Raoul Walsh's, "The Roaring Twenties" (1939)

It seems that director Raoul Walsh (1887-1980) only came to film as the logical extension of his life as a career adventurer.

At the age of fifteen, while accompanying his sea captain uncle back from a rum delivery to Cuba, a hurricane crippled their vessel and forced them to land in Vera Cruz, Mexico. Young Walsh spent the remaining summer months learning to ride a horse and rope steer and eventually took a job on a cattle drive headed for Texas. He left his uncle and the ship in Vera Cruz and left the news to reach his parents in its own good time. He worked as a Cowboy in the waning days of the American west and to hear him tell it, his life was essentially a continuous B-western from the ages of 15-20.

At nineteen Walsh the cowboy sat on the front porch of a hotel in San Antonio, nursing an injured leg when a theater producer came up and asked, "Cowboy, do you want a job?" Walsh said yes and thus he was cast as an extra in a stage production of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (the source material for D.W. Griffith's incendiary 1914 film, Birth of A Nation. In which Walsh would play John Wilkes Booth.) He stayed with the production as it toured the U.S. eventually landing back home in New York, where his parents had been receiving occasional post cards and only slight intimation of the life Raoul had been living.

Having caught the acting bug he was advised to find an agent and was offered work in the slap-dash acting back water of moving pictures. Anathema to, "serious," actors, a willing specimen like Raoul was immediately directed to Union Hill, New Jersey and a meeting with film pioneers the Pathé Bros.

Walsh's film career stretches from the very earliest days of movies, in low-rent warehouses on the New Jersey shore, through the height of Jazz-age opulence, working with D.W. Griffith, Gloria Swanson and Douglas Fairbanks, through the mythic golden age where his direction added luster to the careers of James Cagney, John Wayne and Humphery Bogart and into the waning days of the studio system. To call him a Hollywood archetype is to radically overestimate the industry's ability to honor legacies such as his.

The Roaring Twenties finds Walsh helming a cross breed of vital and reliable formulas. It uses the Brothers-in-Arms device of a film like What Price Glory cross hatched with the mis-spent-life-parable as with any gangster picture you care to name. But as usual in the best entertainments the formula is only a reliable beginning.

We Meet doughboy Edie Bartlett (James Cagney) fighting in the trenches of WWI. He [literally] falls in with hard egg George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) and rattled good guy Lloyd Hart (Jeffery Lynn). Their battlefield scenes have a snap and resonance that does more than any special effect could to build an atmosphere of conflict. The rapport between the curt Cagney and long-vowled Bogart reeks of simmering discord.

The war ends and the boys return home to a country not anxious to accommodate their return. Eddie's old job is taken. The girl he's corresponded with turns out to be a teenager and prohibition is turning the screws on the culture at large. The strains of melodrama swell as Eddie meets Panama Smyth (Gladdys George) the owner of a speak easy and is drawn into the world of bootlegging. He eventually comes into conflict with Bogart and clashes with the Jeffery Lynn character over a mutual love interest.

The devices in this film, from the pompous narration, to the shoulda-coulda-woulda speeches that pop up for character after character and the over emphasized descent into evil and purifying comeuppance, were 100% hack work even in 1939. But the performances of Cagney, Bogart, Gladdys George and character great Frank McHugh, compounded by Walsh's ability to set pace and really deliver a death scene (consider his list of great demises: Bogart in High Sierra, Cagney in White Heat and here, the street tough's bleak pieta on the snowy steps of a church) display the essence of film alchemy: base materials made precious by mysterious craft.