"The Roaring Twenties" (1939)

The 1920’s are often remembered for being both glamorous and gritty, overflowing with decadent excess built on questionable and troubling enterprises. The decade is consistently depicted as a time of reckless abandon right before the Great Depression put the carefree lawlessness of the Jazz Age to an end. Whether this is true or not, Prohibition was inextricably linked to this allure, and nowhere was this more noticeably seen than in a number of 1930's James Cagney gangster films. The Roaring Twenties nostalgically looks back on the illicit enterprises that made the twenties so “roaring”. Cagney plays Eddie Bartlett, a WWI veteran who can’t find work when he comes back home, and falls into criminal activity out of necessity. He soon discovers a knack for bootlegging and rises to the top of the gangster underworld, only for the repeal of the 18^th Amendment to turn Eddie into a man with a useless skill-set. With a charming, hard-nosed mug, Cagney was able to make his gangster characters highly absorbing and likable but also tragic and repellant. Eddie’s motivations are deeply sad, even when he’s at his grandest. Raoul Walsh’s thoroughly energetic and stylized direction snappily moves the story along and grounds Eddie’s exciting and fateful rise and fall. "He used to be a big shot," goes the film's great closing line, and the nobility implied rings true. Eddie may have been a bruiser, but it's hard to resist that Cagney grin.

Grade: A-