The roaring twenties

The Roaring Twenties (original title: The Roaring Twenties) is a 1939 American film directed by Raoul Walsh and written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen, based on the short story The World Moves On by columnist Mark Hellinger. It stars James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart and Gladys George.

The film is considered a classic of the gangster genre and is considered a homage to the gangster cinema of the early 1930s.

The Roaring Twenties was a candidate for inclusion on AFI's 10 Top 10 list in the "Gangster Movies" category.

Plot

The film chronicles the rise and fall of gangster Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney), a bootlegging bootleg bootleg bootlegger in the Prohibition era. It takes place in a very broad period of time, between the end of the First World War (1918) and the Wall Street Crash (1929), and the subsequent presidential election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1932). To cover this time span, the director often resorts to summarizing through skilful montage effects, sometimes using archival material recorded at the time. This fact, together with the use of newspaper headlines and the voice-over that comments on the story and explains the fundamental milestones in the history of prohibition, gives the film a tone close to that of the documentary. The film openly criticizes Prohibition and its undoubted effect on the increase in crime, as well as the prevailing police corruption (a police officer enters a clandestine bar in the face of general indifference and limits himself to reproaching a customer for you have left the vehicle improperly parked).

The central character has ambiguous ethics, swinging between the extremes of honesty, personified by his former comrade in the trenches Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Linn), and the utter lack of scruples of George Gally (Humphrey Bogart), another fellow weapons. After having fought in World War I, he finds himself without a job and without resources when he returns home; accidentally he meets Panama Smith (Gladys George), who opens the doors of the world of smuggling. Despite being a teetotaler (a fact whose humor is highlighted in the film), his ascent in the world of bootlegging adulterated liquor is dizzying. The first announcements of his downfall come when the woman he loves, Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane), an innocent suburban girl whom Bartlett showers with gifts and sponsors in her singing career, turns him down to marry lawyer Lloyd Hart. thus revealing how the gangster's life is incompatible with marital happiness. George Gally betrays Bartlett, and after the Stock Market crack, he ends up taking over the organization and leaving the protagonist in misery; Bartlett, however, finally manages to redeem himself by killing George and several of his men to protect the happiness of Lloyd Hart and Jean Sherman, for which - an essential ending in any gangster film of the time - he is shot dead and expires in the middle. from the street, in the arms of Panama Smith. The final sentence of the film, pronounced by the character of Panama, "He used to be a big shot" ('he used to be a big shot'), accentuates the moral character of the film.

Awards and nominations

National Board of Review