The Roaring Twenties (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Hal B. Wallis; directed by Raoul Walsh; screenplay by Jerry Wald, Richard Macauley, and Robert Rossen, from a story by Mark Hellinger; cinematography by Ernie Haller; edited by Jack Killifer; art direction by Max Parker; starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Gladys George, Jeffrey Lynn, Frank McHugh, and Paul Kelly. 4K UHD + Blu-ray or DVD, B&W, 106 min., 1939. A Criterion Collection release.

What qualities are needed to make a decade roar? It’s a hard question, but the twentieth century’s notoriously Roaring Twenties had enough of them to justify its famous moniker. The victory of the Allies in World War I, the end of the global flu pandemic, a growing economy, and technical advances in everything from mass media to household appliances generated a sense of energy and optimism that rapidly percolated throughout American society. Cultural developments were also speedy and sweeping, with the spunky flapper and the sort-of-liberated New Woman dancing to the upbeat rhythms of the Jazz Age, as F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the period. On the downside, all this agreeable roaring had less agreeable accompaniments. Race, class, and gender inequality burdened millions of people, nativism soared, and Prohibition did its best to squelch a widely shared pleasure, turning ordinary citizens into clandestine lawbreakers and creating a profitable playing ground for organized criminals and small-time hoodlums.

This was an epoch made for the big screen, and Raoul Walsh’s propulsive mobster film The Roaring Twenties, released in 1939, reprises many of its highs and lows in rapid-fire montage sequences that give a quasi-documentary feel to parts of the picture, which also barrels through a wide array of other genres, serving up melodrama, music, comedy, gangland intrigue, romantic rivalry, and even a bit of wartime combat. Some of its traits are traceable to the advent of the priggish Production Code, which encouraged post-1934 filmmakers to set troublesome subjects—violent crime, licentious behavior, and the like—in the past rather than the present. The craziness of antisocial characters was also mitigated, with the pre-Code harshness of James Cagney in William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), Edward G. Robinson in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931), and Paul Muni in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932) giving way to the more nuanced personalities of Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in The Roaring Twenties, as critic Gary Giddins observes in an engaging video interview for The Criterion Collection’s new edition.

Not that the Cagney and Bogart characters, Eddie Bartlett and George Hally, are a couple of nice guys whose criminal activities aren’t really so bad. For a while, that’s almost true for Eddie, who stumbles into the world of booze and bootlegging almost by accident. But the same doesn’t go for George, who starts out mean and gets meaner as the tale unfolds. Their respective natures are sketched out in the opening scenes, when they and a third man, law-school graduate Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn), meet in a World War I foxhole under fierce bombardment. Lloyd admits to feeling scared, and empathetic Eddie sympathizes with his fear. But heartless George expresses contempt, and soon afterward he underscores his nastiness by shooting a very young German soldier just moments before word of the Armistice arrives; then he sneers that the fifteen-year-old will never get to be sixteen and boasts that he’ll bring his beloved rifle home when he’s discharged. The film thus presents three figures with contrasting moral signatures: George is a callous sociopath; Lloyd is an educated idealist; and Eddie is somewhere between, fundamentally decent but susceptible to opportunism and temptation. Giddins aptly describes Eddie as a victim of his tumultuous era, of his immediate circumstances, and of emotions he doesn’t fully understand; George, on the other hand, is downright satanic. 

True to movie convention, the lives of the men remain connected after the war. Finding that he can’t get work in his old mechanic job, Eddie picks up a few dollars by delivering a package that happens to contain booze, gets busted by the cops, and impulsively decides to join a brassy new friend, Panama Smith (Gladys George), in the illicit liquor business. “I’ve got a bathtub, too!” he realizes with joy. George eventually gets involved as well, and again shows his deep-down cruelty when he runs into his former army sergeant while robbing a liquor warehouse and ruthlessly guns him down. (Some visuals in this scene have an abstract look that Fritz Lang could have applauded.) Still an amiable straight arrow, Lloyd performs legal services for the operation until George’s malevolence becomes too much for him, whereupon he exits from the group, earning George’s extremely dangerous animosity. By this time Eddie has gotten a major crush on aspiring nightclub chanteuse Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane), who likes him a lot but prefers Lloyd as her true love. In ways, The Roaring Twenties anticipates William Wyler’s great classic The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), although Walsh’s picture is shorter, scruffier, and geared to the working-class ethos espoused by Warner Bros. in those years. Affectionately recapping a long list of trusty genre tropes, it amounts to a “living museum” of the gangster-film tradition that had arisen and prospered earlier in the Thirties, as journalist Mark Asch observes in a lively Criterion leaflet essay.

