Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Roaring Twenties
1939 · Raoul Walsh · The Roaring Twenties on Sightlines
The image you keep from The Roaring Twenties may be one with nobody in it. Tape spilling out of a stock ticker. Newspapers spinning up into the lens. Marching men, a shoreline of seized liquor going up in flame, champagne glasses breaking in layers on top of one another, and over all of it an announcer's voice with the flat authority of a newsreel. Warner Bros. had a montage department by 1939, and these passages are usually credited to that unit and to Don Siegel, then a young specialist in the form. Optical printer, stock footage, miniatures, specially shot inserts. They take seconds and they buy years.
Which raises a question worth holding onto: why does a James Cagney picture keep interrupting James Cagney?
Start with what it does when it isn't interrupting him. Deleuze's name for the working engine of classical cinema is the action-image: a person perceives a situation, the situation presses, they act, and the act changes things. Cause, effect, consequence, carried by continuity cutting that makes the chain feel like the natural order of the world. Deleuze separates a large form from a small one. In the large form an entire environment bears down until a decisive act transforms it. Eddie Bartlett gets that form at full power. He comes back from France to a country with no job for him, drives a cab, carries a package he didn't know was liquor, gets pinched, and walks out of it with a plan. Inside an hour of screen time he commands a fleet and an empire. Walsh stages it for movement and physical business rather than static composition, and Cagney supplies the rest with his shoulders.
Deleuze has a precise word for the environment in that circuit. The synsign, or encompasser: not the set, but the whole weather of forces that calls a particular act out of a particular man. Usually you have to infer it. Wet streets, a headline, a breadline at the edge of a shot. The Roaring Twenties says it out loud. Mark Hellinger was a New York newspaper columnist before he was a producer, and he built the picture on a signed foreword and a narrator's running chronicle of the era. That is the film's specific invention: the encompasser becomes audible, and then it becomes visible, because the montages are the encompasser given scenes of its own. They aren't transitions. They're the other main character.
None of this arrives from nowhere; Walsh is quoting a discourse he helped start. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley put criminal life in a real tenement street and treated it as documentary texture rather than melodrama backdrop. Walsh's own Regeneration (1915) found the rise-from-the-slums arc and the kinetic street action he is still using twenty-four years later, with mourning added. Underworld codified the doomed sympathetic gangster and the deep-shadow underworld lighting that Ernest Haller hardens another step toward the noir of the following decade. Little Caesar supplied the shape, ambition to ascendancy to isolation to death on the street. The Public Enemy built the Cagney body itself. And Scarface worked out the grammar of headlines and gunfire and calendar time compressed into a reel, which is exactly the grammar Siegel's unit inherits and then expands from one criminal career to a whole country's.
Deleuze reads Griffith as the inventor of an organic montage: parts converging into a whole, parallel lines that finally meet, individual and milieu explaining each other. Warner's montage unit takes that convergence and makes it historical. Private fortune and public tide get cut into the same sequence until you can't pull them apart. The crowds inside those passages behave the way Deleuze says a crowd behaves here: as a dividual, a collective rendered as one feeling rather than a sum of persons. Marching men. A breadline. A generation with a single face. The film's whole argument is that Eddie is a case of that face, not an exception to it.
Within the drama the circuit runs on a binomial, Deleuze's term for force set against force. Cagney's Eddie is volatile, sentimental, loyal past the point of sense. Bogart's George Hally is cold, pragmatic, unbothered by anything. They're one mechanism with two ends. Deleuze calls the bond between a man and his moment the imprint: situation stamps character, character stamps situation, until you can read either off the other. Panama Smith speaks that imprint in six words on the steps. He used to be a big shot. Not he was. Used to be. Past tense, dated, belonging to a decade that has closed.
Then comes the crash, and something goes wrong with the engine. Deleuze dates the crisis of the action-image to after 1945, to characters who perceive perfectly well and can no longer act adequately on what they perceive. This film is six years early and doesn't go all the way, but the tremor is there and it's the most interesting thing in it. 1929 is a situation against which no act is available. Eddie isn't outfought. He's liquidated by a market. The tragedy is doubly determined, by his flaws and by impersonal forces no individual virtue could withstand, and it's that second half the classical action-image cannot metabolize. Watch what happens to the rooms. The boom is staged in crowded, energetic tableaux, packed bars, dancing, the machinery of the rackets. The decline empties them. Those late spaces are a first approach to what Deleuze calls the any-space-whatever, a place that has stopped being a stage for action and become somewhere to endure.
