Synopsis
The Roaring Twenties (1939) is a Warner Bros. gangster landmark you can watch online on iFILM. Director Raoul Walsh put James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart together as two veterans returning from World War I with no money and few options. Prohibition-era New York turns out to have a use for both of them.
Eddie (Cagney) drives a cab, stumbles into bootlegging, and within a few years runs an operation that spans the city. George (Bogart) takes the same road with considerably less sentiment about it. Their partnership holds as long as the business holds — when things turn, so do they. Priscilla Lane plays the singer Eddie loses his judgment over, while the law slowly tightens its grip on everyone involved.
Made at the peak of Warner Bros.' grip on the genre, the film leans on Cagney's particular gift for playing men who destroy themselves chasing something that was never going to hold. Less a crime thriller than an elegy for a wrong turn. Stream The Roaring Twenties (1939) online on iFILM.
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