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So much average

Fresh and Exciting

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

best movie i've ever seen.

The title implies a fun movie, but in fact is depressing throughout. The movie starts out with three infantrymen in a trench, with Bogart rather than Cagney proving to be the nasty psychopath who genuinely loves killing. The war ends and Cagney finds he cannot get his old job back in the automotive repair shop after two years' absence. He gets a job as a taxi driver, unaware that he is part of a liquor bootlegging racket, and is caught and arrested...and later is essentially forced into working in this racket. He prospers and his war buddy becomes his lawyer, but wants out when a mutual friend gets killed. Then there is the other war buddy who is a rival in the rackets...Unlike "The Public Enemy", Cagney does not voluntarily join the rackets, and is never happy while in them. Arguably one of the strongest gangster movies which is not a morality play as such.

James Cagney as Boot-Legger kingpin Eddie Bartlett drinks "cow juice" exclusively as he rises to the top of the illegal booze biz, but fuel's his downhill slide with "the hard stuff" when She does him wrong. Priscilla Lane is perfectly cast as Eddie's teasing Femme Fatale Jean, while Humphrey Bogart is not much more than a window dressing piece of furniture only to be used by Jean to flatten her no longer convenient love triangle. Bogart's big moment comes less than five minutes into this ROARING TWENTIES tale, when he gleefully guns down a German teenager three seconds before an Armistice ends WWI. Like many "Great War" heroes, Sgt. Bartlett is all but forced at gunpoint by the U.S. government into a life of crime. As I heard a couple weeks ago on the Coast-to-Coast overnight news program, American President Hoover had future U.S. WWII generals Eisenhower, Patton, and MacArthur expend this country's leftover supply of poison gas to liquidate thousands of WWI vets (plus their wives and kids) when they came to Washington, DC, to lobby for restoration of their pension "guarantees" which Hoover had embezzled. (These were the original "I can't breathe" demonstrations.)

I've seen this movie on the big screen in several different settings; the Strand on Market street in frisco after Cagney's death; LACMA; the old Pussycat theatre on Hollywood blvd. this Raoul Walsh gangster starring two-gun Jimmy Cagney unfolds as the title suggests - over the course of the 1920s. the support is perfect - Jeffrey Lynn as the idealist; Priscilla Lane as the ideal; Frank McHugh as the sidekick; Gladys George as the wised up dame; Humphrey Bogart, the sociopath. This film has gained some devotees, showing at museums and revival houses over the past two decades. now it's considered one the best of the Warner's cycle. with the backstage musical Footlight Parade and turn in the masterwork the Public Enemy, this is Cagney at his best.

Sometimes I come to a film because it looks like it can directly fulfill, sometimes because it can provide precious background to other things that matter, letting them stand. It's watchable in itself, this one; a misfit's rise and fall played against the passing of times. Released on the cusp of WWII, it opened a portal back to more careless times, taking us on a journey from WWI trenches through the highs of Prohibition to the lows of Depression, so we could have this clear moral stance: in the new world there's no room for scoundrels. Right.Interesting here is that only a year or two before Citizen Kane we have a similar saga about the passing of the times, but one that asks no fundamental question of us, casts no doubt on its testimony. It's as lurid and constructed as newspaper headlines of the time, a main contrast in Welles' film about its world-creating newspaperman. It's machinegun history written in the staccato sounds of a newspaperman's typewriter.What I really wanted to see though was Cagney. I am in the middle of a film noir quest looking for its machinery, and as an aside I was brought to explore its roots in 1930's crime stuff. Cagney is a force in this niche. He had so much energy that he could turn into presence. He is not just amused, he doesn't coast on pushing things back like Bogart; he throws himself on the encounter, bitterly cutting himself on the edges. Not so here. He was asked to play a basically decent guy led astray by the prospect of easy money, meaning to reflect the broader American endeavor that ended on Black Tuesday. Usually in a Cagney film he lets loose in the end. They asked of him here the precise opposite; he sleepwalks, numbed by failure, a human ruin clawing at redemption. He looks like he gives it his all, but it's just not who he is. It's as if you asked Welles to strut like Wayne. If you want to see Cagney in top form, look him up in Footlight Parade fully in command of a show, White Heat to see him face real demons.