The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Men really knew how to dress in gangster pictures.

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, Robert Rossen, Mark Hellinger (story)

Starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Jeffrey Lynn

Whatever else Prohibition might have been responsible for, it certainly did the cinema a world of good. I rambled on last time about the three genres with exclusively American roots: the musical, the western, the gangster flick. Musicals come from the stage, of course, from the Vaudeville traditions that gave us so many early screen greats. Westerns come from, well, the west, that grand American foundation myth of brave heroes taming the wilderness.

But the gangster flick wouldn't exist without Prohibition; not merely because of the wealth of stories the era offered up, but also – crucially – because of the glamorisation of crime it engendered. The Eighteenth Amendment was hugely unpopular across much of the United States – especially in the major cities – and fighting it grew into a popular crusade. In the westerns, the bandits were there to be defeated by the dashing, maverick hero; in the gangster flick, the leaden-footed enforcers of a hated law were the villains, the bootleggers the stars of the show.

And the violence? Nobody, wherever they live, wants violence in their lives. But most Americans were never affected by the Tommy guns and the beatings; these existed in newspaper reports, on the radio, on the screen, not on their street. Just as war when seen from a distance has heroism without the brutality, nobility without the squalor, so the rise of the bloodthirsty gangster and the millionaire who took his money from the hands of the dead and dying couldn't possibly be so grim and repellent when projected onto the silver screen.

Time provides even more distance than geography. When Prohibition sank unmourned in 1933, the bootlegging era was cut adrift*, and its heroes and villains became ever more distant, and ever easier to build into tales of adventure and dynamism. After all, that period was half-over by the time sound – another essential ingredient of the gangster flick – made its way into the movies, and nostalgia never struggled to find a way into the stories and legends that were already growing apace.

The Roaring Twenties is a very nostalgic gangster film. Cagney may be playing a criminal, he may be playing a man of violence, but there's never any question that his heart is in the right place: here is a man who just wanted his job back when he returned from the Great War, and when that was denied him, he had no other choice but to pursue a life of crime. He devotes himself to helping a young girl who wrote to him during the war, and when she goes off with a fellow more her own age, he's disappointed but never vengeful. Even in a genre that relished nostalgia, the rosiness of Raoul Walsh's view back to the 20s is strikingly simplistic and uncritical.

Yet, for all that, it's in no way a bad film. Suspend your disbelief for a moment – just as you would for all those westerns which aren't filthy and ridden with disease, malnutrition, poverty and gore; just as you would for all those musicals where bursting into co-ordinated song in an instant seems a perfectly normal thing to do – suspend your disbelief, and the charm of the lost world and the deep-down-goodness of Cagney's gangster-hero is as engaging as it is delightfully crafted. The Roaring Twenties is as much a nostalgic homage to the genre as it is to the era it glorifies, and a thoroughly enjoyable one at that. Forget realism, this is just very good cinema storytelling

*of course, in reality, most of those involved simply moved on to other things – criminal organisations of that size were never likely to just disappear overnight. But it makes a better movie for their kingpins to end the story dead or defeated, particularly for gangster films in the 30s and 40s, before the world had entirely moved on, before a more critical and impartial eye could be cast on events of the time. Later gangster pictures – notably Leone's Once Upon A Time In America – tend more to reflect the continuation of organised crime into other areas once alcohol became legal again.