Sizār-i Kūchak: Persiska (Farsi) 1403

With "Little Caesar", from 1929, we are at the very origin of the crime novel. Together with "The Asphalt Jungle", Burnett's other masterpiece, it constitutes the model and icon of every narration of the day of the "swarming, dirty, noisy, frenetically alive" city like the modern metropolis, its natural environment. From both novels, came unsurpassed classics of American realistic cinematography; slang expressions were born from the perfect metaphors of the two titles, capable of synthesizing the entire criminal universe in one image. And it is interesting to note that, born from the avowedly objective, "veristic" observation of social reality, the two novels have certainly influenced even sociological essays on the subject, at least in the expressive choices and in the reconstruction of the atmospheres. "Little Caesar" is the portrait of a boss, Rico Bandello, in the span of his exceptionally capable, relentlessly cold, professionally alien to any ethical evaluation, extraordinarily lucky. The author's stated intention was to describe the image of the world seen through the eyes of a gangster" by telling the story "so that the action itself speaks". But there is also something more. Silent and evident as a sculpture, there is a human type in all its psychological depth; and in all its being, however.