The Roaring Twenties
and White Heat

Then as now, there are always those actors that capture the public's fancy by acting out some of the most anti-social behavior on American movie screens. Everybody loves a good bad guy and, for audiences during Hollywood's Golden Age, James Cagney played evil with the kind of zeal that kept audiences coming back for more and more.

Warner Brothers, continuing to dip into its near-endless well of classic catalog titles, recently released a slew of tommy-gun-totin', rat-rubbin'-out'n, cigar-chompin' nasties onto DVD, including these two Raoul Walsh-directed gems that marked Cagney's swan song in the genre that made him a star.

The less well known of the pair, 1939's The Roaring Twenties, features not only Cagney but his rival bad-boy Humphrey Bogart as a pair of bootleggers during the titular period in American history. Cagney's Eddie Bartlett is a man more or less forced into a life of crime due to desperate circumstances. A World War I combat vet, he returns to the States at war's end only to find himself one of many unemployed vets looking for opportunity in the country they just finished fighting for. A chance encounter with the law makes him consider the profits to be made from selling the recently-criminalized booze that America wanted to drown its postwar miseries in.

Enter Humphrey Bogart, Cagney's old army buddy, who comes on board as the muscle in the operation. Unlike Cagney, Bogart's character is bad to the bone and has no qualms about wasting whoever gets in his way, including Cagney. Raoul Walsh's direction gives the film an epic sweep, a breakneck pace, and several enjoyable supporting characters. This was the last gangster film Cagney made for ten years and it also marked the start of Humphrey Bogart's rise to stardom, transforming him from second string hood to the Bogey we all know and love.

When Cagney and director Raoul Walsh returned to the genre ten years later (to make White Heat), they created an out of control classic that gave us the catchphrase "Top of the world, ma!" and gave us Cody Jarrett, THE archetypal gangster for everything that followed. Unlike the previous film's Eddie Bartlett, Jarrett is evil from the beginning and Cagney takes full advantage of this psychotic role, pulling out all the stops.

Hitting the ground running with an opening train robbery sequence, the film announces right from the start that it has you by the throat and has no intention of letting go. A psychotic momma's boy suffering from migraine headaches and a severe case of distrust for anything that walks or crawls that isn't his mother -- a way of thinking that bears ironic fruit by the film's end -- Cody Jarrett loves being a bad guy. There's glee in his eyes when he kills those who cross him. My personal favorite is his riposte to an enemy stuck in the trunk of a car: "I'll give ya some air!" He then snaps and empties his gun into the back of the car.

Virginia Mayo plays Verna, one of the trashiest gun molls ever seen in a movie, a woman who snores, spits, drinks hard, and is ready to trip up Cody the minute an opportunity arises. But the real marvel on the female side is Margaret Wycherly as Cagney's scheming and equally psychotic mother, a portrayal made all the more disturbing by the fact that their relationship is the central romance in the film.

And the film ends with a bang, literally.

Extras for both discs are identical in layout. Scholarly commentary tracks on both discs (by Lincoln Hurst on The Roaring Twenties and Drew Casper on White Heat) do an excellent job of analyzing not only the films but their place in the genre and the careers of the key participants. I lean a little more toward Casper's commentary on White Heat because of his obvious love and zeal for the film he's discussing.

Both of these fellows appear in featurettes on both discs that not only use the two of them but a host of other heavy-hitter film historians, including Eric Lax, Andrew Sarris, and Martin Scorsese! They bring their considerable knowledge to each film, its making, and its influence. My only qualm with the featurettes is the brief running time of each. With guys like these, a little extra time would have been perfectly welcome. As it is, it almost feels like they're being cut off.

Happily, each disc also contains the "Warner Night At The Movies" feature that Warner Home Video has been including with a lot of their classic titles and each provides the viewer with a little helping of Hollywood ephemera: newsreels, vintage trailers, comedy shorts, and classic cartoons. The Tex Avery cartoon, "Thugs With Dirty Mugs" (on The Roaring Twenties disc), is almost worth the price of the DVD on its own.

This is another home run for the folks at Warner Home Video, just don't get any ideas about drillin' dirty rats when you're through enjoying the films. -- Christopher Hyatt