James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart (who was just about to become a big star) team up here, with Cagney as a more easy-going sort of guy and Bogie as a strictly low-down type (one of his best lines: "He won't be 16"). The strength of the movie is where it plays very much like a historical newsreel headline, taking us through the intervening years from our first meeting with both men fighting together in the WWI trenches, and then later as they become ordinary citizens again and lose contact for a bit; Cagney tries unsuccessfully to get back his old job at the local auto garage but when he's turned away, decides he has to stoop to running his own bootleg liquor business when Prohibition sets in by the '20s. His is a much less conventional gangster type this time around, but he still doesn't hesitate to step into his disgruntled "mobster" mode when he gets occasionally perturbed. Not as consistent as some of Warner Bros.' earlier films of the genre, but still a good one. *** out of ****
Review of The Roaring Twenties