The original story for The Roaring Twenties came from Mark Hellinger, the widely syndicated New York journalist recently hired as a Warner Bros. writer and producer. Although three writers are credited for the screenplay and several others also labored on it, the results hang together well, and some of the dialogue is crisp and smart, as when Eddie reveals both his business aptitude and his nefarious streak by explaining why he rejected a new gang member because the applicant had never been jailed; he’s not prejudiced against honest citizens, he tells Lloyd, but “in this booze business you can’t hire any geraniums. A couple of years in stir seems to ripen them for the job,” an observation about the dark consequences of incarceration that remains all too relevant today. Walsh also welcomed a good deal of last-minute invention and improvisation by the cast, as film historian Lincoln Hurst discusses in the Criterion audio commentary. Faced with a pair of unfriendly mechanics standing between Eddie and his old job, for instance, Cagney had the bright idea of decking the two of them with one well-aimed punch, a Three Stooges maneuver that Cagney brings off with a canny blend of pugnacity and humor. Some of the banter between Eddie and his buddy Danny (Frank McHugh), who teams with him in a legitimate taxicab venture, is also improvised, benefitting from the close personal friendship of the actors. Walsh started his career as an actor and never lost his openness to creative contributions from the cast.

Gadgetry was another of Walsh’s enthusiasms, as Hurst notes, and he had special affection for newfangled sound equipment, which explains why Eddie and George get timely information about the fatal warehouse robbery, a turning point in the narrative, via Jean’s nifty crystal radio set. And the director loved music, which plays a big part in the picture, especially vintage tunes that enhance its nostalgia angle—the oft-heard “My Melancholy Baby,” published in 1912, was a golden oldie by 1939—and heighten the atmosphere of the film’s numerous saloons and nightclubs, where items like “Ain’t We Got Fun?” and “It Had to Be You” fit right in. Lane did her own vocalizing, capitalizing on her pre-Hollywood experience as a big-band singer with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians.

Singing and dancing give way when the picture reaches its somber final scenes [Spoiler Alert], the most striking in the film. George dwells in the wealth and comfort his conscience-free viciousness has brought, but Eddie loses everything in the 1929 stock market crash, becoming a dirty, raggedy shadow of his former self. He’s still a halfway decent person, though, and when it looks like George is about to take murderous vengeance on Lloyd, he makes a desperate effort to intervene, telling his former partner that the Twenties now have a different kind of roar. “There’s a new kind of setup you don’t understand,” he says with the precisely clipped diction always associated with Cagney’s legendary voice. “Guys don’t go tearing things apart like we used to. People try to build things up. That’s what Lloyd’s trying to do. In this new setup, well, you and me don’t belong, that’s all.” To which George replies in a laconic Bogart drawl, “Maybe you don’t. I do all right, any time, any place.” A fight ensues, and shortly thereafter the badly wounded Eddie staggers down a sidewalk and expires on the snow-covered steps of a nearby church. Panama rushes up to him and cradles him in a Pietà pose, and when a police officer asks who he is, she sums him up in a handful of words: “He used to be a big shot.” It’s a terrific finale, and Walsh adds a nice film-historical footnote in a 1973 television excerpt on the Criterion disc, saying that a mass-audience picture would surely fail if you killed a Clark Gable, a Gary Cooper, or a Gregory Peck, but you could knock off a Cagney or a Bogart and still have a hit. The Roaring Twenties proves the point.

Cagney and Bogart had appeared together in two previous films, Michael Curtiz’s crooks-and-kids opus Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and Lloyd Bacon’s spirited western The Oklahoma Kid (1939). Both were on upward Hollywood trajectories, and in addition to rounding off the Thirties gangster cycle, The Roaring Twenties prepared the ground for new stages in their careers. Tired of Warner Bros. and his own tough-guy image, Cagney decided to take firmer control over his projects (he set up Cagney Productions in 1942) and temporarily swore off gangster movies, abstaining from the genre until Walsh’s explosive White Heat in 1949, arguably the best film either the star or the director ever made. Standing a bit lower on the ladder, Bogart did a déclassé turn in Vincent Sherman’s The Return of Doctor X (1939) before receiving third billing in The Roaring Twenties and playing second fiddle to George Raft in Walsh’s 1940 trucker drama They Drive by Night. But he toplined Walsh’s High Sierra in 1941, became a genuine leading man in John Huston’s 1941 proto-noir The Maltese Falcon, and never looked back for years to come. Bogart and Cagney are two of the “city boys” discussed in the seminal 1994 book of that title by film scholar Robert Sklar, who writes that despite Walsh’s reputation as an action-picture specialist, his work in The Roaring Twenties drew “previously untapped resources of subtlety and energy” from Bogart and helped Cagney create “a subdued [and] gentle” portrayal of a shifty, sometimes homicidal character whose modulated brio matches the mercurial ambience of his surroundings. “Within the activity of Walsh’s frame,” Asch similarly observes, “quicksilver Cagney embodies the busyness of the city itself.” He does indeed.

At the beginning of The Roaring Twenties, a text by Hellinger speculates that the story could hold useful lessons if “another period similar to the one depicted in this photoplay” ever comes along. You can’t take that too literally, since we’re in another Twenties now, and its dangers are more sinister and far-reaching than mere moonshine and tommy guns. But civilization survived the first Roaring Twenties, so ours may not prove fatal. And while classic movies don’t provide instruction manuals, they can move and entertain us as we slouch toward whatever awaits us as this difficult decade proceeds.—David Sterritt

David Sterritt is a Cineaste Contributing Writer and author of fifteen books on film.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 3