MACHINE GUN KELLY **

It opens splendidly with a heist carried out without dialogue but to a jaunty Gerald Fried score making me almost wish Roger Corman's "Machine Gun Kelly" were a silent film. It isn't, of course, but this Z-Movie, made in eight days, is a lot of fun. It's not a biopic of the title character; he's real enough but everyone else is basically an invention 'for dramatic purposes' and it has a lot of the punchy quality of the old Warner Brothers' gangster movies.

Charles Bronson is excellent as Kelly and Susan Cabot is suitably hard-boiled as his moll while the supporting cast includes the always watchable Connie Gilchrist and Morey Amsterdam, he of 'Dick Van Dyke Show' fame. No-one would ever conclude from this that Corman was a great director but give this to me anyday over certain European art movies that pass for masterpieces in some quarters.