filmbriefs
Director

Raoul Walsh

1
brief
9:51
average
10 min
in total
On film.briefs1
video still
9:51

The Roaring Twenties

Raoul Walsh · 1939

The Roaring Twenties (1939) is a studio-crafted gangster film that uses the interwar years as architecture—not archive. It honours early-1930s genre conventions while narrowing the decade to a single masculine trajectory: rise, rule, ruin. Its specificity (1919–1933, Hellinger source, Walsh direction) makes it a useful artifact—not of the twenties, but of how Hollywood repackaged them on the cusp of war.