The Roaring Twenties
Die Wilden Zwanziger

USA 1939
produced by
Hal B. Wallis (executive) for Warner Brothers
directed by Raoul Walsh
starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Gladys George, Jeffrey Lynn, Frank McHugh, Paul Kelly, Elisabeth Risdon, Edward Keane, Joe Sawyer, Joseph Crehan, George Meeker, John Hamilton, Robert Elliott, Eddy Chandler, Abner Biberman, Vera Lewis, John Deering, Murry Alper, Raymond Bailey, Wade Boteler, Al Bridge, Clay Clement, Alan Davis, Bert Hanlon, Lew Harvey, Oscar 'Dutch' Hendrian, Al Herman, Herbert Heywood, Al Hill, Stuart Holmes, George Humbert, Don Thaddeus Kerr, Reid Kilpatrick, Arthur Loft, Charles Marsh, Wendell Niles, Jack Norton, Lee Phelps, Paul Phillips, Jack Richardson, John Ridgely, Cyril Ring, Hector Sarno, Cliff Saum, Elliott Sullivan, Billy Wayne, Ben Welden, Dick Wessel, Frank Wilcox
screenplay by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, Robert Rossen, based on the story The World Moves on by Mark Hellinger, music by Ray Heindorf, Heinz Roemheld, special effects by Edwin P.DuPar, Byron Haskin

review by
Mike Haberfelner

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Returning home from World War I, Eddie (James Cagney) finds out that jobs are short in supply, so eventually he becomes a cabby, sharing a car with his best buddy Danny (Frank McHugh) ... and Eddie is blue-eyed enough to let himself be used as an alcohol delivery boy without his knowledge in the times of Prohibition - which promptly lands him in jail, but Panama (Gladys George), the nightclub owner whom he was supposed to deliver the booze to, has pity on him and pays his fine ... and suddenly sees an opportunity knocking, and in no time, he has set up a bootlegging business with a fleet of cabs as front - and before long, he's really rolling in the dough. And Eddie finds a girl to love, too, in singer Jean (Priscilla Lane), ad he uses his influence to let her sing in Panama's nightclub ... but Jean doesn't love him, she's just tremendously grateful while somewhat alienated by his high-rolling lifestyle. Instead she falls in love with Eddie's honest, upright attorney Lloyd (Jffrey Lann).

Eventually, Eddie wants to muscle in on gangster Nick Brown's (Paul Kelly) territory, in which he succeeds thanks to Brown's turncoat right hand man George (Humphrey Bogart), an old warbuddy of his - but this all leads to a gangwar, in which Danny is killed, George turns against Eddie, and Brown is shot in a big shootout ... and both Lloyd and Jean leave his side to start a new, honest life with each other.

In 1929, Eddie loses everything in the crashof the stock exchange, and he has to sell his whole fleet of cabs (and essentially his business) to George of all people. And Eddie is hit with yet another blow when the prohibition is lifted, and his business (or what's left of it) quickly dries up in the process. Out of cynism however, George, who has fallen on his feet again, has left Eddie one cab, and now Eddie makes what little money he can as a cabbie - and when he meets Jean again (as one of his customers) it almost breaks his heart to see her doing well with Lloyd and their kid in a house in suburbia.

Then though George decides he has to get Lloyd killed because he knows to much about George's shady organisation, and in her desperation, Jean turns to Eddie to persuade him to talk George out of it - but this tak ends in a shootout in which George is killed and Eddie is allowed to die a hero's death on the steps of a cathedral.

The Roaring Twenties is certainly not the best gangster film ever, nor is it Raoul Walsh's best film - but that said, it's still pretty good entertainment, a light-footed approach to the epic story of the rise and fall of a gangster in stylish sets with Cagney and Bogart on top of their game, carried by a fast paced and elegant directorial effort, in the context of which not even the cheesy final scene seems too out of place.

Recommended.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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