The Roaring Twenties: Into the Past

To Hellinger, The Roaring Twenties was “a memory.” He calls it that in his preamble to the film, text that unfurls in an opening-credits scrawl scored to an overture borrowing melodies from popular songs of the recent past, like “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “My Melancholy Baby,” that play key roles in the narrative and put the audience in a reflective mood. The action proper begins somewhere on the western front, where native New Yorkers Eddie (James Cagney), George (Humphrey Bogart), and Lloyd (Jeffrey Lynn) all tumble into the same trench. The intensity of wartime experience draws out compressed, efficient characterizations that represent a cross section of the gangster movie’s moral universe and the manly bonds that govern it. Blue-blooded lawyer Lloyd, eventually a rumrunner’s reluctant mouthpiece, is introduced as a Goody Two-shoes, and his prissy rectitude underscores the hypocrisies of the straight world, once the story jumps ahead to the Prohibition era; George, an out-and-out psychopath who feels no guilt upon learning that he has shot his last German after the armistice has been signed, is a disloyal snake who comes to represent the venality of the underworld. Where Lloyd and George are flat characters, Eddie becomes the audience’s figure of identification because of his dynamism, as he navigates the upside-down world of the Prohibition era with opportunism and decisiveness. He starts out as a teetotaling innocent—the type of hard-luck Great War vet memorialized earlier in the thirties by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “forgotten man” speech and films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Heroes for Sale—before a stroke of fate throws him into the bootlegging racket, offering him scope for his ambition.

Like Lloyd and George, the women of the film represent the dual poles of Eddie’s world. His wartime pen pal, Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane), enters the movie skipping, inspiring some insinuating wisecracks. But once she has grown into the kind of classy adult girl who still plays with dolls, she becomes Eddie’s aspirational love object, and he secures her a gig singing at a nightclub modeled after the El Fey in Manhattan, where another Warner Bros. gangster, George Raft, was once a tap dancer. The club’s hostess, Panama Smith (Gladys George), is also Eddie’s business partner, and she rags him for his schoolkid crush in a tough-broad manner, betraying a love that is half romantic, half maternal (foreshadowing the openly Oedipal relationship at the center of Cagney and Walsh’s next collaboration, White Heat, ten years later).

The film hits what were, even at the time, all the traditional stops on a Hollywood antihero’s journey, but Walsh relates every old chestnut with extra spice. Filling each sequence with stock characters and local color, he makes the city a place of constant movement and incident, paced to the rat-a-tat of tommy-gun battles and snappy dialogue. Beyond Hellinger and credited screenwriters Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, and Robert Rossen, more than half a dozen writers worked on the film—including Frank McHugh, Cagney’s real-life buddy and frequent script doctor, who plays Eddie’s sidekick Danny in the film—and each one probably got in a few of the one-liners and callbacks that close practically every scene, as if inviting a roar of laughter and shouts for another round of drinks. A kind of living museum of gangster movies of the early thirties, The Roaring Twenties also, through sheer force of personality, crystallizes the characters and conflicts that would become the framework of many gangster movies that followed, including those from the Black-crime-film booms of the seventies and nineties, and especially films by its professed admirer Martin Scorsese. The dolly shot taking in Eddie’s operation, which scrolls past the associates cooking the ethanol off the moonshine they sell as scotch and carbonating the sham champagne, could be an early prototype for the famous Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas. It’s a running gag that Eddie puts bad booze over on his clients at a high markup—he’s streetwise, and so, by extension, is the audience that laughs with him.

Cagney and Bogart are two exemplars of the type that film scholar Robert Sklar calls “city boys”: actors who emerged from the melting pot of the early-twentieth-century metropolis, and whose white-ethnic, tough-minded affect spoke to the realities of poverty as well as to the dynamism of the bustling underclass. Warner Bros.’ reputation as the most populist studio of Hollywood’s golden age comes down to its association with the gangster-movie genre and the city-boy actors who were its stars.

By 1939, the careers of both Cagney and Bogart were in transition. Cagney, dissatisfied with Warner Bros.’ handling of his career and bored with his screen persona, was soon to strike out on his own as an independent star-producer. Bogart would work with much of the Roaring Twenties unit again on Walsh’s They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941), building up to his leading-man status in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (also 1941). The laconic cynicism he exudes in The Roaring Twenties would, by the time of Casablanca (1942), read as ironically patriotic: the sleepy smirk of a scrappy warrior with no illusions but plenty of underdog spirit. In the noir films that followed the end of the war, it would read still differently, expressing a disaffection that was not sociological, as in the gangster movies, but psychological and existential.

Each man in his time, right? If The Roaring Twenties signals the effective end of the type of cinema that he once personified, then Cagney, in one of his greatest showcases, goes down literally swinging. His walk is herky-jerky, with his shoulders pulled back, and he shifts his weight from one foot to the other while trying to stand still; he never quite knows what to do with his hands. When Eddie is angry, Cagney cocks his balled little fist, draws it back as if thinking with his body, considering, and either expresses his energy through a punch or shakes out his hand and finds a different outlet. He laughs at other people’s jokes and runs through multiple moods in a single shot, eyes always darting and assessing, mouth setting and resetting. When Eddie approaches a grown-up Jean, now a vaudeville chorine rushing around backstage, we’re with Cagney through every beat of the interaction: his wink, his bright-eyed pickup lines, his crumpled rejection, his scabbed-over resolve and promise to come back tomorrow. Within the activity of Walsh’s frame, quicksilver Cagney embodies the busyness of the city itself.