Product Description

Six classic movies focusing on gangsters.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 25-JAN-2005
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12689 in DVD
• Brand: BOGART,HUMPHREY
• Released on: 2005-01-25
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 106 minutes

Features

• Three World War I buddies clash in a vicious bootlegging racket. Based on a Mark Hellinger story.Running Time: 107 min. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR Age: 012569690820 UPC: 012569690820 Manufacturer No: 66908

Amazon.com
Three doughboys--played by James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Jeffrey Lynn--meet in a foxhole in Europe just as World War I is ending. When they return to the States, they are forgotten men, and after Eddie (Cagney) tries in vain to get his old job back, his pal Danny (Frank McHugh) lets him drive his cab at night. A fare asks unwitting Eddie to deliver bootleg liquor, but Prohibition is in full swing and Eddie is arrested and thrown in the slammer. Gallant Eddie won't rat out the woman to whom he delivered the hooch, speakeasy owner Panama Smith, (whiskey-voiced Gladys George). She bails him out and carries a torch for him for the rest of the movie, but he only has eyes for sweet little Jean (Priscilla Lane). Panama introduces Eddie to a life of crime, staking him in the bootleg business. Eddie's grit and bluster suit him perfectly for this existence, and he's soon a success, so he hires Army buddy Lloyd (Lynn) as consigliere, then teams up with George (Bogart), a liquor smuggler who plays a much dirtier game. Racketeering and murder are his methods, and he drags Eddie down with him. When Prohibition ends and the stock market crashes, Eddie loses everything and takes to the bottle himself.

The film is a bit schematic. The three stars are archetypes: Cagney the good boy gone bad, Bogart the bad boy who stays bad, and Lynn the good boy who stays good. Still, it packs quite an emotional wallop--Cagney shows extraordinary range, going from green boy to swaggering gangster to broken man, and Bogart has rarely seemed more purely evil than he does here. He kills for the sheer pleasure of it; it's truly frightening to see. The final scene is a stunning shootout between Cagney and Bogart. With lesser actors this film could be pure hokum. With Cagney and Bogart, it attains catharsis. Laura Mirsky

Customer Reviews

I'm Just Wild About Harry
In 1939 the world was moving on. Warner Brothers, the Hollywood studio that owed its existence to Prohibition and the Volstead Act, was slowly weaning itself from gangster movies. The genre's greatest star, James Cagney, was heartily sick of playing gangsters - How many ways can you hit a guy, anyway?
THE ROARING TWENTIES, from the story "The World Moves On" by popular Broadway columnist Mark Hellinger, was `a memory' of the era Warners mined so successfully, and profitably, in the thirties. It stars Cagney as Eddie Bartlett, a more-or-less good guy who fought in World War I only to return to a country that didn't quite know what to do with all of her returning soldiers. Bartlett's two army buddies figure prominently in his eventual rise and fall - the slimy George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) and golden boy Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn). Bartlett's first touch of the Big Bottom occurs early on after his return. The job he'd thought was waiting for him when he got home is filled by someone else, and soon enough he sees and grabs at the opportunities presented by Prohibition. Bartlett's ascent begins when he begins to manufacture his own bathtub gin. Along the way Barlett enlists the services of old foxhole buddies Hally (right-hand gunsel) and Hart (legal advisor). Bartlett goes into the speakeasy business with Panama Smith (Gladys George) and falls hard for pretty young Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane). Of course it's lonely at the top, and with treacherous associates like Hally and rivals like Nick Brown (Paul Kelly), precarious as well.
Cagney may have been sick of playing gangsters by 1939, but it's hard to tell that from his performance. There's just something right about everything he does with a character who has to travel, convincingly, from the gutter to the penthouse, and then back again to the gutter. It's a consummate performance, and director Raoul Walsh, best known as an action director, handles the intimate moments with delicacy and sensitivity. Barlett's forlorn love for good-girl Jean, with good-boy Lloyd lurking around in the background, is doomed from the start, and Walsh and Cagney explore it to good effect. Gladys George's Panama's miscast affections are also delicately painted. Walsh balances the quieter moments with action scenes that would have fit comfortably in the later-day gangster films of Coppola and Scorsese. In fact, the shootout in Nick Brown's diner is an obvious template for a similar scene in The Godfather.
THE ROARING TWENTIES is a masterpiece. The transfer print is in very good condition - I was so wrapped up in the story I really didn't notice any flicks or flacks. Warners has loaded this one with fun extras. There's a twenty minute feature titled "The Roaring Twenties: Time Moves On" featuring director Martin Scorsese and film experts Lincoln Hurst, Alain Silver, Mark Viera and Andrew Sarris. The theme is the end of the gangster movie cycle and Cagney's and Bogart's careers. The other special feature is Warner Night at the Movies, which opens with a trailer; a 1939 newsreel ("Worlds of Tomorrow"); a charming Lloyd French directed "All-Girl Revue" that features a young June Allyson as `mayor for a day' singing the forgettable "We've Got to Make the City Pretty"; a Grouch Club entry titled "The Great Library Misery"; and a color cartoon, "Thugs With a Dirty Mug."

Cagney and Bogie as bootleggers
One of my all-time favorite gangster movies. The Roaring 20's features James Cagney at his best as a returning WWI vet who has lost his job , turns to bootlegging and muscles his way to the top. Cagney is at his wisecracking tough guy peak in this and he is given a run for his money by Humphrey Bogart as his WWI buddy turned partner turned rival.
The movie traces these characters through the tumultuous speakeasy days. Cagney's character falls for a young singer who is in love with a young straightshooting attorney. Eddie(Cagney) has one loyal admirer in Panama Smith an aging speakeasy manager who is played flawlessly by Gladys George. She delivers the most memorable line in the movie "Get a Victrola- Jughead".

The story culminates with Eddie being ruined financially and having a showdown with Bogart's character that results in the death scene to end all death scenes. Cagney's staggeriing down the street and collapsing on the church steps after being shot has been often imitated but never duplicated.

A great movie and a piece of film history that stands up to repeated viewings.

All the Way Up, and All the Way Down
That's the symbolism at the end of "The Roaring Twenties", my all-time favorite James Cagney movie. What a joy to watch Cagney as he plays Eddie Bartlett, a doughboy who can't get a job after WWI, and who stumbles into the racketeering world by accident. It's a world about tuxedo clad toughs who pack heaters and gats, and speakeasies raided by cops on the make, two-timing ingenues and shady ladies with hearts of gold. And ultimately, a world set right by truth, justice, and the repeal of Prohibition. Supporting Cagney's gangster protagonist is a wonderful ensemble cast. Gladys George has been around the block, but gets stuck on Eddie; Priscilla Lane is the baby face that Eddie's ga-ga about, who sings "Melancholy Baby", "It Had to Be You" and other great songs of the period; Frank McHugh is Eddie's sidekick from the trenches to the big time; and Humphrey Bogart is the rat fink who chisels and kills with very little effort or remorse. "The Roaring Twenties" is a great movie about a good boy who fell in with the wrong crowd, expertly put over by that prince of the gangster movies, James Cagney. Take it out for a little ride back to your VCR.