The Roaring Twenties (1939)

User Rating:

7.8/10   

Director:

Raoul Walsh

Writers:

Jerry Wald (screenplay) &
Richard Macaulay (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

23 October 1939 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Thriller

Tagline:

The land of the free gone wild! The heyday of the hotcha! The shock-crammed days G-men took ten whole years to lick!

Plot:

After the WWI Armistice Lloyd Hart goes back to practice law, former saloon keeper George Hally turns to bootlegging...

Plot Keywords:

Prohibition | Lawyer | 1920s | WWI | Murder

Cast

James Cagney	...	Eddie Bartlett
Priscilla Lane	...	Jean Sherman
Humphrey Bogart	...	George Hally
Gladys George	...	Panama Smith
Jeffrey Lynn	...	Lloyd Hart
Frank McHugh	...	Danny Green
Paul Kelly	...	Nick Brown
Elisabeth Risdon	...	Mrs. Sherman (as Elizabeth Risdon)
Edward Keane	...	Henderson (as Ed Keane)
Joe Sawyer	...	The Sergeant
Joseph Crehan	...	Michaels
George Meeker	...	Masters
John Hamilton	...	Judge
Robert Elliott	...	First Detective
Eddy Chandler	...	Second Detective (as Eddie Chandler)

Also Known As:

The World Moves On (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

104 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Australia:PG (TV rating) | Canada:PG (video rating) | Norway:16 | Sweden:15 | USA:Approved (PCA #5576) | Australia:G

Filming Locations:

Warner Brothers Burbank Studios - 4000 Warner Boulevard, Burbank, California, USA

Company:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Trivia:

Unlike the movie's Eddie Bartlett, Larry Fay died on New Year's Day of 1932. Dwindling finances had forced him to cut costs at his New York nightclub, the El Fay; after telling the doorman at the club that his pay was going to be reduced, the doorman pulled a revolver and shot Fay four times. Fay collapsed backward onto a sofa and died.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: When the gangsters hurl bombs at a storefront from the car, watch the prop explosives bounce off the building and roll into the street before the blast.

Quotes:

Narrator: 1929. As the dizzy decade nears its end, the country is stock market crazy. The great and the humble...the rich man and the working man...the housewife and the shop girl. All take their daily flyer in the market, and no one seems to lose. Then like a bombshell comes that never-to-be-forgotten Black Tuesday...

Movie Connections:

Featured in The Long Shadow of Dirty Harry (2008) (V)

Soundtrack:

Swanee

Vintage Warner Brothers of the thirties

Not as well remembered as "Little Caesar" or "Public Enemy," "The Roaring Twenties" is the culmination of a decade's worth of Warner Brothers gangster films. It was also James Cagney's last tough guy role at the studio for almost a decade.

Cagney is criticized by some in this one for not packing the cinematic punch he did in "Public Enemy" or "White Heat." But this film was the brain child of former Broadway columnist Mark Hellinger and was written as almost an ode to the Damon Runion-like characters Hellinger knew when he prowled the great white way during the 20s. Hellinger was a regular at the famous El Fey club and friend of Texas Guinan, the wild saloon hostess who personified the twenties. Cagney's good/bad guy character, Eddie Bartlett, was in fact based on Larry Fay, the cab driver turned bootlegger who opened the El Fey and hired Guinan as his hostess. Fay is also believed to have been one of the inspirations for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." Bartlett is meant to symbolize,not a psychotic criminal, but more the social confusion that resultedfrom the passage of a highly unpopular law meant to regulate character,which wound up having the absolute opposite effect, spawning an era of lawlessness.

Although Cagney dominates every scene he is in, the more ominous gangster in the film is played by Humphrey Bogart in one of his best performances prior to assuming character roles in the late 40s. His trigger happy hood was probably fashioned after Owen "Ownie the Killer" Madden, the bootlegger who bought into Harlem's Cotton Club and formed a loose alliance with Fay.

Strong supporting work comes from Gladys George, who plays Panama Smith, the Texas Guinan character.

This picture is slick, well produced, uniformly well acted under the direction of action specialist Raoul Walsh and features some great Cagney stick. When he exploded on screen, there was no one like him.