A great write up by Wheeler Winston Dixon from Steve Eifert’s blog at http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2011/08/hoodlum-1951.html

By 1951, Lawrence Tierney’s career was on the skids, and he knew it.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Breaking into films in the early 1940s after a career as a catalogue model and theater actor with bit parts at RKO Radio in such films as Gordon Douglas’ Gildersleeve on Broadway, Dudley Nichols’ Government Girl, Mark Robson’s The Ghost Ship (all 1943), and then William Clemens’ The Falcon Out West, John Auer’s Seven Days Ashore, and Robson’s Youth Runs Wild (all 1944), Tierney learned the ropes playing everything from cab drivers to orchestra leaders to FBI agents , until he got his big break at the ultra-cheap studio Monogram Pictures, in Max Nosseck’s Dillinger (1945). It was his first role of any consequence, but it was the lead role of Dillinger himself, and the film made a splash with both the critics and the public, even if was made very cheaply and quickly.

Go to Steve Eifert’s site and read the full story here: http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2011/08/hoodlum-1951.html