‘The Roaring Twenties’ or — Can You Keep Up?
‘The Roaring Twenties’ (1939) opens with one of the most concise and concentrated introductions to three individuals and their different personalities you could possibly imagine: Eddie Barlett (James Cagney) can keep his head and shrug off life’s knocks with a quick pragmatic wit; Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn) is a blue-bloodied lawyer who we know will go far once The Great War is over; George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) is a murderous psychopath. They’ve barely crawled out of their muddy hole and we already know everything we need to about them. But take a deep breath because it only gets faster from here. Much faster.
A number of things are remarkable about ‘The Roaring Twenties’ (A number? Where to even begin?!) but what immediately hits us is that Cagney’s Eddie isn’t a complete monster being neither ‘Public Enemy’s (1931) violent hood nor ‘White Heat’s (1949) Freudian nightmare. Indeed, he’s so seemingly decent he only drinks milk! But you’d think an ex-serviceman wouldn’t have so many doors shut in his face back in the country he put his life on the line for so when Eddie finds himself bootlegging and running speakeasies it’s not so much a question of greed but, as on the battlefield, survival. Turns out war is the perfect training ground for rampant capitalism; it ripens a guy up for the job.
Prohibition, and America is moving so fast it becomes a nation of dizzying montages… but Eddie is moving even faster. So fast that it’s not the illegal activities that’ll trip him up but his momentum as he’s moving too quickly to notice what’s really going on around him. Panama Smith (an astonishing Gladys George) sure notices. She notices Priscilla Lane (Jean Sherman) doesn’t love Eddie, even though he’s convinced she does. She notices the song Jean’s singing isn’t for Eddie but Lloyd, and Panama’s expression of pain breaks our heart (there’s a devastating tenderness hidden away here among the blazing Tommy Guns). She notices Eddie can’t outrun consumerism no matter how rich he gets. She notices Eddie isn’t a bad man; he’s just been fed too many lies.
When the Crash happens and brings the party to a halt (an event so destructive it literally MELTS the city!) Eddie can’t handle the sudden deceleration, the sensation of being stationary, the fact the brawl he thought was gonna go on forever has stopped, so finally takes a drink. He’s been stripped raw of his illusions and an addict suffering withdrawal needs something to fill the void.
He attempts a redeeming heroic act in the name of something he once believed in and it costs him everything, his final moments spent crawling his way towards another unattainable illusion he’s excluded from, one last mirage forever out of reach.
‘The Roaring Twenties’ is fascinating because it’s both a memory and a premonition, a looking backwards and forwards. It’s an homage to classic gangster films of the past, and how The Great War impacted America and Hollywood, yet prefigures the trauma of what’s to come only a couple of years later in WW II and the effects that devastation would have on the nation and its cinema.
Raoul Walsh directs with the furious energy of a diabolical demon let loose upon the earth, although I suspect the real driving force here is journalist/writer/producer Mark Hellinger as this movie is ripped from the headlines with such savage vigor it’s still dripping blood and cynicism. After all, remember what narrator said at the beginning — “Almost a million young American men are engaged in a struggle which, they have been told, will make the world safe for democracy.” Eddie was just one of those millions, but that struggle wasn’t abroad and it wasn’t the bullets that killed him. It was the lies.