Which is what the ending is. Eddie's last stretch of screen time is a walk, a stagger, a collapse on the snow-covered steps of a church, the diagonal and the isolating darkness lighting a gangster's death into something close to a Pietà. Deleuze has a category for that: the reflection-image, where an act is no longer performed but transposed into a figure, a pose, a piece of spectacle carrying the meaning the action can't carry anymore. It is also, frankly, a Production Code solution. Enforcement since 1934 had made the unrepentant criminal impossible, so Warner historicized the lawlessness and put the body into an attitude of grace. The constraint produced the image.
A decade later Robert Warshow would argue that the gangster was America's tragic hero, the man who must succeed and must be destroyed for succeeding. Walsh gets there first and adds something the essay doesn't need: he presents the tragedy as journalism. The foreword likens the picture to a newspaper account of a vanished age; the narration treats the fiction as documented fact. That's a borrowed contract. Documentary's guarantee, that what you're watching happened, is lent to a melodrama so the melodrama can be read as record. Nothing in the film is a lie, exactly. A studio simply built a truth-effect and used it to turn a genre picture into history.
That's the significance. Warner invented the gangster film in 1930 and 1931. In 1939 it made the first one that looks back. A genre that can date itself can be mourned, quoted, revived, argued with, and every crime picture since that opens with a year on the screen and a voice telling you what the country was like is working inside machinery Hellinger and the montage bench assembled here. The people scattered into what came next: Haller's low-key nights into noir, Siegel off the montage bench into directing, Robert Rossen from staff writer into a directing career, Bogart out of stock heavies into the thing he became.
Watch it again and try this. During the montages, ask who is acting. Nobody is. The tickers act, the newspapers act, the years act, and then the film cuts back to Cagney and hands him a decade he doesn't control and can't outrun. The question it leaves open is the one the next twenty years of cinema had to answer: what does a hero do when the situation is larger than any available act? Walsh's answer is to let him fall on the steps and have a woman say a sentence in the past tense. It wasn't the last answer. It may be the first time an American studio picture admitted the question was there.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — Eddie returns from the war to no job, drifts into bootlegging, and builds a cab fleet and a liquor empire: a global situation (post-war unemployment, Prohibition) presses until his decisive acts transform it — the SAS circuit at full power, cut in Warner's brisk manner.
- the encompasser — The era itself is the encompassing milieu, and the film makes it explicit: Hellinger's signed foreword plus a stentorian newsreel narration supplying the historical commentary, with the montages giving the milieu its own scenes (Armistice, boom, speakeasy, crash, breadlines, Repeal).
- binomial — Cagney's volatile, loyal Eddie set against Bogart's pragmatic, treacherous George Hally, described in the film's own design as the negative image of each other — force against force driving the rackets and the ruin.
- empreinte — Panama Smith's epitaph, "He used to be a big shot" — the character dated by, and standing for, a closed decade; the film insists his personal trajectory is representative, a case study in what Prohibition and the Depression did to returning soldiers.
- montage-organic-american — The montage unit's convergent construction, binding the private fortunes of the characters to the public tides of the era in single sequences (marching men, tumbling stock tickers, spinning newspapers), inheriting Griffith's tenement-realist milieu from The Musketeers of Pig Alley and Scarface's headline-and-calendar compression.
- dividual — The montage crowds — marching men, breadlines, packed speakeasies — rendered as a single affective unit standing for a generation, against which Eddie reads as a representative case rather than an individual.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The 1929 crash: a situation no act can answer. The tragedy is doubly determined, by Eddie's flaws and by impersonal historical forces (economic collapse, the criminal marketplace) that no individual virtue could withstand — a 1939 tremor of the break Deleuze dates to after 1945.
- espace quelconque — Staging contrasts the crowded, energetic tableaux of the boom with the emptied, desolate spaces of Eddie's decline, ending on the isolating darkness and falling snow of the church steps — space that has stopped hosting action.
- the Figure — The finale stages Eddie's death as pictorial pathos: the diagonal of the steps, the isolating darkness, a gangster's death turned into something close to a Pietà — action transposed into a held figure, a Code-era solution that historicizes the violence and poses the body in grace.