Roaring Twenties
Directed by Raoul WalshReturning from the First World War with no prospects and fewer illusions, Eddie Bartlett drifts into bootlegging almost by accident, finding that Prohibition-era New York rewards nerve and indifference to the law far more generously than legitimate employment ever did. He partners with the calculating George Hally, a fellow veteran whose wartime taste for violence has only sharpened in peacetime, and recruits idealistic lawyer Lloyd Hart to keep their operation at arm's length from the courts. Panama Smith, a taxi-dancer who has loved Eddie from the beginning and understands him far better than he understands himself, watches the whole enterprise from the margins, loyal and clear-eyed.
Eddie's attachment to Jean Sherman, a young woman who sings in one of his clubs, exposes the limits of what he has built. Jean gravitates toward Lloyd, whose legal career Eddie has quietly subsidized, and the triangle that forms among the three of them erodes whatever code of loyalty had held the partnership together. Hally, never constrained by sentiment, moves to consolidate power by aligning with the syndicate boss Nick Brown, and when that alliance turns lethal, Eddie finds himself on the outside of an organization he helped construct, his fortune evaporated and his authority dissolved.
Walsh frames the story as a kind of social autopsy, tracing the arc from wartime sacrifice through Prohibition prosperity to Depression-era ruin with the detachment of a coroner's report. The film belongs to the tradition of the gangster-as-American-everyman that Warner Bros. had been developing since the early sound era, and it positions Cagney's Eddie somewhere between tragic protagonist and cautionary emblem – a man whose fate is inseparable from the decade that made and then discarded him.
