"He used to be a big shot"

“It may come to pass that, at some distant date, we will be confronted with another period similar to the one depicted in this photoplay. If that happens, I pray that the events, as dramatized here, will be remembered. In this film, the characters are composites of people I knew, and the situations are those that actually occurred. Bitter or sweet, mot memories become precious as the years move on. This film is a memory – and I am grateful for it.” This text signed by Mark Hellinger is the foreword of "The Roaring Twenties"(1939), movie directed by Raoul Walsh and situated somewhere on the top of my list for gangster movies.

What i appreciated the most in "The Roaring Twnties" was its documentary attempt – different from the regular plots of late thirties gangster movies – to deal with a very important social and economical matter in the history of the United States: the period of Prohibition, correlated with the aftermath of World War I. The movie follows the life of Eddie Bartlett (beautifully played by brilliant James Cagney), one of the American soldiers who had fought in WWI, only to return home after two years and find a society which didn’t seem to want to reintegrate either him or his fellow-soldiers. Under the circumstances, the only way left for him was to adapt was to take advantage of the Prohibition, and therefore, he becomes part of a network of organized crime, faking and selling alcohol, until the stock market crash in 1929. The drama in Eddie's social life and its brutal fall, after losing everything he had (except for one cab which his back-stabbing partner George Hally - played by Humphrey Bogart), are doubled by the drama in Eddie's love life, the girl (Priscilla Lane) for whom he would sacrifice everything leaving him for the higher-style lawyer Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn).

In addition to the movie, i also watched a very interesting DVD bonus: the documentary The Roaring Twenties: The World Moves On, in which great names such as Martin Scorsese, Lincoln Hurst, Eric Lax or Alain Silver express their own views on the movie.