" . . . bastard, (cast) Humphrey Bogart," one of the seven "talking heads" guys says about "Bogie's" early career at Warner Bros. film studio. None of the seven speaks about the time Humphrey sniveled in real life, when he went crusading to Washington, DC, to defend his free-thinking co-workers against Joe McCarthy's fascist witch hunt, and retracted everything he'd just said on the train ride home at the first hint of Red Stater backlash. The seven White guys chewing the fat here talk instead mostly about trivia, such as the fact gangster "Nick Brown" in THE ROARING TWENTIES was played by a real-life killer, or that Director Raoul Walsh was captured by the Mexican Bandito Pancho Villa during WWI. One thing that could have been emphasized more (had a group been recruited capable of seeing the forest rather than focusing on individual trees) was this 1938 feature film's ground-breaking use of verisimilitude, deftly mixing actual newsreels and REEFER MADNESS-like mini-dramatizations into its main story line.
The Roaring Twenties: The World Moves On
(2005 Video)
"If you need a sniveling . . . "
27 December 2014
Warning: Spoilers