Movie Review: The Roaring Twenties (1939)

A crime thriller set during the Prohibition era, The Roaring Twenties is a wild ride through a decade of excess, featuring the rise and fall of an ambitious racketeer. 

During the first World War, three American soldiers meet under fire on the battlefields of France. Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney) is an enthusiastic car mechanic, George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) is an acerbic saloon owner, and Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn) is an aspiring lawyer. 

Back in the United States after the war, Prohibition is introduced in 1920, creating a new and massive underground alcohol industry. In New York City Eddie meets nightclub manager Panama Smith (Gladys George) and gets into the alcohol business, with Lloyd as his reluctant lawyer. After teaming up with George, Eddie rises to become a big-time criminal manufacturing and distributing alcohol.

On his way to the top Eddie meets and falls in love with lounge singer Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane), but she is unsure about romancing a gangster and is more interested in Lloyd. Increasing levels of violence cause rifts between Eddie, Lloyd, and George, before the Great Depression upends the entire economy.

Based on the memoirs of journalist Mark Hellinger as recounted in his 1938 book The World Moves On, The Roaring Twenties captures the energy of its title. The script by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, and Robert Rossen is packed with incident, and Raoul Walsh directs with suitable vigour: the scenes are short, the years tumble by, the characters evolve, and no time is wasted as a country rides a roller coaster of nightclubs, parties, money, and violence fuelled by an unpopular law imposed on an unwilling public.

Propelled by James Cagney's irrepressible intensity, Eddie Bartlett chases the American Dream whereby a lowly mechanic can become a somebody, his rise made possible by a massive underground industry created overnight. Eddie starts with delivery, progresses to manufacturing (at first in his bathtub), then moves onto distribution, offering a range of products including luxury varieties. Along the way he forges uneasy alliances (including with George), elbows competitors out of the way, and makes plenty of enemies.

But Eddie always carries a torch for Jean, the teenager who wrote to him when he was in the trenches of France. He waits for her to grow up then sponsors her career. But while she is always grateful, she also represents Eddie's great blind spot. Over the years he fails to understand she will never respect a gangster, and remains oblivious to her blooming romance with Lloyd. Overall, Eddie is much less successful at affairs of the heart than at business: he also fails to recognize or acknowledge Panama's decade-long crush on him.

Eddie's love for Jean makes him sympathetic, as do the two men more brutal than he is: George is a cold-blooded killer when needed, as proven in an early scene during the war when he does not hesitate to snipe a teenager. And rival booze industry mobster Nick Brown (Paul Kelly) is also quick to deploy deadly tactics of intimidation.

The final act features Eddie's dramatic descent back to his roots, his fate now resting in the competing palms of George and Lloyd. Eddie can still grab the initiative for the sake of the great love of his life, and hurtles to the only place where retribution and redemption can meet.



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Movie Review: Saboteur (1942)

A spy thriller and propaganda film, Saboteur features several set-piece suspense highlights but also some creaky plotting and flat speechifying.

With World War Two raging, a deliberately-set fire destroys a military aircraft factory in Los Angeles. A worker is killed, and the victim's friend Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) believes he spotted the saboteur, a man calling himself Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd). But when no record or trace can be found of Fry, Kane himself becomes a suspect. He avoids arrest and sets out to clear his name.

Remembering an address on an envelope carried by Fry, Kane arrives at the rural ranch of respected businessman Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger), unaware he is one of the leaders of a treasonous cell. Tobin turns Kane over to the police but he escapes by jumping off a bridge, and finds refuge with kindly blind man Phillip Martin (Vaughan Glaser). Kane teams up with Phillip's initially suspicious niece Patricia (Priscilla Lane) as they dodge a nationwide search and pursue the dangerous saboteurs first to an isolated dam site and then all the way to New York City.

Filmed and released on either side of the Pearl Harbor attack, Saboteur is an evil-lurks-among-us cautionary tale. Director Alfred Hitchcock includes the requisite cringey propaganda speeches exalting the American way of life, and the film is fueled by sharply defined good and evil characterizations, with Barry Kane's innate goodness easy to spot, especially by the blind and dispossessed.

But what could have been a standard and stiff exercise in wartime morale boosting greatly benefits from Hitchcock's talent for building up suspenseful moments. Saboteur features several elegant setpieces, including Barry evading the police with a breathtaking jump from a bridge, then hiding his handcuffed hands at Martin's house, and a cat and mouse game at a lavish New York City ballroom party.

And finally the climax atop the Statue of Liberty is a classic cliffhanger with ingenious use of special effects, the famous monument a suitable reminder of what's at stake as her raised hand with the torch of enlightenment hosts the final battle between wholesomeness and hate.

Between the film's highlights Hitchcock stitches together a decent on-the-run thriller, although narrative coherence in the final third starts to slip, hampered by clunky and rushed scene transitions. The entire plot is also dependent on some sustained imbecilic actions by both the plotters and the enforcement authorities.

The cast is one of the most underpowered of any of Hitchcock's American-made movies. Neither Robert Cummings nor Priscilla Lane were first choice for the project, but their relative plain anonymity suits the theme of ordinary American resistance to homegrown malevolence. Saboteur lacks stardust, but compensates with sly craft.

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