| Warner Bros. | Release Date: October 28, 1939 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
13
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The movie has an epic sweep that anticipated and influenced the best gangster movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of which it is fully the equal. [18 Aug 2010]
During the 1930s, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were masters of the gangster role. They made three films together. Two of them, Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939), were among the best gangster epics of the decade. [05 Jan 1997, p.48]
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.
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Walsh and producer Mark Hellinger's classic ultra-tough gangster opus about World War I, Prohibition and good-hearted mobster Jimmy Cagney's breezy rise and grim fall. [18 Feb 2005, p.C6]
If you fed the earlier gangster movies into a machine and made a prototype, you'd come up with this picture.
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