Jackie Gleason
Izzy Einstein
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Izzy and Moe is a 1985 American made-for-television comedy - crime film starring Jackie Gleason and Art Carney. It is a fictional account of two actual Prohibition -era policemen, Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, and their adventures in tracking down illegal bars and gangsters.
- Comedy Crime
Izzy & Moe: Directed by Jackie Cooper. With Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Cynthia Harris, Zohra Lampert. The adventures of two retired vaudeville performers, who become two of the best prohibition Agents in the 1920s.
- (267)
- Comedy, Crime
- Jackie Cooper
- 1985-09-23
Isidor "Izzy" Einstein (1880–1938) and Moe W. Smith (1887–1960) were United States federal police officers, agents of the U.S. Prohibition Unit, who achieved the most arrests and convictions during the first years of the alcohol prohibition era (1920–1925).
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Meet Izzy and Moe, the Prohibition era’s canniest crimebusters.
Isadore Einstein, known as “Izzy” to his friends, was no one’s idea of a G-man. Short, fat with numerous chins and thinning hair, he was so rotund that the great crime writer, Herbert Asbury, described his belly as moving “majestically ahead like the breast of an overfed pouter pigeon.” With his thick round spectacles perched on his nose, Izzy had all the looks of your below-average Joe. But it was precisely this unprepossessing appearance that would make him, and his similarly schlubby friend, Moe Smith, the greatest federal agents of their age.
That age was Prohibition. It’s a period that nearly 100 years on still seems like a fantastical blip in America’s history. From 1919 to 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution declared it illegal to produce, transport or sell alcohol, the result of years of lobbying by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. It had been thought the decree would instill a more peaceable character in the nation. However, those 14 years saw the United States at its loudest, most violent and perversely, most entertaining. It was Prohibition that made the era roar.
The Prohibition Agents Who Became Masters of Disguise
When Prohibition went into effect in January 1919, Izzy Einstein lived on New York’s Lower East Side, struggling to keep his wife and four sons fed on a postal clerk’s salary. Reading in the newspaper that the newly created Prohibition Unit was looking for agents, he went down to the local bureau and applied. As Izzy recounted in his wisecracking memoir, Prohibition Agent No. 1, the bureau chief looked him up and down and told him he “wasn’t the type.”
But Izzy was not easily dissuaded. He argued that looking like an everyman was exactly what was needed in this dry new world. Moreover, although he had no gumshoe experience, Izzy insisted he understood people. He had been a salesman and could mix with people and gain their confidence. The bureau chief bought the argument and Izzy was given a badge and thrust out onto the mean streets of New York to sop up the booze that poured through the city’s speakeasies.
Using evidence from excavations, scientific studies, historical document and computer graphics, the team pieces together clues as to what Al Capone's 1920's Chicago looked like.
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In November 1925 the pair were among 35 Prohibition agents fired by the new Prohibition administrator because they “did not measure up to the standards of efficiency.” Such a claim was clearly bogus. In five years Izzy and Moe arrested some 4,932 sellers of alcohol, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all Prohibition arrests in New York City. Even Eliot Ness fighting Al Capone’s mob in Chicago couldn’t match Izzy and Moe’s success rate.
The “masterminds of federal rum-ferrets” were forced into another career: selling life insurance. Fortunately, they were good at that too. Indeed Izzy liked to boast that many of his policies were sold to the very bootleggers he had arrested just a few years before.
Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith were two of the most successful federal agents during Prohibition. They used their wits, disguises and humor to infiltrate and bust illegal bars in New York and beyond.
- 1 min
Izzy & Moe - Full Movie. The adventures of two retired vaudeville performers who become the best prohibition agents of the 1920s. With Jackie Gleason and Art Carney. ...more.
- 92 min
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Izzy & Moe streaming: where to watch online? Currently you are able to watch "Izzy & Moe" streaming on The Roku Channel, Tubi TV, Freevee for free with ads.
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Two ex-vaudeville masters of disguise (Jackie Gleason, Art Carney) work as Prohibition agents in Roaring '20s New York.
- Comedy, Drama
