A send-off to the golden age gangster film

Both a reflection and send-off to the golden age gangster films of the 1930s, as well as a historical tracing of how such a genre came to be. The Roaring Twenties gives its audience a brutal, very true-to-life portrait of a soldier coming home after the great war, played by James Cagney, and greeted NOT with the open arms he expected to be greeted with but instead, work, does he struggle to find, and ends, he cannot seem to meet legitimately, for the world he’s left behind exists no longer, leaving him with no other choice but to take up revolver in hand in a life of crime. The scene about ten minutes in of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Jeffrey Lynn picking off French soldiers in the blown-up house together is such simple, yet clever, effective foreshadowing of their personalities that later on will you see them act on, each in their own set ways. Once more, James Cagney floors me again, one of the most compelling of all the classic actors. Even Humphrey Bogart, who wasn’t quite the iconic star at this point in his career that Casablanca would propel him too, not even receiving top-billing, truly gives one of his most chilling, hardboiled, sadistic performances that I’ve never quite seen before from him. Truly solid gangster film, and a contender with Angels with Dirty Faces as the greatest of them all from that period.