The Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties is a 1939 crime thriller starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, and Gladys George. The epic movie, spanning the periods between 1919 and 1933, was directed by Raoul Walsh and written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen based on The World Moves On, a short story by Mark Hellinger, a columnist who had been hired by Jack L. Warner to write screenplays. The movie is hailed as a classic in the gangster movie genre, and considered an homage to the classic gangster movie of the early 1930s.

Three men meet in a foxhole during the waning days of World War I Eddie Bartlett James Cagney, George Hally Humphrey Bogart and Lloyd Hart Jeffrey Lynn, and experience trials and tribulations from the Armistice through the passage of the 18th Amendment leading to the Prohibition period of the 1920s and the violence which erupted due to it, all the way through the 1929 stock market crash to its conclusion at the end of 1933, only days after the 21st Amendment brought an end to the Prohibition era.Following World War I, Lloyd Hart starts his law practice, George Hally, a former saloon keeper, becomes a bootlegger, and Eddie Bartlett, a garage mechanic, finds his old job filled. At the suggestion of his friend Danny Green Frank McHugh, Eddie becomes a cab driver. While unknowingly delivering a package of liquor to Panama Smith Gladys George, he is arrested. Panama is acquitted and after a short stint in jail, they go into the bootlegging business together. Eddie uses a fleet of cabs to deliver his liquor, and he hires Lloyd as his lawyer to handle his legal issues. He remeets Jean Sherman Priscilla Lane, who is now an adult a girl he formerly corresponded with during the war while she was in high school working at a nightclub. Eddie gives her a job singing in Hendersons cabaret, where Panama is hostess. Eddie wants Jean as his wife, but she does not return his affections. ........

Source: Wikipedia