Film

The Roaring Twenties

Name: The Roaring Twenties
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Released: 1939
Cast: James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Gladys George, Jeffrey Lynn

James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart headline this seminal Prohibition gangster picture, narrated with newsreel-style captions that frame the whole thing as history already written. It's less shoot-'em-up than lament: a scrappy WWI vet claws his way up through bootlegging only to be undone by love, loyalty and bad timing. Elegiac, propulsive, and the template every rise-and-fall gangster film since has quietly borrowed from.

TMDb rating

7.5

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Cagney and Bogart together again, a year earlier, same studio machine, same Warner Bros grit — this time as childhood friends who took opposite paths.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Little Caesar1931no page yet

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Scorsese's answer to the same question Roaring Twenties asks — what the business does to a man — filtered through cocaine and voiceover instead of Prohibition and dissolves.

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A sprawling, elegiac gangster epic that shares Roaring Twenties' sense of Prohibition as a lost American age, just stretched across decades and drenched in regret.

But Nearly four hours in its full cut, and deliberately, achingly slow.

Underworld1927

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