Review: The Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties revels in a relativism that keeps its momentum fresh and elusive.

The Roarding Twenties
Photo: Warner Bros.

An epochal rise-and-fall epic of the gangster cycle, Raoul Walsh’s skittering, impetuous The Roaring Twenties hits the ground running but a couple lengths further back on the track than one would expect. It bookends the glorious ascent of James Cagney’s bootlegger with a cold reception for soldiers returning from overseas following World War I on one side and the 1929 stock market crash on the other.

The plot, based on Mark Hellinger’s short story “The World Moves On,” defies genre conventions right out of the gate, beginning not with Cagney’s spry neophyte chump Eddie Bartlett traipsing his way into, say, the stage door of a hotbox revue but with him stumbling his way into a blown-out crater in Europe during the war. The role of Bartlett, a principled soldier who blossoms into a hoodlum with a conscience, found Cagney at a peculiar point in his career as a uniquely physical being, long past the point where his characters’ violent tempers could be written off as shows of arrested adolescence. Here, vulnerability seems well entrenched in the deep gashes that bisect his jaw. And the film’s lengthy prologue sets the stage for a micro-epic that explores the imperative of the gangster ethic from every moral angle.

When Bartlett stumbles downward (with only the faintest shading of metaphor) into the foxhole at the beginning of the film, he collapses onto George Hally (Humphrey Bogart, before his miscreant meatiness was forever tenderized down at Rick’s Café) and Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn). Very quickly, the two are established as extreme ends on the naughty-nice continuum, respectively, which is all more or less according to the Walsh action film blueprint. The filmmaker may glamorize his thugs, but they’re rarely glorified without compunction.

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Manny Farber wrote in an article extolling the work of Walsh that the director “goes to sleep when he handles Decency, the wooden lawyer who works for the DA’s office.” The DA, Bartlett’s lawyer and former foxhole companion Hart, does walk a samey tightrope between corruption and godliness that feels “second verse, same as the first.” (Cagney’s two love interests follow similar patterns, only Gladys George’s blowsy performance as Panama Smith clearly reveals Walsh’s sympathy for the spice of “naughty” girls.) But Farber’s convincingly weak stomach for The Roaring Twenties’s lilies of virtue can’t quite digest that most of the film’s wonky charm comes courtesy of George’s schizoid impulses, never quite settling into which moral imperatives to hold onto and which to disregard. It’s a paradox that finds its best example when Eddie the rising ganglord is approached by three previously jailed men looking for “work,” and only accepts the two that fess up to their guilt, dismissing the one who maintains that he was framed.

Ernest Haller’s camerawork is almost an extension of Cagney’s swift gait. Both seem to be landing each step on the front side of their feet, and the effect is that the camera is anticipating the catharsis between nitroglycerine crime partners Bartlett and Hally to tip the scales of moral alignment back to zero. In the same way, Walsh’s punchy interludes, in which a radio announcer and cross-fading montages four images deep detail the sociological background of the era (approximating the zingers between page turns in a pulp novel), almost seem to ludicrously trivialize the same economic plight that was played for sympathy in the opening credits scroll: “The characters are composites of people I knew, and the situations are those that actually occurred.” Climaxing with a tableau that’s as iconic as it is melodramatic, The Roaring Twenties revels in a relativism that keeps its momentum fresh and elusive.

Score: 
 Cast: James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Gladys George, Jeffrey Lynn, Frank McHugh, Paul Kelly, Elisabeth Risdon, Edward Keane  Director: Raoul Walsh  Screenwriter: Jerry Wald, Richard Macauley, Robert Rossen  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 106 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1939  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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