His Gun He Was Naked Yellow!’, announced the ads.
USA 1958 Dir Roger Corman With Charles Bronson, Susan Cabot, Morey Amsterdam 80min 12A
Tue 14 July 18:20 NFT2, Fri 17 July 20:40 NFT2

Al Capone
A fairly accurate biopic, taking Big Al from bouncer to mob boss and beyond. Steiger is on mercurial form, chewing on a long cigar instead of the scenery. If the documentary stylings appear somewhat dated, that’s because they draw on The Roaring Twenties, not genuine newsreel footage. For many critics, though, Steiger lays down a standard that even De Niro in The Untouchables failed to match.
USA 1959 Dir Richard Wilson With Rod Steiger, Fay Spain, Martin Balsam 103min 15
Sat 18 July 20:40 NFT2, Wed 22 July 18:20 NFT2

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
Arguably Boetticher’s most important film outside his westerns, this slick, smart, utterly fraudulent biopic reprises the basic elements that underlie the classic gangster movie. Ray Danton found his best-ever role as the flamboyant, graceful Jack Diamond (nicknamed ‘Legs’, here, because of his dancing abilities), and would reprise the role in Portrait of a Mobster. In an early role, Warren Oates is Jack’s expendable brother. Photographed by Lucien Ballard.
USA 1960 Dir Budd Boetticher With Ray Danton, Karen Steele, Warren Oates 101min PG
Wed 22 July 20:40 NFT2, Fri 24 July 18:20 NFT2

Bonnie and Clyde
‘They’re Young. They’re In Love. And They Kill People.’ Like a smile dying, Arthur Penn’s new wave gangster rhapsody gets you high on the thrills and spills of the chase, then hits you with the consequences right between the eyes. The violence was a turning point for the genre, but so too the romantic take on the attractive, non-conformist outlaws. The stuff that counter-cultural myths are made of.
USA 1967 Dir Arthur Penn With Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman 111min 15
Wed 15 July 18:30 NFT1, Tue 21 July 20:45 NFT1, Wed 29 July 14:30 NFT3

The St Valentine’s Day Massacre
Returning to the scene of the crime – 1920s Chicago – nearly a decade after he made Machine Gun Kelly, Corman made the most of an unusually generous budget from Twentieth Century Fox. Sadly, the studio nixed his idea of casting Orson Welles as Capone, and the part was inherited by the improbable Jason Robards. Screenwriter Howard Browne was a veteran journalist who had covered the crime beat in the 20s, and the movie feels scrupulously researched.
USA 1967 Dir Roger Corman With Jason Robards, George Segal, Ralph Meeker, Jean Hale 100min 15
Wed 29 July 20:40 NFT2, Thu 30 July 18:10 NFT3

Bloody Mama
In a very, very different mode, Corman let loose here. Steeped in Freudian motifs and throwing history out the window, the movie makes no bones about its anti-social anti-heroes. The Barker clan comprises a sadist, a homosexual, a lady-killer and a junkie (De Niro sniffing glue). Each takes his turn in Ma’s bed. Not for the faint hearted, this is positively Jacobean movie-making.
USA 1970 Dir Roger Corman With Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle, Don Stroud, Robert De Niro 90min
Sat 25 July 20:40 NFT2, Mon 27 July 18:20 NFT2

Thieves Like Us
Three cons escape from prison and take to robbing banks. It’s all they know. Unsentimental and scrupulously unglamorous, this is a film about the wrong side of the tracks, where the helpless and the hopeless persist in betting against the odds and lose every time. Nick Ray filmed Edward Anderson’s novel as They Live By Night, while the Coens took it somewhere else entirely in O Brother Where Art Thou.
USA 1973 Dir Robert Altman With Keith Carradine, John Schuck, Shelley Duvall 123min 12A
Tue 21 July 18:30 NFT1, Mon 27 July 20:45 NFT1

