The Roaring Twenties (1939)

The Roaring Twenties (1939) is a returning veteran social epic gangster and prohibition rise and fall of a criminal kingpin armed robbery and classic thirties gangster bootlegging story of spaghetti with extra cheese directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, and Gladys George, telling a tale spanning the period from 1919 to 1933, was written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen and which in its noiro-historical cinematic presentation style of the pre-war era and follows three men and their experiences during major events in the 1920s, such as Prohibition era violence and the 1929 stock market crash, based on "The World Moves On", a short story by Mark Hellinger, a columnist who had been hired by Jack L. Warner to write screenplays and one of many key general film noir superheroes, and was the third and last film that Cagney and Bogart made together, the other two being as you well ken you ken, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and the famous horse opera, The Oklahoma Kid (1939).

Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939) is not merely another gangster picture dragged from the Warner Bros. assembly line. It is a ferocious historical tragedy, a cinematic indictment of American ingratitude, and one of the most commanding examinations of criminal capitalism produced during the classical Hollywood period.

The film follows Eddie Bartlett, played with astonishing emotional force by James Cagney, from the trenches of the First World War to the filthy commercial opportunism of Prohibition-era New York. Anyone who dismisses the picture as a routine chronicle of bootlegging has failed to understand its brutal intellectual architecture, because the film is fundamentally concerned with how a nation manufactures its criminals and then pretends to be morally offended by their existence.

Eddie first encounters George Hally and Lloyd Hart while the three men shelter in a shell hole during the final hours of the war. This opening is not decorative exposition but a viciously efficient social diagram, placing three distinct moral temperaments inside the same historical catastrophe before releasing them into an America that has neither gratitude nor practical use for returning soldiers.

Lloyd responds to civilian life by pursuing the law, clinging to institutional respectability as though legality and morality were naturally identical. George, played by Humphrey Bogart with a reptilian absence of conscience, embraces violence without apology, while Eddie occupies the tragic middle ground between decency and corruption.

The film’s historical vision is merciless. America asks men to endure industrialised slaughter in Europe, welcomes them home with sentimental rhetoric, and then abandons them to unemployment, poverty, and social irrelevance once their military usefulness has expired.

Eddie discovers that his former position at a garage has been given to another man and that patriotic service has no monetary value in the civilian marketplace. His humiliation is not an individual misfortune but a structural betrayal, and the film has the courage to present respectable society as an accomplice in the creation of the criminal economy it later condemns.

This is where Cagney’s performance becomes indispensable. His Eddie is not born monstrous, nor does he enter crime because of some melodramatic defect of character; he is energetic, loyal, intelligent, and desperate to regain the dignity that post-war America has casually stolen from him.

Cagney’s physical style communicates this desperation with extraordinary precision. He moves with the compressed force of a man permanently resisting humiliation, and even his moments of charm contain the threatening velocity of an explosion that civilisation has neither prevented nor properly understood.

After employment fails him, Eddie begins driving a taxi belonging to his loyal friend Danny Green. Through an apparently routine delivery, he is arrested for transporting illegal liquor, and this encounter with Prohibition exposes the absurdity of a law that converts popular appetite into a lucrative criminal industry.

Prohibition does not eliminate alcohol in the world of the film. It merely transfers the sale of alcohol from regulated businesses to men willing to use bribery, intimidation, and murder, and the film aggressively refuses to flatter the political stupidity responsible for this transformation.

Panama Smith, embodied by Gladys George with caustic wit and wounded tenderness, pays Eddie’s fine and helps introduce him to bootlegging. She understands the underground economy because she understands the hypocrisy of the social order above it, and her nightclub operates as both a commercial institution and a theatre in which respectable citizens purchase the pleasures they publicly denounce.

Eddie’s rise begins through the manipulation of his taxi business, which becomes an efficient distribution network for illegal liquor. The same ingenuity that might have made him a celebrated entrepreneur in another context now makes him a criminal, demonstrating that the difference between legitimate capitalism and organised crime is often less moral than administrative.

