Watched: 05/09/2025
Format: Criterion Disc
Viewing: First-ish?
Director: Raoul Walsh
Fun (likely apocryphal) fact: This movie from 1939 is thought to be what coined the phrase "the roaring twenties" to refer to the 1920's. Contemporarily, thanks to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the 1920's were referred to as The Jazz Age and, by others as The Plastic Age. (There's a Clara Bow film of the same name I've never tracked down.)
Also - This doesn't happen very often, but I am unsure if I've seen this movie before.
It sure seems like I would have seen it. It's entirely up my alley. And when Cagney introduced Gladys George's character by name, Panama Smith, I had my first moment of pause, thinking "wait... have I seen this?". Because George sure looked familiar and then the name is kind of unforgettable. Panama Smith. (It's also insane this was not Eve Arden when this role feels like it should be Eve Arden).
What I suspect is that I saw it on TV while doing other things, and wasn't really watching - and maybe way back when we lived in Phoenix 20 years ago, or... I just caught part of it on TCM at some point and promised myself I'd get back to it.
And get back to it I finally did, forcing myself into a corner by watching it on Criterion 4K, which I picked up during the 1/2 off sale.
The Roaring Twenties (1939) is a classic of the gangster genre and part of how WB's gangster pictures got a serious looking at - because while the movie is not relentlessly violent, when bullets start flying, it's a pretty rough flick for the first 50 years of film. It's also a true epic, maybe paving the way for the notion gangster films become epics in order to tell stories about the dark mirror version of the American dream.
The movie opens on a crawl written by journalist-turned-producer Mark Hellinger, who once had a column in papers that got 18 million readers assuring us that this is based on real people and events, which... I'm a bit skeptical, but I also like Fargo. What unspools is a story with some curious poetry to it, capturing something honest about America, even as it clearly has its studio-enforced tragic ending for our crooks.
The crooks, by the way, are played by James Cagney in his final gangster role for a decade - he'd go back to musicals - and Bogart, when Bogie was regularly cast as the heel, two years before Maltese Falcon would turn him into a leading man and three before Casablanca would solidify his place in cinema history.
The film starts, after the crawl with Hellinger's note, with a "wow, we're in the shit now" bit of newsreel anticipating WWII, but rolls it back to the trenches of WWI, with our three leads meeting each other in a rathole (as Bogie calls a foxhole) introducing us to three of the main characters in Cagney, Bogart and Jeffrey Lynn as Lloyd, the college-boy lawyer. They all get notes from girls back home, and Cagney thinks he's got a beauty on the line, but when he returns home, finds out she's still in high school.
Returning from the war, jobs are not waiting for soldiers as was promised, and things are bleak. Meanwhile, Prohibition is about to become a reality. Cagney is driving a cab when he's asked to deliver a package he's unaware is booze and winds up getting pinched for violating the Volstead Act, delivering a bottle to Panama Smith (Gladys George).
From here it's the story of the rise and fall of Cagney's character, and the shifting sands of racketeering, an honest accounting of what a terrible idea Prohibition was, and the ill side-effects* - like enabling massive criminal enterprise to provide a good, while also making sure no one is monitoring the quality of that good.
Cagney stumbles across his girl (Priscilla Lane) who is now an adult and a girl-next-door beauty. But she's drawn to Lloyd, Cagney's lawyer.
The movie lays down the template for what we'll see for decades, and that is not a complaint. It's well done - Raoul Walsh is no hack - and it manages to tell a decade-long story with a lot of story arcs and still feel tight. Because 1929 and 1939 are not so far apart, I had to check myself to remember this movie was a period piece when it came out, and a reflection on what occurred in recent history. Sort of like our movies about the drug trade through Latin America now. The photography is great, and scanned and cleaned up for 4K, it's really gorgeous.
A lot of money was clearly behind the film, with elaborate set pieces and sets, dancing choruses, music, and large action sequences that feel like they predict some of what's to come even in movies like The Godfather.
There's an interesting bit to the movie that I want to see if it gets mentioned in the disc commentary, but there's some classism baked into the film that is just below the surface and embodied in Priscilla Lane's character and her choice of romantic partners - that Cagney is never the right fit for her because he's not Joe College and is from the wrong side of the river. It doesn't matter what he does to offer her opportunities - she knows she's singing in Speakeasies, and isn't an angel - her desire for Better Homes and Gardens-style legitimacy is reason enough for her to seek a different guy who grew up in that environment. Meanwhile, poor Panama has to sit and watch Cagney chase her around, when clearly Panama is the cooler choice.
Anyway - great film. Not super shocked at that as it's still something people are watching 85 years later.
*much of what could be applied to prohibition of some drugs in the US
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