It’s a new week here at BCB After Dark: the grooviest gathering of night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We’re so glad you decided to stop by. Come on in out of the heat. There’s no cover charge. We validate parking. We’ve got a few tables still available. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The
late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week, I asked you who the Cubs second-most valuable player was. The vote wasn’t close as 60 percent of you said it was Seiya Suzuki.
Here’s the part with the music and the movies. You can do with that what you want.
Saturday was the 101st anniversary of the birth of the great Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson. So to honor Peterson, we have him performing the bossa nova classic “Wave” with guitarist Joe Pass and bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (NHØP) in Italy in 1985.
By 1939, the gangster movie genre was pretty close to played out, soon to be eclipsed by the darker (literally and figuratively) film noir genre. But the gangster film never really died and the “golden age” of gangster films had one last gem in it with The Roaring Twenties. Directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane and Humphrey Bogart, The Roaring Twenties is lighter in tone than the pre-Code gangster films like The Public Enemy where Cagney broke out, but some terrific performances and deft direction make The Roaring Twenties one of the classic gangster films nontheless.
The plot of The Roaring Twenties is the standard rise-and-fall of a gangster, who learns in the end that crime does not pay. The film tries to give itself a different twist by adopting a newsreel format that takes the characters from the trenches at the end of the First World War through Prohibition, the Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression. Each new chapter in the life of Eddie Bartlett (Cagney) is introduced by a narration and stock footage of the era. The effect of this is a gangster who doesn’t choose his own demise, but rather he gets swept up in a current of history beyond his control.
This all works in nicely with Cagney’s Eddie, who is portrayed in this film as a generally nice guy. Yes, he occasionally has to put the screws on a speakeasy operator, but he’s never cruel and the few people he punches out had it coming.
We first meet Eddie in the trenches of France where he serves in a unit with Lloyd (Jeffrey Lynn) and George (Bogart). The characters are archetypes—Eddie is the everyman, Lloyd is an upright person with brains and George is a thug. Eddie is helped through the war by a pen pal, a beautiful young woman named Jean (Lane) who sends him love letters. When the war is over, he intends to marry this woman and return to his job as an auto mechanic.
Eddie is in for a rude shock when he returns to ask Jean to marry him. Turns out, Jean’s not a young woman. She’s a girl still in high school. Additionally, despite his boss’s promise that his job as a mechanic would be waiting for him when he returned from France, it isn’t. So he is forced to drive a cab with his buddy Danny (Frank McHugh).
Eddie gets arrested when a customer asks him to deliver a bottle of whisky to Panama Smith (Gladys George). Out of gratitude for keeping his mouth shut, Panama bails him out of jail. The two then begin a small-time bootlegging operation together. Panama is the brains and Eddie is the brawn, as well as the salesman.
After a few years, Eddie spies a now-grown Jean working as a chorus girl. While he was a bit disturbed by the schoolgirl Jean, he immediately falls head-0ver-heels in love with the adult Jean. He immediately makes her the headlining act at one of the speakeasies he supplies booze to.
Meanwhile, Lloyd has become a lawyer and a prosecuting attorney. Despite Eddie’s gangster profession, he and Lloyd remain friends. And when Eddie decides to rob another bootlegger of his supply, who should he meet but his old army buddy George, working for the guy Eddie is robbing. Eddie and George decide to join forces and turn Eddie’s small-time operation into something bigger.
Two things conspire to bring down Eddie. For one, Jean no longer has a schoolgirl crush on him. She is grateful for everything he’s done for her, but she falls in love with the respectable Lloyd instead. Eddie is blind to this and thinks that Jean is still going to marry him. (Meanwhile, Panama has an unrequited love for Eddie.) Meanwhile, George is bad news, a heartless mobster who would cut his own mother’s throat for a slice of the action.
Without spoiling the ending, Eddie’s partnership with George doesn’t go well and he reacts poorly when he realizes that Jean loves Lloyd and not him. He hits rock bottom before he is redeemed at the end by an act of self-sacrifice.
I’ve spent too much time on a plot that really doesn’t deserve it. What makes The Roaring Twenties is Cagney’s winning performance as a good guy driven to being a gangster by forces beyond his control. But unlike his character in The Public Enemy, he never really stops being a good guy. The supporting actresses are great too as Lane plays Jean as someone constantly torn between her respect for Eddie but her love of Lloyd. Lane was also a popular singer of the era, so naturally she gets to perform a couple of songs as well. Gladys George was like the third choice to play Panama, but she’s fantastic as a streetwise moll in love with a man that she knows will never love her back.
Bogart is still in his “heavy” period, playing tough-guy villains. The Maltese Falcon, which would break Bogart out of this typecasting, is still two years in the future, George doesn’t have the depth of some of the other characters in the film. But he’s still Bogey, so he’s able to command the screen when he’s on it.
The Roaring Twenties certainly has a lot less violence than the pre-Code gangster films from earlier in the thirties. But there are still some shootouts and action scenes. Eddie is a gangster that relies more on charm and the threat of violence than the actual use of it, but George is a killer and the film doesn’t shy away from that.
The Roaring Twenties may not have the edge of earlier gangster films like The Public Enemy, Scarface or Little Caesar, but Cagney, Lane, Bogart and George make the film a classic anyways.
Here’s the trailer for The Roaring Twenties. It is introduced by journalist Mark Hellinger, whose knew a lot of gangsters of the era and who collected the real-life stories that were fictionalized into this film.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
After dropping two out of three to the Cardinals this past weekend, the Cubs playoff odds, according to Fangraphs, have dropped down to 97.7 percent. That’s down from the 99.2 percent on Thursday.
I bring this up only because it’s extremely likely that the Cubs are going to make the postseason. And along those lines, the Cubs are going to have to start thinking about how to set up their rotation—both for the three-game Wild Card series if they have to play that, or the best-of-five Division Series.
So tonight, I’m going to ask you which Cubs starter would you have start Game One? Let’s assume that the Cubs have clinched their seed a few days before the playoffs start, so that no one is starting Game 162 to try to clinch home field or a bye or anything. This is an “all other things being equal” question.
I’ll probably ask you this question again in September. But I thought it would be interesting to ask you this now so we have something to compare it to next month.
So who would you have start Game One of the playoffs?
Thanks you for stopping by. Please get home safely. Don’t forget any personal items. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow evening for more BCB After Dark.
