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.
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.
Image/Sound
If it weren’t for the fact that they’re releasing weird and risky crap no other studio would touch (like F for Fake and Tout va bien), the transfers on some of Warner’s most recent crown jewel projects would have me asking “Criterion who?” Right from the bejeweled opening credits, The Roaring Twenties looks positively ridiculous. Jet blacks, quicksilver grays, a total monochromatic symphony in crisp focus with no discernible edge enhancement. Aside from the occasional (and completely understandable) print imperfections, this is a flawless transfer. Same old story with regard to the old mono audio track, which is clear if tinny, as well as a little low in volume. Still, the gunshots ring out with surprising force.
Extras
Along with other titles in the new box set of WB gangster movies, The Roaring Twenties is accompanied with a simulated “Warner Night at the Movies” program, which features a trailer for Each Dawn I Die, a brief newsreel, a cartoon by Tex Avery (Thugs with Dirty Mugs, which doesn’t quite look as vivid and restored as the collected shorts on WB’s Golden Collection DVD sets), an awkwardly pace-devoid comedy short about a club for the prototypal angry white males with raging senses of entitlement, and, on the flip side, an unbelievably campy musical short called All Girl Revue, in which women are “allowed” to run the city for a day, and conduct their entire working day’s business through song and dance. Asks “mayor” June Allyson: “We’ve got to make this city pretty. Tell me what can you suggest?” Answer her secretaries the Harrison Sisters: “I suggest that we wear curls in our hair. That should make the finest fare.” All together: “Let’s make a note of that.” The standard commentary track and featurette can’t help but seem pedestrian in comparison, though Dr. Lincoln Hurst does reveal that Priscilla Lane used to swear up a blue storm on the set. What a catty bitch.
Overall
Raoul Walsh’s fast-paced film makes its own case. I’m more worried about the Harrison Sisters’s suggestion that “you can make each street nice and neat by hanging a drape on each garbage can” and to “clean up the slums, put high hats on all the bums.”
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