The Hoodlum (1951)
A career criminal talks his way out on parole, takes a job at his brother's gas station, and immediately starts casing an armored car for the heist that will destroy what is left of his family.
Lawrence Tierney, who spent his career getting arrested nearly as often as he played criminals onscreen, needed no help finding Vincent’s contempt for everyone around him — the film barely bothers to make him sympathetic before letting the heist tear his family apart.
Background
The Hoodlum is a 1951 film noir directed by Max Nosseck, distributed by Eagle-Lion, and released July 5, 1951, running about 61 minutes. Lawrence Tierney stars as Vincent Lubeck, a career criminal paroled five years into a ten-year sentence who goes to work at his brother’s gas station and almost immediately begins planning an armored-car heist, drawing his family into the fallout. Allene Roberts, Marjorie Riordan, and Edward Tierney, Lawrence’s real-life brother making his film debut, round out the cast. By 1951 Tierney had already alienated several studios, including RKO, and was working through a string of low-budget crime pictures for independents like Eagle-Lion.
What to watch for
Lawrence Tierney’s offscreen reputation, a long record of arrests and brawls that followed him throughout his career, bleeds directly into Vincent, a character the film makes little effort to soften or explain before letting his criminality destroy what is left of his family. The casting of his actual brother Edward as Vincent’s screen brother adds an odd, uncomfortable layer to the family scenes, since the contempt Vincent shows his relatives plays against a real sibling relationship. The heist itself, when it finally comes, is staged with the flat, unglamorous matter-of-factness typical of Eagle-Lion’s crime output rather than as a suspense set piece.