Dillinger
Dean Stanton, Richard Dreyfuss, Geoffrey Lewis, John Ryan 102min
Milius made his directorial debut under the auspices of Roger Corman’s AIP studio, still profiting from the gangster revival inspired by Bonnie and Clyde (dismissed as two-bit hoodlums here). This is easily the most accurate movie Dillinger to date – Warren Oates could pass for the premier public enemy number one in a line-up. Look for Richard Dreyfuss as ‘Baby Face’ Nelson.
USA 1973 Dir John Milius With Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Michelle Phillips, Cloris Leachman, Harry Thu 23 July 18:20 NFT2, Fri 24 July 20:40 NFT2

The Lady in Red
John Sayles wrote this cheerful exploitation flick for Roger Corman, giving us a novel angle on the Dillinger story by focusing on the notorious ‘lady in red’. Pamela Sue Martin – between Nancy Drew and Dynasty – is the preacher’s daughter who is seduced by a reporter, beaten by her father, and runs away to Chicago, where she eventually winds up in a brothel. ‘The thinking person’s crunch movie,’ declared Time Out.
USA 1979 Dir Lewis Teague With Pamela Sue Martin, Louise Fletcher, Christopher Lloyd 93min
Wed 29 July 18:10 NFT3, Fri 31 July 20:30 NFT3

Scarface
‘Nothing exceeds like excess,’ says Elvira (Pfeiffer) and this is the movie to prove it. De Palma’s overblown, operatic disco’n’coke era update on the Hawks classic confirms the potency of the gangster myth, even as it replays – and plays with – cliché and convention. Al Pacino’s snarling Cuban Tony Montana is as hyper-real as Cagney or Robinson, a little man’s impersonation of a tough guy.
USA 1983 Dir Brian De Palma With Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steven Bauer, Robert Loggia 170min
Sat 4 July 18:30 NFT1, Thu 16 July 20:45 NFT1

Once Upon a Time in America
If Scarface seems like the quintessential 80s film, Leone’s masterpiece is oddly timeless, for all that it spans 40 years of American social history and Time is its central theme. Leone was born in 1929, and Once Upon a Time… is an imaginative, amoral recollection of the roaring 20s, a melancholy meditation on camaraderie, fleeting youth, illusionment, money and power. Monumental cinema.
USA-Italy 1983 Dir Sergio Leone With Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, William Forsythe, Burt Young, Tuesday Weld 229min
Mon 20 July 18:30 NFT1, Sun 26 July 18:30 NFT1

The Newton Boys
Linklater mines for the missing link between the cowboy movie and the gangster picture, and excavates reallife (though little known) 1920s Texas bank robbers, the Newton brothers. ‘Linklater’s first big-budget movie may be the Jules and Jim of bank-robber movies, thanks to its astonishing handling of period detail and its gentleness of spirit, both buoyed by a gliding lightness of touch.’ – Jonathan Rosenbaum
USA 1998 Dir Richard Linklater With Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, Ethan Hawke 122min 15
Tue 28 July 20:30 NFT3, Fri 31 July 18:10 NFT3

I've seen none on the list..:)

The only movie I remember well from the Platinum Collection is "Port of NY," a very decent B-movie with Yul Brynner (with hair, no less!) as a pretty convincing and intelligent gangster. All of those movies should be worth watching--US B films on gangsters always have some redeeming features.

The BFI Southbank menu really hits all the classic high spots. In addition to "Little Caesar," "The Public Enemy" and "Scarface," which speak for themselves, I'd strongly urge you to see:
--"Al Capone": another B-movie (and not very accurate at all), but featuring Rod Steiger's all-time greatest performance--and, considering his brilliant career, that's saying a lot. Capone or Capone-like characters have been played almost as often as Lincoln and Churchill, but no Capone will ever match the ferocity and conviction with which Steiger played him.

--"Lady in Red": One of Corman's masterpieces. If this is a B-movie, then it raised the bar 20 notches. Done with taste and verve. Look for Jack Nicholson in a bit part. Very fine performance by Ralph Meeker as Bugs Moran.