The Roaring Twenties The Roaring Twenties

America's Most Colorful Era!

Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney), George Hally (Humphrey Bogart), and Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn) are three American soldiers during WWI who become friends. Once the war is over and each goes his separate way, Eddie finds out what had happened to his country during the past couple of years. His buddy finds him a job driving his cab part time for a while, but then he begins a lucrative career in bootlegging during Prohibition.

James Cagney Priscilla Lane Humphrey Bogart Gladys George Jeffrey Lynn Frank McHugh Paul Kelly Elisabeth Risdon Edward Keane Joe Sawyer Joseph Crehan George Meeker John Hamilton Robert Elliott Eddy Chandler Abner Biberman Vera Lewis John Deering

Warner Bros. Pictures

action drama

104 mins   More details at IMDb / TMDb

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  • FernandoFCroce

    Review by FernandoFCroce ★★★★½

    From the Armistice to the Wall Street Crash, "this film is a memory." The opening is a joke to set the barrel-rolling tone, three doughboys in a WWI crater, trading quips and cigarettes amid explosions. Back in America, the rotten one (Humphrey Bogart) joins the mob, the righteous one (Jeffrey Lynn) turns to the law, and the one in between (James Cagney) slides from quintessential "forgotten man" to impetuous bootlegger. The soldier’s homecoming is a rickety tenement, the elusive babe (Priscilla Lane) turns out to be a schoolgirl with a song (cf. Anderson’s "The Master"), the hooch racket is the answer for the discarded warrior who’s "tired of shadowboxing." As a rival Prohibition shark (Paul Kelly) circles the territory, Bogart…

  • Veronica

    Review by Veronica ★★★★

    Old school gangster film extraordinaire! And it comes with an important lesson: if you have shell shocked boys coming home from the horrors of war, the very worst thing that you can do is make booze illegal. Seriously. The sparkling dialogue makes this an absolute joy to watch.

  • Galen Wilson

    Review by Galen Wilson ★★★

    An interesting look back at the 1920s from the lens of the late 1930s. For the most part this is yet another case of Cagney elevating a rather mediocre script into something interesting. As he often did, he does a great job of portraying a sympathetic and complex gangster here, and the film is a bit more interested in where the gangsters came from than earlier efforts. That said the reasons and solutions are overly simplified (Prohibition created gangsters, FDR stopped them), but it is well-executed at least.

  • Colin the dude

    Review by Colin the dude ★★★★

    It's possible the gangster genre hit its highest peak of epic by 1939 with this rip-roaring saga of Prohibition crime. The drama is swift, tight and clear, the plotting beautifully conveyed through newsreel montages that inform and delight with effortless story progression and the direction by Raoul "White Heat" Walsh is smooth and classic in structure.

    By a mile though, the greatest aspect of The Roaring Twenties is the gun play and face punching. Cagney really throws his weight into other men's faces with his fists and it's kind of brutal even by today's standards.

  • Derek Hill

    Review by Derek Hill ★★★★

    One of the best gangster movies ever. Bullshit moralist sentiments are kept to a minimum considering the Code, and the movie overall still feels fresh and exciting. It's an epic condensed into 104 minutes. And its influence is still felt in countless modern gangster pictures that came after it. It may have come at the end of the first cycle of mob movies, but it elevated the genre to a whole new level. Cagney, Bogart, and Walsh all do great work in it.

  • KasperL

    Review by KasperL ★★★½

    Quite good but never great. I prefer Bogart to Cagney for sure.

  • Iain Dickie

    Review by Iain Dickie ★★★½

    "He used to be a big shot"

    The story of three war buddies and their rise and fall during the start and end of prohibition, I loved the visual style especially the news-reel interludes, which really reminded me of Citizen Kane.

  • Richard Doyle

    Review by Richard Doyle ★★★½

    It's great to see Cagney and Bogart together in a film. Both actors never fail to please. I couldn't help feeling like this was really a bit of a by-the-numbers gangster film. Similar plots had been several times by 1939, and it felt like this was recycling many familiar elements. Definitely worth watching, but not top tier.

  • Nikolai Efimov

    Review by Nikolai Efimov ★★★★★

    A pitched battle in World War 1. James Cagney leaps over a ridge to find cover, crashing into Humphrey Bogart. Bogart: "There's ten thousand shell holes around here and everybody's gotta come divin' into this one." This is three years before Casablanca, folks. The script for this film is a work of art. It's not like I haven't seen cold-blooded, hard-boiled tough guys spit daggers at one another, believe me I have, but this script makes the old tommy gun rhythm of gangsterisms sound like Shakespeare. If you're going to put Cagney and Bogart in a gangster movie together, you'd better have enough one-liners to go around, and in this case the script almost over-delivers. Then there's the clockwork structure, the relentless pace, the inventive imagery in the transitional newsreel-style montages, this is the peak of the gangster film form. If you've ever loved a gangster movie, you owe it to yourself to check this out.