As I would state without hesitation, “La société qui fabrique ses criminels n’a aucun droit de feindre l’innocence lorsqu’ils deviennent puissants.” The film’s governing argument is precisely this severe: American society creates the conditions of Eddie’s ascent and then recoils from him once his success becomes too visible to ignore.

Walsh directs this ascent with magnificent speed. The film’s raids, deliveries, betrayals, nightclub performances, and territorial conflicts move with such kinetic confidence that slower gangster pictures appear almost anaemic by comparison.

Yet the pace should not be confused with superficiality. The film compresses more than a decade of political and social transformation into a narrative that remains psychologically coherent, using montage and newsreel-style transitions to bind Eddie’s private destiny to national history.

These documentary passages are essential to the film’s intellectual authority. They insist that Eddie’s career cannot be separated from the Armistice, the Eighteenth Amendment, the expansion of organised bootlegging, the stock-market collapse of 1929, the Great Depression, and the repeal of Prohibition.

The technique produces a deliberate tension between historical record and popular melodrama. Walsh and the screenwriters transform newspaper headlines into emotional pressure, forcing public events to invade private relationships until Eddie’s romantic, financial, and moral lives become inseparable from the convulsions of the nation.

concentrated contempt.

Their confrontation is not merely a contest between two gangsters but a conflict between rival theories of criminal identity. Eddie still imagines loyalty, romance, friendship, and personal codes can survive within the rackets, whereas George understands crime as pure domination, and the film brutally confirms that Eddie’s sentimental compromises cannot protect him from George’s ruthlessness.

Jean Sherman, played by Priscilla Lane, initially enters Eddie’s imagination through wartime correspondence. When he visits her after returning home, he discovers that the woman he had romanticised is still a schoolgirl, and this revelation establishes the destructive pattern of idealisation that will govern his later devotion to her.

When Eddie meets Jean again as an adult, he uses his influence to advance her singing career. His generosity is genuine, but it is contaminated by possession, because he repeatedly assumes that loyalty, money, protection, and professional opportunity should produce romantic gratitude.

The film is nostalgic, but its nostalgia is not innocent. It remembers the Jazz Age as an era of music, movement, speakeasies, fashionable excess, and spectacular self-invention, while simultaneously exposing that glamour as a veil covering exploitation, murder, political incompetence, and economic instability.

The musical performances contribute to this double vision. Songs such as “It Had to Be You,” “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” and “My Melancholy Baby” provide seductive period texture, but they also create an atmosphere of emotional denial in which entertainment continues while human beings are ruined around it.

Jean instead falls in love with Lloyd, whose legal career and conventional morality promise stability outside the criminal world. Her rejection devastates Eddie not simply because he loses a woman, but because she represents the respectable future he has attempted to purchase through disreputable means.

The romance therefore cannot be dismissed as a sentimental interruption to the gangster plot. It is the emotional mechanism through which the film demonstrates that wealth acquired through violence cannot automatically confer legitimacy, domestic happiness, or moral rebirth.

Eddie’s love for Jean is sincere, but sincerity does not make it healthy or reciprocal. The film understands this with greater sophistication than viewers who merely pity Eddie and resent Jean, because his tragedy emerges partly from his inability to recognise that devotion does not create ownership.

Panama, by contrast, loves Eddie while clearly perceiving his weaknesses. She neither worships him as an invincible criminal nor imagines that his wealth can redeem the world, and her unsentimental loyalty becomes the film’s most persuasive expression of love.

Gladys George’s performance is formidable. Panama’s sarcasm protects a vulnerability that the film never reduces to helplessness, and she remains emotionally intelligent in a narrative populated by men who repeatedly mistake aggression for insight.

Bogart’s George Hally is Eddie’s moral opposite. Where Eddie retains loyalty, sentiment, and the capacity for sacrifice, George treats every human relationship as a temporary commercial arrangement that may be terminated through betrayal or gunfire.

Bogart does not attempt to humanise George through psychological excuses. He plays him as a concentrated instrument of appetite, a man whose experience of war has not traumatised him into violence so much as confirmed his belief that killing is an efficient method of administration.

George’s murder of his former military superior is especially revealing. The act merges personal revenge with criminal convenience, showing that he has converted the resentments of wartime hierarchy into a peacetime philosophy of extermination.

