Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: Jerry Wald
Starring: James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Gladys George
Country: US
Running Time: 107m
Year: 1939
BBFC Certificate: PG
This month sees the release of Criterion’s edition of 1939’s The Roaring Twenties on Blu-ray and UHD. It’s as fun as it is dated, and gives us a rollicking insight into a fascinating period. Following the end of the Great War, economy and culture exploded in the US. Prohibition created a wealthy underworld of opportunity, which evaporated when the law was relaxed.
Raoul Walsh’s nostalgic film follows the rise and fall of Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney). Eddie exploits the illegal moonshine trade, establishing himself as a mid-tier gangster with the help of club owner Jean (Priscilla Lane), cold-blooded George (Humphrey Bogart) and a couple of Tommy guns. The script is by the numbers, especially from our conveniently retrospective viewpoint, and yet the scale and pacing is fabulous. The plot is proto-Gangster genre; not the first, but this was a prestige picture, pulling together established stars in a decade-encompassing epic. A rubber-stamped Hollywood product.
Nothing here is a surprise, but the sure-handed production, despite occasional punch pulling (this was 50 years before Goodfellas), gives us some of the era’s best scene-chewing. It feels big and should be unwieldy, but for the laser-focused performances of Cagney and Bogart. Perhaps unavoidably anachronistic these days, there’s still no diminishing the star-wattage. Cagney is phenomenal. The song and dance man can hardly keep the grin off his face until the last act at least. The subtlety in his glidingly smooth performance betrays a dark side long before the machine tooled simple plot plays for it. You sympathise, and he’s always believable, even as his morals slide. Bogart is the perfect vicious foil to Cagney with a dangerously still performance; he’s side-lined for a while, but the film visibly darkens in his considerable shadow when he does step up.
It was an interesting time, both in the story and production. The accepted wisdom is that by the mid-40’s, Frank Capra’s sentimentalism was needed, welcomed even, hence a belief in benevolent fantasy in his It’s a Wonderful Life or Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life or Death, and on the flipside, the natural nihilism of the era birthed Film Noir. Citizen Kane questioned a man’s life and the American Dream.
Yet even as late as 1939, The Roaring Twenties wasn’t ready for those shades of grey. It would be easy to see it as unsophisticated and naïve, but maybe its effort to look back at the previous decade with eyes wide open was the right pitch. The twenties really did, briefly roar..
VIDEO
Ernest Haller’s crisp studio-set cinematography is beautifully presented in this new 4K transfer. Crisp and consistent throughout, the classical, unfussy mono photography lends itself to some bold shifts. Not Noir by any means and yet there are some scenes here, especially in this presentation, that put some actual Noir to shame. It’s worth mentioning that this was always a well-treated transfer from its original DVD releases and yet, Criterion appear to have found more depths to mine.
EXTRA FEATURES
The extra features included on this edition are modest by Criterion’s best standards. Decent when taken individually, especially Licoln Hurst’s commentary though that’s an old one, but underserved as a whole. It especially appears rather sombre and stony-faced to those of us who remember the seminal Warner Gangsters boxset from the early 2000’s. Each disc was accompanied by a slew of extras under the “Night at the Movies” banner, featuring news reels and cartoons amongst others. Some of the choices were eccentric but nevertheless evoked the time in which the original films were released. Fun curation such as this would have been welcomed in the new generation of releases.
- Audio commentary with film historian Lincoln Hurst
- New interview with critic Gary Giddins
- Excerpt from a 1973 interview with director Raoul Walsh
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