It's very of its time, but it's good fun to spot all the hallmarks screenwriter Oliver Stone and director Brian De Palma liked and decided to include in the 1982 remake, both in the plot and on the screen that (in this iteration, the 'The World Is Yours' is a neon advertising sign across the street from the antihero's apartment).

Like the other high water mark in the genre around the same time, The Public Enemy, Hollywood dared not make a movie about how exciting the life of crime was for its own sake. Tony (Paul Muni) will pay for what he's done, much like his namesake played by Al Pacino half a century later, and the studio also includes the then-obligatory warning that it was a cautionary tale, that there was a scourge taking over America's streets at the hands of migrant crime gangs the law must stamp out.

If you didn't realise what a direct lift De Palma's 1982 classic it is, you'll soon see it. Italian Tomy Camonte (Paul Muni), an enforcer in 1920s Chicago, starts to climb through the ranks of the mob by shooting his boss dead, a sting he carries out with his boss' top lieutenant, Lovo (Osgood Perkins, no relation to the son of the late Anthony and director of Nicolas Cage horror thriller Longlegs) so the pair can take over the gang.

Along with his friends and hangers-on, Tony starts leaning on the local bars to buy his gang's contraband beer instead of buying supply by other gangs – by force when necessary, and they soon control the entire south side of the city.

Lovo forbids him to touch the north side, which is run by the far tougher Irish gang, but Tony ignores him, using guns and balls to muscle in on their turf, putting his boss offside when gang warface threatens to explode.

He also takes a shine to Lovo's flapper girlfriend Poppy (Karen Morley), a streetwise, tough talking broad whose brains match her beauty but who finds herself falling under Tony's spell.

Eventually there's nowhere for Tony to go but take Lovo's position for himself, putting himself at the top of city's criminal underworld, a position he can't possibly survive with the public, his rivals and the cops all calling for someone to do something about the carnage in their streets.

Like the remake, there's the baby sister Tony's way too overprotective of, the affair she starts with his best friend that will be the undoing of them all and plenty of other story turns you're familar with after watching De Palma's version on VHS countless times during the 80s and 90s for the languge and violence.

It has the Cagney-esque genre styles very much on its sleeve, with well-dressed hoods issuing threats no more fearsome than 'I'm in charge now, see?' and 'you're going to buy from me now, get it?', all of which is funny rather than scary if you watch it nowadays. I felt sure someone at some point would sneer 'you dirty rat', but no such luck.

Director Howard Hawks does manage some very muscular filmmaking that would have made great use of movie screens back in the day while most films were still little more than recorded stageplays, with vintage cars screeching past, tommy guns spewing fire out of their windows in mob hits.

There's also some interesting trivia - it was heavily censored (so who knows what version you're watching on streaming or DVD?), it was produced by Howard Hughes before he descended into tinfoil hat wearing paranoia, and the novel it was based on was mostly taken from the true story of Al Capone.

It's a historical document now, but it's worth seeing to see the staple tropes of crime films it inspired in later directors.