Cagney and Bogart consequently embody two different models of the gangster. Eddie is a fallen citizen whose criminality grows from social exclusion, while George is a predator who understands historical disorder as an invitation to seize power without restraint.

Their partnership is doomed because Eddie continues to believe in loyalty long after entering a business that rewards treachery. George recognises no obligation beyond his own survival, and he therefore adapts more successfully to organised crime even as he becomes morally repulsive.

Lloyd’s role is more ambiguous than the film’s simple moral contrasts initially suggest. Although he represents law and domestic respectability, he benefits professionally from Eddie’s empire before distancing himself from its violence, which means his cleanliness is not entirely free from contamination.

This ambiguity matters because the film refuses to divide its world into spotless citizens and isolated criminals. Lawyers, customers, police officers, nightclub patrons, drivers, politicians, and businessmen all participate in the economic ecosystem created by Prohibition.

The criminal underworld is not outside American society. It is American society stripped of its ceremonial language, operating through the same hunger for expansion, monopoly, profit, territorial control, and competitive destruction that respectable capitalism prefers to describe in more dignified vocabulary.

The film’s depiction of Eddie’s success is exhilarating because Walsh understands the visual seduction of power. Fleets of taxis, crowded clubs, rapid deliveries, expensive clothes, and armed subordinates transform Eddie from an unwanted veteran into a man capable of commanding rooms and reshaping the city around him.

However, the film never allows this spectacle to become a simple celebration. Every sign of expansion also contains the mechanism of eventual collapse, since Eddie’s fortune depends on a temporary law, unstable alliances, public corruption, and the continued profitability of scarcity.

His empire is therefore structurally fragile even at its height. He mistakes rapid growth for permanence, which is precisely the delusion that consumes both gangsters and respectable speculators during the decade’s feverish economic expansion.

The stock-market crash destroys the fantasy of endless ascent. Eddie’s assets lose value, his operations disintegrate, and the social world that once celebrated his money abandons him with the same efficiency that post-war America abandoned him at the beginning.

This fall is not pathetic because Eddie lacks strength. It is tragic because his strength has been invested in an economy that regards human beings as disposable once their commercial moment has passed.

The repeal of Prohibition delivers the final institutional blow. The government that created the conditions for Eddie’s fortune abruptly changes the rules, legalises the commodity on which his empire depends, and leaves him stranded among the ruins of a market that official policy first constructed and then annihilated.

Eddie’s decline consequently resembles classical tragedy, though its gods are legislators, markets, police departments, and historical fashion. He rises by mastering the demands of one era and falls because the next era no longer requires the skills that made him powerful.

As I insist elsewhere, “Eddie Bartlett n’est pas vaincu par un homme, mais par une époque qui le crée, l’exploite et l’abandonne.” This formulation captures the film’s deepest cruelty, since Eddie is repeatedly used by institutions and social forces that later condemn him for adapting too effectively to their failures.

His return to taxi driving is devastating because it recreates the position from which his ascent began. The circular structure obliterates the fantasy of progress, revealing that his wealth, violence, and reputation have not delivered him from social precarity but merely postponed his confrontation with it.

The taxi scene involving Jean is among Cagney’s most restrained achievements. Eddie recognises the domestic life he has lost, assists the woman he still loves, and confronts the humiliating fact that she now inhabits a world from which he has excluded himself.

Cagney refuses theatrical self-pity in this sequence. His pain emerges through control, silence, physical hesitation, and the exhausted courtesy of a man who finally understands that the object of his devotion has become evidence of his failure.

The film’s final movement is astonishingly severe. When George threatens Lloyd, Eddie intervenes despite having no realistic expectation of reward, proving that the moral instinct buried beneath his criminal identity has not been extinguished.

Eddie kills George and attempts to escape, only to be shot by George’s men. His final act is both revenge and sacrifice, completing the transformation of the gangster narrative into a tragedy of belated ethical recognition.

The climactic shooting does not offer comfortable redemption. Eddie’s death cannot repair the lives destroyed by bootlegging, resurrect Danny, erase coercion, or transform his earlier violence into virtue, but it does establish that he remains capable of choosing another person’s survival over his own.

