As other have accurately pointed out, this is an unusual film for Hawks. For one thing, there really is no hero. Muni looks rather anthropoid in this movie. He seems to live in a dump and is content to let his mother and sister live in a similar dump. He throws his mother around too, the swine. There is little of the male solidarity we've come to expect from Hawks. Everyone in the film seems manipulative.
There are a couple of other uncharacteristic features here. Some fancy editing takes place as a chattering tommy gun seems to blow away the pages of a calendar. And the later Hawks would have considered the symbolic use of all those Xs to be pretentious. (Hawks claimed he got the idea from a photo in a tabloid newspaper of a murder scene after the body had been removed, but an X was entered into the pic to denote the body's position.) Of course many of his characters had little quirks, rubbing their noses with a finger or whatever, but they were behavioral touches rather than artifactual. After this film he seems to have given up on built-in symbolic oddities and gone with George Raft's coin flipping instead.
But, the main plot aside, Tony Camonte's attitude towards his sister, a characteristically non-obedient babe with melanic eye rings like a panda's, is straightforwardly covert. I've never been sure he knew exactly what he was doing with forbidden impulses like incest or homosexuality. I mean, the guy was from Goshen, Indiana! He didn't know from Freud. As he once put it in an interview, "They attribute all these things to me. . . . It's completely unconscious." Ann Dvorak, as the sister, does a mean kootchy kootchy for Raft in the nightclub vestibule, by the way.
This is definitely worth catching, although it doesn't seem to be shown much on TV. It belongs with Little Caesar and Public Enemy as one of the films to establish an entire genre.
