Documentary: Raoul Walsh Biography

Discussion in 'Movies & Entertainment' started by Joe Riley, Nov 11, 2018.

  1. Nancy Hart

    Nancy Hart Veteran Member
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    I remember a long series of Peanuts cartoons about that eye patch back in the Sixties. HEW even published a pamphlet of them in 1965. Maybe Charles Shulz knew someone who had to wear the patch at the time.

     
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    Last edited: Jul 13, 2019
  2. Nancy Hart

    Nancy Hart Veteran Member
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    Bing Crosby and Marion Davies. Going Hollywood, 1933

    bing crosby marion davies 1933 Going Hollywood.jpg
     
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  3. Joe Riley

    Joe Riley Supreme Member
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    “You can really double anybody. If the action is good enough, it can be a monkey with top-hat and spats.” -. Raoul Walsh

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  4. Joe Riley

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    Wonders of Walsh: “Action! Action!

    Boyish Bravado

    "In spite of the virile intensity and fast-moving action sequences in Walsh’s oeuvre, his characters have a surprising tenderness and childishness. Not only do his films feature more intimate close-ups than other studio-era work, but also the characters themselves have a level of vulnerable infantility that most film critics and reviewers overlook. On closer inspection, the characters’ childishness complicates the plot and accounts for many of the famously memorable moments in his work."
     
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  5. Joe Riley

    Joe Riley Supreme Member
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    Raoul Walsh Encore

    Raoul Walsh on politics:
    Our benevolent Peace Corps spent millions of dollars in sixty countries around the world, helping to show people how to improve their land – methods of irrigating, planting crops, building homes, caring for and feeding livestock, establishing schools, and offering medical and dental care to people in other lands. Why is it that the Peace Corps does not give all these benefits to the American Indian? Do they just close their eyes and let these poor unfortunate humans suffer and die in their wasteland? Shame, America, shame for your treatment of the Indian.


    On Hollywood:
    That land, called Hollywood, was a mythical abstraction without geographical boundaries. Whether its locations were in Manhattan, a Western prairie in New Mexico, the high Sierra, Paris, London, the Alps or a converted orange grove in Los Angeles – they all formed the total myth known as ‘Hollywood’.


    I saw its birth, its golden era, and its declining years. We were never the lotus-eaters of legend. We performed an endless job of hard work under hot lights and blazing sun, in snow and rain or wherever the job took us – even riding a camera on an ice flow.


    On stars:
    In those days, Cagney and Bogart were the only two stars you could kill in a picture. You couldn’t kill Flynn; you couldn’t kill Gable; you couldn’t kill Cooper or any of those fellows. The exhibitor wouldn’t even play the picture. But, with Cagney they accepted it and with Bogart. So, I thought, as long as they accepted it, we’d give them a good load of it.


    On film:
    Chase scenes are very easy to shoot. Just keep going, keep going, keep going. Get up on top of the mountain, turn around, bring ‘em down again. Just hope there’s nobody on the road.


    Of course, the difficult thing about making pictures as compared with the stage – in those old days, we used to work until three or four o’clock in the morning. When I’d get home, at daybreak, there’d be a script on my lawn, like the newspaper; somebody threw it there. We went back and started work at nine o’clock.


    I suppose the record shows that I have filmed my share of murder, rape, and arson. But what a difference between these elements and sodomy, sadism, and scatology. My chauvinist studs never doubted they were males. The virile lover had no need for nudity to prove he was a man; sometimes he didn’t even take off his hat.


    Twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristophanes taught us to laugh at sex, and the French made a national industry of frustrated amour. Our neophytes, however, too often look on sex as a matter of very grim substance. Oh well, boys will be boys and sometimes boys will be girls.


    It is my somewhat optimistic hope that a new generation of filmmakers (…) will learn the ABC’s of entertainment – which is at least the basis of that rare commodity, art. Indeed, I feel there is a good chance that these young will learn, from life as well as from art, for each man in his time plays many parts.


    Quotes from Directing the Film: Film Directors on Their Art (Sherman, Eric. Little, Brown and Company 1976); Each Man in his Time (Walsh, Raoul. New York, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1974); Film Crazy: Interviews with Hollywood Legends (McGilligan, Patrick. St. Martin’s Press 2000); The Men Who Made the Movies (Schickel, Richard. Athaeneum 1975); Jack Benny (Livingstone Benny, Mary. Doubleday and Company, Inc. 1978); Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director (Moss, Marilyn Ann. The University Press of Kentucky 2011)
     
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  6. Joe Riley

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    Gregory Peck during our interview in Brussels, January 1986. Photograph: © Leo/Film Talk
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    "One time I took pioneer and film director Raoul Walsh [1887-1980] to the American Film Institute for a seminar and a Q&A session. He was about ninety-one at the time. He was a great character, wearing his eye patch. He still rolled his own cigarettes and he was a very colorful, profane, outspoken character from an earlier time. He was tougher, more independent, and had more self-confidence about his way of life and his code of behaviour, without compromise. "

    "So the students were asking him many of the usual questions about the old times, and then one of them asked, ‘Mr. Walsh, I understand that you were once an actor, is that true?’ And he said, ‘Sunny Boy, I played John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Lincoln, in “The Birth of a Nation” [1915]!’ And there he was, sitting before them. There was a moment of silence, and then they stood and applauded. About fifty or sixty young people. It was like seeing a ghost [laughs], but there he was. "
     
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  7. Joe Riley

    Joe Riley Supreme Member
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    "Raoul Walsh was one of the five directors whom Cagney (out of some 80 he’d worked with) characterized as “a real director.” Which was what? I asked. And Cagney said, “A real director is a guy who, if I don’t know what the hell to do, can get up and show me!” Walsh had been a fine silent actor as well, so Cagney, confident of being in great hands, gives by far his most daring performance."
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  8. Joe Riley

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    50 Westerns From The 50s.
    Riding the long, dusty trail through 50s Westerns.

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    "Raoul Walsh said he didn’t like CinemaScope, but was excited about 3-D. Funny, given that he only had one eye and couldn’t see depth. He’d end up using Scope a few times, but he’d go with 3-D just once, with 1953’s Gun Fury."

    "It’s a pretty simple chase/revenge story, as Rock Hudson goes after Phil Carey, who’s kidnapped Donna Reed. Of course, Walsh applies his typical speed and efficiency — and the picture moves like a rocket."

     
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  9. Joe Riley

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  10. Nancy Hart

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    Rosita is an American silent film directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Raoul Walsh (uncredited), released in 1923. Brother George Walsh played Don Diego in the film.

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    Walsh with Ernest Lubitsch

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  11. Joe Riley

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    Mary Pickford in "Rosita" directed by Ernst Lubitsch 1923
     
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  12. Bess Barber

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    images - 2019-08-17T163647.766.jpeg
    Why eye patches stay in fashion.
     
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  13. Joe Riley

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    Tully Marshall and Raoul Walsh on the set of The Big Trail (1930). Marshall was 66 years-old at the time. He had previous played an old frontiersman in 1923's, The Covered Wagon.
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  14. Joe Riley

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    Frankly, Clark....
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  15. Joe Riley

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