Walsh stages Eddie’s collapse on the snow-covered steps outside a church with ruthless visual grandeur. The setting creates an iconography of judgement, sacrifice, exclusion, and spiritual exhaustion without reducing the image to crude religious symbolism.

Panama rushes to Eddie’s body while the police regard him as another dead criminal. Her declaration that he “used to be a big shot” is devastating precisely because it compresses an entire life into the grammar of vanished importance.

The line does not merely describe Eddie’s loss of status. It condemns a culture that measures human value through visibility, wealth, power, and reputation, then speaks of ruined men as though their former significance were an embarrassing anecdote.

The ending is beautifully photographed because its formal elegance intensifies its cruelty. Eddie’s body becomes the final monument to a decade that produced extraordinary fortunes, extravagant pleasures, organised bloodshed, and masses of discarded people.

Comparisons with The Public Enemy (1931) are inevitable, but Eddie Bartlett is not simply another version of Tom Powers. Tom advances through aggression with little evidence of moral hesitation, whereas Eddie is pushed, tempted, rewarded, compromised, and finally destroyed by circumstances that exploit his admirable qualities as efficiently as his weaknesses.

Cagney’s achievement in The Roaring Twenties (1939) therefore exceeds familiar gangster mannerism. He presents charm, authority, resentment, tenderness, vanity, exhaustion, humiliation, and fatal courage within a single coherent character, proving that his screen ferocity was always supported by exceptional dramatic intelligence.

Bogart’s contribution should not be diminished merely because the film belongs primarily to Cagney. His cold performance anticipates the hardened authority of later roles while demonstrating that his early gangster characters possessed a frightening economy of gesture and speech.

Walsh’s direction is equally deserving of forceful praise. The insulting notion that he was merely a competent craftsman collapses in the face of the film’s narrative velocity, historical organisation, emotional clarity, visual dynamism, and near-perfect command of tonal variation.

His camera does not decorate the action. It attacks the material, driving bodies through streets, clubs, warehouses, trenches, offices, and stairways while ensuring that movement always expresses the pressure of history.

The newsreel montages, assembled with a vigorous sense of compression, help transform the film into a semi-documentary national chronicle. They also allow private melodrama to acquire epic dimension without bloating the running time with tedious exposition.

Later gangster films would adopt comparable structures of rise, indulgence, paranoia, betrayal, and collapse. Goodfellas (1990), in particular, shares the fascination with criminal enterprise as a seductive social system, though it would be intellectually lazy to reduce Walsh’s film to a mere primitive ancestor of Scorsese’s achievement.

The Roaring Twenties (1939) already possesses its own elaborate understanding of criminal identity, historical narration, masculine performance, social mobility, and economic violence. It does not require validation from later cinema, and critics who praise it only for anticipating modern techniques inadvertently insult its independent sophistication.

The picture also functions as an elegy for the Warner Bros. gangster cycle of the 1930s. Released in the same year as an extraordinary number of canonical Hollywood productions, it revisits the genre’s familiar materials with the sombre awareness that an era of cinematic criminality is reaching a point of culmination.

Cagney would not return to the gangster role with comparable force until White Heat (1949), another Walsh-directed masterpiece. The contrast between Eddie Bartlett and Cody Jarrett confirms Cagney’s range, since one is a socially produced tragic figure while the other is an apocalyptic embodiment of violence, dependency, and psychosis.

Walsh’s related films, including High Sierra (1941) and White Heat (1949), further demonstrate his sustained interest in doomed men confronting social systems that have already rendered them obsolete. His cinema is full of motion, but that motion frequently leads toward extinction rather than liberation.

The supporting cast strengthens this fatalistic design. Frank McHugh gives Danny warmth without reducing him to comic machinery, Jeffrey Lynn supplies Lloyd with restrained respectability, Priscilla Lane embodies the conventional future Eddie desires, and Gladys George dominates the emotional aftermath with magnificent authority.

Some viewers object to the number of songs or to Jean’s relatively conventional characterisation. These criticisms are not entirely baseless, but they become disproportionately trivial when measured against the film’s historical reach, dramatic momentum, and devastating central performance.

