The movie Martin Scorsese said was “a template for Goodfellas and Casino”
His filmmaking may have constantly been evolving, diversifying, and broadening its horizons for half a century, but above all other genres, Martin Scorsese will always be closest linked to the crime story.
That comes with the territory when it’s a medium he’s returned to repeatedly over the decades, with several all-time cinematic classics emerging along the way. Each of them is distinctly different in terms of style, tone, atmosphere, setting, and narrative, but they all lean heavily into characters with no problems operating on the wrong side of the law.
Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Killers of the Flower Moon are all astounding movies in their own right, and every single one of them is rooted deeply in criminality in one way or another. However, in terms of his straightforward gangster flicks, there’s one film that served as a massive inspiration.
During an interview with The Daily Beast, 1939’s The Roaring Twenties was named by the filmmaker as “the template for Goodfellas and Casino“, and it had an even bigger impact on pop culture than it did on Scorsese, with its initial release sparking a boom period for 1920’s nostalgia and even helping to cement the titular phrase as a common part of the lexicon.
As for Scorsese in particular, he viewed director Raoul Walsh’s classic “as a send-off to the gangster genre, which seemed to have run its course”. Star James Cagney actively swore off crime thrillers in the aftermath, too, beginning a decade-long sabbatical that would end in seminal fashion when he reunited with Walsh for White Heat in 1949.
“It plays like a journal of the life of a typical gangster of the period, and it covers so much ground, from the battlefields of France to the beer halls to the nightclubs, the boats that brought in the liquor, the aftermath of Prohibition, the whole rise and fall of ’20s gangsterdom that it achieves a very special epic scale,” Scorsese continued, before celebrating The Roaring Twenties for having “one of the great movie endings”.
The third and final collaboration between Cagney and Humphrey Bogart finds them starring as friends returning home after World War I with dreams of carving out a better future for themselves. After realising it’s not going to come easy, they partner up in the bootlegging business before the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash ruins their illicit endeavours and pits them against each other, with the affections of Priscilla Lane’s Jean providing another stumbling block for their fractured relationship.
There aren’t many gangster films that can hold a candle to Goodfellas or Casino, but if it wasn’t for Scorsese’s appreciation of The Roaring Twenties, they might not have even happened at all.
