"Bitter or sweet, most memories become precious as the years move on. This film is a memory – and I am grateful."
As the signature tells these lines are Mark Hellinger's words. But who is he? Good question, because Raoul Walsh didn't deal a card for him in his classic gangster masterpiece, The Roaring Twenties. Instead of taking part, Hellinger created the story, but he was more than a simple screenplay writer. He was one of the first Broadway columnists, a classic hard-drinking, hard-living theatre-journalist, with such a friends like Bugsy Siegel, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and who knows who else. He was authentic.
"In this film, the characters are composites of people I knew, and the situations are those that actually occured."
And Walsh, my favourite gangster film director (with the unbeateable White Heat, exactly ten years after this) delivers the reality what Hellinger imagined, more precisely what he lived through. In the first minutes the wheel of time counts back twenty years from 1938. We found ourselves in a not so shiny April in France. During the WWI our protagonists meet in a bombshell in the middle of a war scene. They are Lloyd the heart of oak lawyer, George the savage guy from a "saloon business" (Bogie again, again, again, and again), and there is Eddie Bartlett, a simple guy from one of the garages of New York (Cagney is perfect as usual). 1919. The war is over, and our heroes return home, to find again their dropped lifes. But when the new decade, the roaring twenties start, they have to continue their well-known game, "the struggle for survive." Unemployment, taxes on the ceiling, prohibition, regression. The almost forgotten veterans are not as welcomed as they thought (familiar?). Everybody needs to find his new role in the changed circumstances, so their lifes starts from different tracks, but in such a perfect screenplay like this we can bet that they will cross each other's paths pretty soon. More than they ever wanted...
The 'roaring twenties' is rather a phrase than a reference to this classic piece to describe the exceptionally hectic decade. There are better and worse explanation about its cultural-, economic-, crime- and politics related historical moment, but if you are tired to study those, this film is a really good choice to seize all its knowledge embedded into a flawless story (Walsh carefully builds the history in the background).
As I said only the screenplay would deserve already 10 out of 10. Cagney's play (he is THE gangster) is the cherry on the top (is it possible that he is a mixture of Robbie Williams and Malcolm McDowell?:)!
!!!SPOILER!!!
Did you realize that in the 30's films Cagney always kills Bogart?
Hellinger had right: "This film is a memory – and I am grateful." Me too!
10/10
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