General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties is a 1939 American crime drama directed by Raoul Walsh for Warner Bros., in which three friends who served together in World War I return home and are drawn into bootlegging during Prohibition, with James Cagney as the bootlegger Eddie Bartlett and Humphrey Bogart as his partner George Hally.¹ Based on a story by the New York journalist Mark Hellinger, the film brought to a close the Warner Bros. gangster cycle of the 1930s and is regarded as one of the most influential crime films of its era.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	October 28, 1939 (AFI catalog date); Warner Bros. Pictures²
Director	Raoul Walsh, in his directorial debut at Warners²
Story and screenplay	Original story "The World Moves On" by Mark Hellinger; screenplay by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, and Robert Rossen¹
Principal cast	James Cagney (Eddie Bartlett), Priscilla Lane (Jean Sherman), Humphrey Bogart (George Hally), Gladys George (Panama Smith), Jeffrey Lynn (Lloyd Hart)¹
Runtime and format	Black and white, 1.37:1; reported as 104 or 106 minutes in the AFI catalog, 106 minutes by Criterion²^•¹
Historical span	The story runs from near the end of World War I in 1918 to 1933, after the repeal of Prohibition³
Recognition	National Board of Review "ten best" list of 1939; 100% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes (19 reviews)²^•⁴

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens in France as the Armistice is signed, where three American soldiers speculate about their futures: Eddie Bartlett expects his old job as a garage mechanic, the saloon keeper George Hally is untroubled by the newly enacted Prohibition, and the law graduate Lloyd Hart plans to practice law.² Back in the United States, Lloyd becomes a lawyer, but Eddie can find work only as a cab driver and falls into bootlegging, building a fleet of cabs through deliveries of illegal liquor and hiring Lloyd as his lawyer.⁴^•⁵ George becomes Eddie's partner, and the rackets flourish until love and rivalry interfere: Eddie loves Jean Sherman, who is Lloyd's girlfriend, and the stock market crash destroys the partners' operation and turns the old friends against each other.⁴ Eddie rises from opportunistic bootlegger to racketeer during Prohibition, and the story ends badly, with Eddie killed protecting the woman he loves from his old criminal partners.⁶^•⁷

The film closes with Cagney's anti-hero dying in the snow on church steps, and with a closing narration released in the autumn of 1939 that warns: "It may come to pass that, at some distant date, we will be confronted with another period similar to the one depicted in this photoplay. If that happens, I pray that the events, as dramatized here, will be remembered."⁸

Production

Mark Hellinger, a widely syndicated New York journalist newly hired by Warner Bros. as a writer and producer, wrote the original story from his own experiences as a newspaper reporter in the 1920s.⁹^•² The working title was The World Moves On, the name of Hellinger's story.² According to a Hollywood Reporter news item cited by the AFI catalog, 40 former bootleggers applied for the job of technical director on the film; the one chosen declined screen credit.²

Raoul Walsh was thrust into the director's role at the last minute, replacing Anatole Litvak, and the picture marked his directorial debut at Warners.¹⁰^•² Walsh had been making films since the silent era, and the project rejuvenated his career, helping establish his reputation as one of the signature action filmmakers of midcentury Hollywood.¹¹ He welcomed last-minute invention by the cast; in one improvised moment, Cagney fells two unfriendly mechanics with a single well-aimed punch.⁹ Gladys George inherited the part of Panama Smith, a character modeled on the nightclub hostess Texas Guinan, from Ann Sheridan.¹⁰

Themes and style

A series of fake newsreel montages, with Expressionist touches, mark the passage of time from the end of World War I to Prohibition to the Great Depression, giving parts of the picture a quasi-documentary feel.¹²^•⁹ The film explicitly blames the ills of the 1920s on the fallout of the First World War, and it treats crime as a business shaped by social conditions rather than by individual wickedness alone.⁸^•¹³ One scholar of Prohibition in the movies, Nicholas O. Warner, describes it as essentially a morality tale whose lesson concerns the disastrous effects of well-intentioned but ill-conceived efforts to legislate morality through the control of drinking.¹⁴

The three leads carry contrasting moral positions: George is a callous sociopath, Lloyd an educated idealist, and Eddie fundamentally decent but susceptible to opportunism and temptation.⁹ Unlike the earlier gangster films built around figures such as Al Capone, the film places its gangsters in a broader historical context, presenting itself as an epic historical account of the Prohibition era with explicit causes and effects behind the gangster's story.⁷

Place in film history

The Roaring Twenties closed out the Warner Bros. gangster cycle of the 1930s, a run Walsh had helped inaugurate with his 1915 silent film Regeneration and that included Cagney's defining turn in The Public Enemy (1931).¹^•¹¹ It was also the last in Cagney's series of gangster roles that began with The Public Enemy; his 1940s roles turned toward song-and-dance pictures such as Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).¹⁵^•¹⁰ Cagney and Bogart made three films together, the others being Angels With Dirty Faces and The Oklahoma Kid, both released in 1939.¹⁰

Released in 1939, a year often considered the high-water mark of classic Hollywood, the film takes an action template and elevates it to the status of myth, in the company of Stagecoach and Gunga Din.¹¹ The film's influence on later crime cinema is broad: later works, including those of the professed admirer Martin Scorsese, reflect its documentary-style montage that compresses history, its tragic gangster portrayed with sympathy, and its mournful arc stretching across decades; meanwhile, its central duo helped advance Bogart toward the fame he would attain in the next decade.¹¹^•¹⁶ The Warwick thesis on Prohibition on screen calls the HBO series Boardwalk Empire a direct descendant of the film, positioning itself as an origin story of American organized crime.⁷

Reception and home video

Contemporary audiences received the film as a strong entry in Warner's crime output and a showcase for Cagney, and its standing as a commercial and popular success of 1939 is well attested.¹⁶ It appeared on the National Board of Review's "ten best" list for 1939.² On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer from 19 reviews and an 89% audience score from more than 5,000 ratings; Metacritic reports a Metascore of 80, with 13 positive and 2 mixed reviews and none negative.⁴^•¹⁷ Critics have singled out the hard-boiled performances and a closing line regarded as one of the standout last lines in movie history.⁴

In February 2024 the Criterion Collection issued the film on 4K UHD and Blu-ray as spine number 1208, with a new 4K digital restoration, an audio commentary by the film historian Lincoln Hurst, an interview with the critic Gary Giddins, and an excerpt from a 1973 television interview with Walsh.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1920s–1940s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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