After watching the Al Pacino one, you will probably be very surprised at the original. It says a lot about the time it was made and how people were feeling. It is clear that it was a bunch of non-Italians pushing their view of what it meant to be Italian (in the 1930s)...

ALSO, if you are interested in more gangster/mobster/seedy crime type movies, I can definitely give you some ideas. I wrote a whole paper on old gangster movies while at Clark