Aside from one of the greatest endings in all film history, two things stood out in my latest viewing of THE ROARING TWENTIES (Raoul Walsh, 1939), in a gorgeous 4K Digital Restoration at the BFI. One was thematic: when Cagney, Bogart et all return from fighting WWI, they’re pretty much sneered at, lose their jobs, treated as chumps. And this made me wonder if, except for WWII, this has ever been thus in the US’s treatment of its war vets: lots of sanctimonious ‘thank you for your service’ on the surface but ‘enjoy the streets sucker’ in reality. The other was the poetry and intensity of the montage created by Don Siegel to evoke the effects of the Wall Street Crash, the melting skyscrapers particularly impactful. It’s gorgeous. I loved the intensity of feeling without the sentimentality that is such a marker of Raoul Walsh (and of 1930s cinema in general) and is personified here by Gladys George as Panama Smith, street gutter glitter, rueful, down to earth; there’s something in the performing of all the supporting cast, everyone seemingly conscious that they’re in showbiz and have to entertain, so they all attempt and succeed in being believable as the characters they play, but adding little twirls, an inflection, a move of the eyes, vocal and physical embroidery with which to delight the audience. And of course, at the centre of it all Cagney, immense throughout, displacing air, crackling with life, bringing humanity into the darkened theatre, long after everyone involved in this movie, one of the all-time great gangster films, has died. A terrific experience, made more poignant by realising that it explicitly sets out at the beginning to construct a work of memory of one period (Mark Hellinger’s opening narration), the film itself operating as a marker of another, and all its many generation of viewers carrying yet at least one other within them.
José Arroyo
