Tag Archives: The Roaring Twenties

A Note on the Roaring Twenties (RAoul Walsh, 1939)

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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

The Godfather, Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1990)

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Sofia Coppola has a lovely ripe presence here but she’s too shy and not very good. Adolescence is an awkward time but awkwardness is the one thing she manages to convey — she makes for uncomfortable viewing and thus quite a bit of the film suffers by her presence. Talia Shire to me is as much a face of the 70s, as representative of that era, as bigger stars (The Godfather Films and the Rocky films ensure that). I love the way she grows into a Lucretia Borgia figure in this. I also love the relish Raf Vallone brings to his Machievellian churchman. Andy Garcia , whom I love to look at, is not good enough really (he suffers in comparison to James Caan. James Caan! That’s how insubstantial he is here). Yet, the film is somehow magnificent in spite of its relative inadequacies. It’s only not good in comparison to masterpieces; in comparison to what I saw in the cinema this week, it’s a masterpiece: it looks beautiful, has novelistic texture, it’s about character, has a view of life and a view of society that it articulates with grandeur. I love the helicopter shootout that wipes out a whole gang of mafiosi, and the opera scene at the end (clearly echoing the Baptism scene in the first film though not as good). Keaton has a lovely look in the film, teary, chic but somehow gemutleich and klutzy-chic.  Is the steps scene inspired Cagney’s death in The Roaring Twenties? I think that here Keaton outshines Pacino but to me it’s really Talia Shire’s movie, and Coppola’s and that of the gorgeous design that is characteristic of all the Godfather films. The montage of the three films at the end, an unnecessary, elegiac and  sentimental coda,  seems somehow unworthy of the trilogy.

 

José Arroyo