Rooney at 38

King of the Roaring Twenties (Allied Artists) is a B that doesn't bumble--thanks to a tight script, sharp direction, and neat performances by the biggest cast of big-name players ever cornered for a quickie. Among those present: Jack Carson, Mickey Rooney. Keenan Wynn, Joseph Schildkraut. Dan O'Herlihy, Dianne Foster, Diana Dors, Mickey Shaughnessy. William Demarest and David (Richard Diamond) Janssen.

Peeled off The Big Bankroll, Leo Katcher's popular biography of Under-worldling Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928). Jo Swerling's script tells the sordid story of a boy who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth and uses it to sup with the Devil. At ten. Arnie is running his own crime syndicate on Manhattan's Lower East Side. At 20, he is running a bucket shop. Soon he sets up a gambling house, and moves in on the horse parlors. But after fingering a little punk (Rooney) who has served him loyally, the rat (as he did in real life) catches a fatal dose of lead poisoning in Room 349 of the Park Central Hotel.

Neat as it is, the show would be eminently missable except for one thing: Rooney. Twenty years of anticlimax have strung hard lines across the famous baby face. With his porky jowls and rathskeller neck and jutting nose. Rooney at 38 resembles an enraged pygmy rhino, a pint-pot Wallace Beery. His talent resembles Beery's, too, in its sock-simple vulgarity, its feisty fecundity. He is one of the great hams of the age, and life seems to have smoked him ripe.

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