The film’s moralism is likewise more complicated than a simplistic warning that crime does not pay. Crime pays extremely well for a considerable period, and that uncomfortable fact is precisely why the narrative possesses social force.

Eddie is not destroyed because the universe automatically punishes wickedness. He is destroyed because markets change, alliances fracture, governments reverse policies, capital evaporates, violence escalates, and emotional fantasies become impossible to sustain.

That distinction is essential. A childish morality tale would reassure the audience that lawful society defeats the gangster, whereas The Roaring Twenties (1939) demonstrates that lawful society and gangster capitalism repeatedly feed one another.

The film consequently remains relevant far beyond its period setting. Any society that sends citizens into war, abandons them upon return, criminalises widespread desires, celebrates ruthless accumulation, and then treats economic casualties as personal failures is repeating the conditions that produce Eddie Bartlett.

Its nostalgia should therefore disturb rather than comfort. The Charleston rhythms, nightclub lights, tailored suits, polished automobiles, and rapid fortunes are seductive surfaces stretched over a social order that is fundamentally predatory.

The picture’s title acquires bitter irony because the decade’s celebrated roar is also the sound of gunfire, machinery, market speculation, public appetite, and institutional collapse. What appears from a distance as cultural exuberance is revealed at close range as the deafening noise of people consuming one another.

The Roaring Twenties (1939) must be understood not as a merely competent gangster picture, nor as a decorative exercise in studio nostalgia, but as an aggressive historical diagnosis of American modernity. The film takes the supposedly triumphant national passage from the First World War into the Jazz Age and tears away its patriotic varnish, exposing an economy that discards veterans, a political order that manufactures criminality, and a culture that converts personal desperation into profitable violence.

The narrative follows Eddie Bartlett, played with astonishing physical authority by James Cagney, as he moves from soldier to unemployed civilian, from taxi driver to bootlegger, and finally from criminal magnate to ruined alcoholic. This trajectory is not simply the rise and fall of an individual gangster, because Eddie’s disintegration is presented as the grotesque reflection of a country whose institutions reward illegality while pretending to defend morality.

The opening sequence establishes this argument with brutal efficiency by placing Eddie, George Hally, and Lloyd Hart together in the trenches during the final hours of the First World War. Their reactions to violence immediately distinguish their moral temperaments, and the film refuses the intellectually lazy proposition that war ends when an armistice is signed, since the habits of aggression, hierarchy, and survival return home inside the men who have been trained to kill.

Eddie emerges from the war with expectations that are almost insultingly modest, since he asks only to return to his former employment and recover the ordinary social position he believes his service has earned. Instead, he discovers that the civilian economy has already replaced him, and the film forcefully demonstrates that patriotic rhetoric is worthless when the returning soldier is abandoned the moment his military usefulness expires.

This is where The Roaring Twenties (1939) becomes more than conventional melodrama, because Eddie’s criminal career originates not in innate depravity but in economic exclusion. He does not initially conquer society through villainy; society corners him, humiliates him, and then acts scandalised when he learns to exploit the illegal market that its own legislation has created.

Prohibition therefore functions as the film’s central political obscenity, a moralistic law whose chief practical accomplishment is the industrial expansion of organised crime. The state declares alcohol forbidden, the public continues to demand it, and the gangster becomes the logical entrepreneur of a market that respectable society simultaneously condemns and finances.

As I would insist, “La loi qui prétend purifier la société ne fait souvent que professionnaliser son hypocrisie.” This formulation captures the film’s savage understanding of Prohibition, since the law does not eliminate desire but transfers economic power to men prepared to satisfy that desire through corruption, intimidation, bribery, and murder.

The film’s semi-documentary structure amplifies this historical argument by inserting narration, montage, headlines, and public events into Eddie’s private story. These devices are sometimes dismissed as heavy-handed, but such criticism is feeble, because the bluntness is purposeful: the film wants the audience to recognise that individual criminality is inseparable from legislation, unemployment, speculation, technological change, and mass consumption.

