"Machine Gun Kelly is a tight, tough gangster movie starring a very young Charles Bronson. It's also a treasure trove of Corman themes and concerns. It's highly unusual for a gangster film to revolve around the protagonist's obsessive fear of death, but here it's virtually the entire subtext of the picture; this theme crops up frequently in Corman films. With recurring scenes like the one when Kelly's automobile passes a funeral parlor and he sees a coffin being brought out, Machine Gun Kelly is almost a horror picture. Bronson is excellent, and Morey Amsterdam turns in a surprisingly good performance. This is a perfect example of how Corman could turn a conventional film into a personal work.

"Machine Gun Kelly also has the distinction of being shot in Superama - an imaginary film process. At the time, there were a number of wide-screen processes going around; Corman's films were shot in conventional square ratios (and black and white to boot), so he hit on the notion of Superama, a process that, supposedly, could not be seen on TV. Of course it was nothing - just a standard movie shot with coke bottle lenses. Superama was later supplanted by VistaScope, another imaginary process, and finally by WideVision VistaScope, when the films were in any kind of CinemaScope."