Metacritic reviews

Bogart and Cagney are gloriously dark in this gangster tour-de-force.

One of the many classic movies from “the greatest of all years”, 1939 (see also The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and Stagecoach), this epic gangster flick dares to provide psychological back stories for the characters.

This is an exciting, sweeping vision of American life, which treats crime like the ultimate small business, crushed by the machinations of the truly powerful.

Raoul Walsh’s essential 1939 gangster movie that turns Prohibition into a tragic nostalgia trip, is a terrifically entertaining film in its own right, rough and witty and fast on its feet in a way that only a ‘30’s Hollywood production could be. But it’s also a historically vital hinge movie of sorts, for its director, for its stars, and even for its genre, which was reaching maturity at the end of the decade that saw its central archetypes created.

Climaxing with a tableau that’s as iconic as it is melodramatic, The Roaring Twenties revels in a relativism that keeps its momentum fresh and elusive.

The over-all tone of the drama—concerning foxhole friends who end up as partners in crime but rivals in love—evokes the flailings of unformed men whom a heedless society tossed in harm’s way and then cast aside.

Most impressive for its frantic pace and its suggestion that in times of Depression almost everyone is corruptible, it's also a perverse elegy to a decade of upheaval.

Because of James Cagney and the story’s circumstances, The Roaring Twenties is reminiscent of Public Enemy. Story and dialog are good. Raoul Walsh turns in a fine directorial job; the performances are uniformly excellent.

A trio of writers took New York critic turned studio exec Mark Hellinger’s notion for a “Roaring” era gangster saga and peppered it with enough snappy dialogue to pass for a screwball comedy.

With a commentator's voice interpolating ultra-dramatic commonplaces as the film unreels, their melodrama has taken on an annoying pretentiousness which neither the theme nor its treatment can justify.