The stock-market collapse of 1929 is consequently not treated as an abstract economic event but as a catastrophe that demolishes Eddie’s accumulated power with almost contemptuous speed. His empire, which seemed invulnerable while liquor remained illegal and credit remained abundant, proves to be another speculative fiction, and the film crushes the fantasy that wealth acquired within a corrupt system can ever provide lasting security.

Eddie’s tragedy is intensified by Cagney’s performance, which combines velocity, charm, anger, sentiment, and self-deception without allowing the character to become psychologically tidy. Cagney does not portray Eddie as a saint trapped among criminals, nor as a monster disguised by charisma; he presents a man whose generosity and brutality coexist, and whose emotional blindness becomes as destructive as any gun.

Humphrey Bogart’s George Hally offers the film’s colder alternative, a figure who possesses Eddie’s appetite for advancement without his residual loyalty or tenderness. George treats human relationships as temporary arrangements of utility, and Bogart’s clipped, contemptuous performance makes him less a flamboyant villain than the perfected capitalist criminal, a man who recognises no obligation beyond advantage.

Jeffrey Lynn’s Lloyd Hart occupies the respectable position between Eddie and George, yet the film does not permit his legal profession to stand entirely outside the corrupt economy. Lloyd initially serves the bootlegging enterprise before withdrawing from it, and his moral recovery is possible partly because Eddie absorbs the punishment generated by the system in which all three men have participated.

The triangle involving Eddie, Lloyd, and Jean Sherman gives the film its romantic structure, but it also exposes Eddie’s disastrous confusion between patronage and love. Eddie promotes Jean’s singing career, provides opportunities, and assumes that material generosity will produce emotional entitlement, an assumption the film rejects with admirable severity.

Priscilla Lane’s Jean is often criticised as bland beside the combustible personalities surrounding her, yet her relative conventionality performs a clear dramatic function. She represents the domestic legitimacy Eddie desires but cannot successfully inhabit, and her preference for Lloyd confirms that money, protection, and masculine force cannot compel authentic affection.

The soundtrack, arranged by Ray Heindorf, is essential to this emotional and historical architecture rather than being a collection of pleasant interruptions. Drawing upon the familiar Warner Bros. catalogue of early twentieth-century popular music, the film uses songs to manufacture nostalgia even as the plot exposes the violence, disappointment, and commercial exploitation concealed beneath that nostalgia.

Lane performs at least three songs onscreen as Jean develops into a nightclub chanteuse, and these numbers establish the entertainment industry as another market shaped by Eddie’s criminal capital. The nightclub is therefore not an innocent refuge from the gangster narrative, because its music, glamour, romance, and alcohol are all materially sustained by the same illicit economy that produces shootings in warehouses and betrayals in offices.

“My Melancholy Baby” becomes especially significant because its emotional softness contradicts the hard surfaces of the criminal world while simultaneously revealing the sadness already embedded within it. The song does not halt the narrative; it gives lyrical form to the longing, regret, and impossible tenderness that Eddie is incapable of expressing without transforming them into possession or sacrifice.

The production history of Panama Smith is itself a remarkable record of studio instability, negotiation, and eventual artistic fortune. Gladys George replaced Ann Sheridan, who had replaced Lee Patrick, who had replaced Glenda Farrell, a chain of substitutions that might have resulted in incoherence but instead culminated in one of the film’s most powerful performances.

George’s Panama is neither a decorative moll nor a sentimentalised nightclub proprietor waiting passively for male recognition. She is shrewd, socially experienced, emotionally disciplined, and painfully aware that Eddie’s obsession with Jean prevents him from recognising the woman who understands him most completely.

Her performance acquires force precisely because Panama rarely indulges in theatrical self-pity, even when the film makes her devotion unmistakable. She watches Eddie construct fantasies around Jean, supports him through prosperity and collapse, and finally becomes the witness who must name what remains of him after ambition, criminality, and romantic delusion have completed their work.

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

America's Most Colorful Era !

1920 . . . Bootleggers, Jazz, Babe Ruth, Speakeasies, Jack Dempsey, Dames, Molls, Easy Living - Quick Dying . . . the torrid . . . blazing . . . wild . . . lush . . . lurid - ROARING TWENTIES ! ! !

Biggest of all the Cagney smashes! 

