This film was director Raoul Walsh's first gangster film (and his first film for Warner Bros).
It has hard-hitting gangster action and romantic sentiment and shares a lot of similarities of the great
gangster films of the 1930s, including Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932).
(for which I will add pages later)
It recreates the entire Jazz Age decade. Prohibition and its repeal and the Depression era, within an historical framework.
Cagney is shown as a returning WWI soldier to a 1918 America of unemployment, he is lured to a corruptible life as a small-time crook
after being denied his old job back.
Then, as a struggling taxi-cab driver after a change of fortune during the Depression, he
becomes a poverty-stricken, alcoholic in the 30s.
It's a classic Warner Brothers film which stars James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney as the reckless leader of the gang
and Humphrey Bogart as his ruthless lieutenant and then as his rival.
It also has Gladys George (Sam Spade's secretary in The Maltese Falcon if any of my readers remember)
The film also features many popular songs of the time, including Melancholy Baby, I'm Just Wild About Harry, It Had to Be You,
and In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town.
This film was the third and last time that Cagney and Bogart were brought together and this was Cagney's last gangster film until
ten years later he made White Heat (1949).
The screenplay for the film was written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, and Robert Rossen and was based on an original screen story
by Mark Hellinger.