The Roaring Twenties | |
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Theatrical release poster
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Directed by | Raoul Walsh |
Produced by |
Hal B. Wallis Samuel Bischoff |
Written by |
Jerry Wald Richard Macaulay Robert Rossen |
Based on |
The World Moves On (1938) by Mark Hellinger |
Starring |
James Cagney Priscilla Lane Humphrey Bogart Gladys George |
Music by |
Ray Heindorf Heinz Roemheld |
Cinematography | Ernest Haller |
Edited by | Jack Killifer |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. |
Release date
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Running time
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104 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
The Roaring Twenties is a 1939 crime thriller starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, and Gladys George. The epic movie, spanning the periods between 1919 and 1933, was directed by Raoul Walsh and written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen based on "The World Moves On," a short story by Mark Hellinger, a columnist who had been hired by Jack L. Warner to write screenplays. The movie is hailed as a classic in the gangster movie genre, and considered an homage to the classic gangster movie of the early 1930s.
The Roaring Twenties was the third and last film that Cagney and Bogart made together. The other two were Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Oklahoma Kid (1939).
Three men meet in a foxhole during the waning days of World War I: Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney), George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) and Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn), and experience trials and tribulations from the Armistice through the passage of the 18th Amendment leading to the Prohibition period of the 1920s and the violence which erupted due to it, all the way through the 1929 stock market crash to its conclusion at the end of 1933, only days after the 21st Amendment brought an end to the Prohibition era.