Wild! Lawless! Fantastic! Action? No picture ever had more! 

AMERICA'S MOST SENSATIONAL ERA! 

THE SCREEN'S MOST COLORFUL STAR...in a story of America's most dazzling era...the torrid...wild...lust...ROARING TWENTIES!!! 

THE THRILLING STORY OF THE POST-WAR ERA WHEN THE COUNTRY RAN WILD....MOST OF YOU WILL REMEMBER IT WELL

The Flaming Story of a Nation on a Jag...With Killers Running America! 

TEN YEARS...INCREDIBLE...ILLICIT...LAWLESS yet ABSOLUTELY TRUE! The wide-open days of hot-cha...hi-jackers...short skirts...sugar daddies and sweet patooties...the inside story of a wild delirious decade we'll never see again.

THE RIOTOUS STORY OF THE ROARING '20s MAKES THE MIGHTIEST FILM HIT OF THE THRILLING '30s! 

Stocks were up....and so were skirts...flasks and flappers...bathtub gin and gangster rule! Here it all is....the thrills of ten breathtaking years...in one breath-taking picture! 

THAT DELIRIOUS DECADE WHEN AMERICA RAN WILD AND KILLERS LIKE THIS RAN AMERICA! 

The famous closing identification, in which Eddie is remembered as a former “big shot,” annihilates the mythology of gangster grandeur with a few words. The once-commanding entrepreneur becomes a body on the steps, and the phrase reduces his empire to exhausted memory, proving that criminal celebrity is only another temporary performance before anonymity.

As I would put it, “La grandeur du gangster n’est qu’un cadavre auquel la mémoire prête encore un costume.” The sentence is deliberately severe because the film itself is severe, stripping Eddie of wealth, authority, illusion, and finally life until nothing remains except Panama’s sorrowful recognition of what he once appeared to be.

Eh note and check it out, but Gladys George replaced Ann Sheridan who had replaced Lee Patrick who had replaced Glenda Farrell for the character of Panama Smith.

The role of Panama also clarifies the film’s gender politics, which are more complicated than the conventional opposition between the respectable young woman and the worldly nightclub hostess. Jean receives the future, domestic security, and social legitimacy, while Panama receives knowledge, memory, and grief, a division that reveals how melodrama frequently rewards innocence while forcing experienced women to carry the truth.

Anatole Litvak was originally attached to direct, a production fact that suggests how differently the film’s tone might have developed under another sensibility. The completed work, however, bears the muscular momentum associated with Raoul Walsh, whose direction drives the story forward with a combination of action, compression, montage, and fatalistic emotional clarity.

Walsh’s handling of Cagney is especially forceful because he understands that the actor’s physical energy can generate narrative meaning before dialogue explains anything. Eddie walks, gestures, strikes, laughs, and collapses with a kinetic intensity that makes his body the visible register of American acceleration, first confident, then strained, then defeated.

The film’s violence is effective because it is rarely isolated from business, loyalty, or political circumstance. Guns do not erupt as empty spectacle; they function as instruments of commercial discipline, methods by which unstable alliances are enforced and illicit property is defended in a marketplace created by prohibitionist law.

This relationship between enterprise and murder makes George’s brutality particularly revealing, since he approaches violence with the same practical calculation that a legitimate executive might apply to an inconvenient contract. The difference between respectable capitalism and organised crime becomes disturbingly narrow, and the film has the courage to suggest that both systems may depend upon coercion while merely differing in public presentation.

Eddie remains more sympathetic because he preserves traces of fellowship, gratitude, and romantic aspiration, but sympathy must not become exoneration. He chooses expansion, authorises violence, profits from addiction, and mistakes his occasional kindness for moral innocence, and the film properly refuses to let charisma erase responsibility.

The returning veteran motif strengthens this indictment by showing how militarised masculinity is redirected into domestic competition. The nation trains men to survive through aggression, abandons them economically, criminalises a popular commodity, and then expresses moral outrage when those men build violent businesses from the skills and desperation the nation itself has produced.

In this respect, The Roaring Twenties (1939) may be placed beside The Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar (1931), Scarface (1932), and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), although it approaches gangster mythology with a more overtly retrospective historical framework. It looks backward across the decade, treating Prohibition and the crash as parts of a completed national disaster rather than as immediate social phenomena.

The film also anticipates White Heat (1949), Walsh and Cagney’s later masterpiece, though Eddie Bartlett is fundamentally different from Cody Jarrett. Eddie is drawn into criminality through circumstance and ambition, while Cody appears almost elemental in his psychosis, yet both performances demonstrate Cagney’s unmatched ability to make masculine energy appear simultaneously commanding and catastrophically unstable.

The pairing of Cagney and Bogart is equally important because their opposing styles create an extraordinarily productive tension. Cagney attacks the frame with movement and vocal rhythm, while Bogart often hardens within it, producing an antagonism between explosive expressiveness and 

Nevertheless, George’s apparent strength is revealed as spiritual emptiness and, finally, cowardice. He is formidable while insulated by organisation and fear, but when confronted directly he possesses none of the tragic stature that Eddie acquires through sacrifice, however belated or compromised that sacrifice may be.

The film’s reputation has remained strong because its combination of historical montage, gangster action, romantic melodrama, popular music, and star performance creates unusual generic density. It can resemble a crime drama, a social chronicle, a musical, a war film, and a tragic romance, but this multiplicity is not confusion; it is the appropriate form for a decade defined by contradiction.

In 2008, the American Film Institute nominated The Roaring Twenties (1939) for consideration in its list of the ten greatest American gangster films. The nomination was justified, although the film requires no institutional certificate to establish its importance, and reducing its value to list placement would merely reproduce the shallow culture of ranking that substitutes numerical hierarchy for criticism.

Its real achievement lies in the way it converts Eddie Bartlett’s life into an accusation against American historical amnesia. The film insists that organised crime did not emerge from nowhere, that economic collapse was not a natural disaster, and that moral legislation was not morally innocent simply because its advocates spoke in the language of purification.

The nostalgia of the period songs, clothing, automobiles, speakeasies, and newspaper headlines is therefore continually poisoned by historical knowledge. The audience is invited to enjoy the atmosphere, but it is not permitted to forget the unemployment, corruption, violence, exclusion, and financial recklessness that made the decade roar so loudly.

This is why the film’s ending remains so devastating, because it compresses the collapse of an individual and an era into a single image of exhausted grandeur. Eddie dies not as the triumphant sovereign of a criminal empire but as a discarded man outside the institutions of respectable society, while Panama alone recognises the scale of the life that has been wasted.

The Roaring Twenties (1939) should consequently be regarded as one of the culminating works of the classical Warner Bros. gangster cycle. It absorbs the genre’s established iconography, subjects it to historical reflection, enriches it through music and melodrama, and then destroys its fantasies of masculine power with an ending of merciless finality.

To call the film merely entertaining is inadequate, although it is certainly entertaining; to call it merely historical is equally inadequate, although history structures every major transformation in the plot. It is an aggressive cinematic argument that America creates its gangsters, consumes their glamour, condemns their methods, and finally abandons their bodies when the spectacle has exhausted its profitability.

The greatness of The Roaring Twenties (1939) lies in this refusal to isolate spectacle from consequence. Walsh gives the audience excitement, humour, romance, music, violence, and star charisma, then forces every pleasure to participate in the construction of a dead man on a frozen staircase.

Eddie Bartlett “used to be a big shot,” but the phrase should not be heard as mockery. It is an epitaph for an American citizen who possessed enormous ability, received almost no legitimate opportunity, converted exclusion into power, and discovered too late that power without belonging is merely another form of dispossession.

The film is therefore one of the finest gangster dramas of its era, and timid qualification is unnecessary. It is fast, intelligent, visually assured, emotionally punishing, historically ambitious, and anchored by one of James Cagney’s most complete performances.

To call it merely entertaining is to praise its surface while ignoring its blade. The Roaring Twenties (1939) is a savage account of how America rewards violence, romanticises wealth, abandons veterans, manufactures illegality, and finally buries the men who believed too completely in its promises.

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Genres - Crime, Drama, Thriller  |   Release Date - Oct 28, 1939  |   Run Time - 106 min.  |