Biography by Bruce Eder "One of Hollywood's most prolific and respected action directors, Raoul Walsh was also one of the longest-lived figures in film, with a career that spanned almost a half-century". "Despite his reputation as an action director, Walsh's movies were usually much more sophisticated than was typical for the genre -- he reveled in psychological themes, and he loved offbeat characterizations and unusual narrative structures, attributes best reflected in the dark Western drama Pursued (1947), starring Robert Mitchum, and the crime film White Heat (1949), with James Cagney". "He also served as unofficial co-director on one of Humphrey Bogart's most interesting later movies, The Enforcer (1951). His later movies showed a slackening of style, and he never did seem as effective working in color as he did in black-and-white. Walsh lost an eye while working on In Old Arizona in 1929, and his deteriorating sight in the other eye led to his retirement in 1964".
Quote of the Day: Raoul Walsh, storyteller Today’s story is a believe-it-if-you-like story Pancho Villa and Raoul Walsh "D.W. Griffith had a stock company — 4 or 5 of us, 3 or 4 girls — and one day he asked me if I would like to go to Mexico and film some battle scenes. I said I would, and he said, “Well, you’re going to go and meet a very notorious bandit. You’re going to meet Pancho Villa. And I may as well tell you this: we’ve had a very sad experience. We had Villa under contract through Mutual, and they signed Pancho Villa up for $500 a week. So I must tell you that Mutual sent a Mr. Doaks or somebody down to meet Pancho Villa with a check for $500 and we never heard anything more from him.” ‘So I said to Mr. Griffith, “What am I going there for — to find Mr. Doaks?” And he said, “No, no, no. You’re going to meet a Mr. So-and-so at the Del Norte Hotel in El Paso and they will have $500 in gold for you to give to this bandit…” ‘By the way, before I went down, Griffith told me, “You know, we have no story to do of Villa’s life, so while you are on the train you will probably think up some story. Either that or get shot.” So I kept thinking about stories on the way down. I had nothing else to do. I kept about 8 possible stories in mind until I could see this bum and see how he would react. They led me in to Villa, and he was sitting there with his goddamn bug hat on and he was loaded with bullets and guns and he had a big black moustache". (Read More)
Raoul Walsh led a life of adventure - on-screen and off A still from the Raoul Walsh film "Objective, Burma" which stars, from left, George Tobia, Anthony Caruso, Errol Flynn and George Tyne. "Some directors tell many stories. Some keep telling the same one". "It’s the second kind of filmmaker who tends to get the most attention, from scholars who dub them auteurs and rush to point out their thematic threads, from fans who turn their names into adjectives". "But it’s the first kind — the adaptable, straightforward storyteller, who works in whatever genre he’s handed — who often provides audiences the most simply satisfying experiences". "Raoul Walsh, for example, is not a director who can be boiled down to a single theme or style. He didn’t share Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with guilt, or John Ford’s flair for composition". "He just told some terrific, and terrifically different, stories". "Not that Walsh got a lot of respect for it at the time, or even today. For example, Warner Home Video has a new set of World War II movies out, called “Errol Flynn Adventures.” Five films on five DVDs, all starring Flynn, who’s featured alone in the ads". "Except that with four of them directed by Walsh (including the gripping “Objective, Burma!”), you might as well call it “Raoul Walsh Adventures” — and a long-overdue tribute to a veteran studio director". (READ MORE)
"Living is adventure in Walsh’s movies, and usually begins as escape — from shame, crime, or life. Walsh left home at 15 when his mother died, unable to support the house without her, and for years propelled himself on an odyssey to nowhere — Cuba, Texas, Mexico, Montana, punching cattle, toughening himself, taking blows, forming callouses so thick he felt ashamed to shake hands. By accident he landed in show business, because he could ride a horse. Then D.W. Griffith decided to turn him into a moviemaker. And he met Miriam Cooper". "And so for 50 years Walsh made movies of his Irish fantasies. Like him, his heroes, and women too, have neither book learning nor ancestry, only themselves, youth, and infinite bravado. There are few families or children to get in the way, and scarcely a mother. Whether in soaring epics like The World in His Arms or hardscrabble tragedies like The Roaring Twenties (1939), Walsh’s heroes incarnate the dreams and miseries of first-generation Irish-Americans like himself, parvenus, with something to escape from". "Women are for loving. Walsh’s never cry. They like watching their guy being beat up, knocked down, given comeuppance — and coming up off the canvas to win. For their world is full of outrageous injustice, mutilated bodies, innocent lives destroyed. “You gotta fight,” says John Wayne in The Big Trail (1930). “That’s life. And when you stop fightin’, that’s death.” "Where your fights will take you and what you will find on the trail and who you will be when you get somewhere are unknowable. The only thing sure is that you will meet a damsel in distress, beautiful, erotic and alluring, and fall madly in love with her — to your ruin or regeneration. “In all my films,” said Walsh, “the whole story revolves around the love scene.” (READ MORE)
"The gods of the cinema were smiling when they brought together this freakish anticipation of the widescreen format and Raoul Walsh, a director whose superb, innate sense of epic space would have made him one of the great landscape painters. Walsh plunges into ''The Big Trail'' with perfect confidence, immediately discovering and mastering the principles of widescreen filming that would take his colleagues in the `50s, when the process reappeared, several years to evolve, and very often going beyond them". "The opening shot of ''The Big Trail''-an elevated view of several hundred settlers, massing on a bank of the Mississippi with their wagons and supplies in preparation for the westward trek-overflows with Walsh`s sheer exaltation in the sudden expansion of his canvas. The sprawling composition bustles with a thousand separate and distinct movements; details from the near foreground to the distant horizon are held in a vertiginous deep focus that pulls the viewer into the screen". (READ MORE)
One of these days I'm going to plow through Birth of a Nation (3 hours). Skipped through to find the John Wilkes Booth scene some time ago. Today I skipped through to find another scene. My favorite old time character actor, Donald Crisp, played Ulysses S. Grant, and future director John Ford played a hooded KKK member. Walsh's first wife, brother George, and Elmo Lincoln (first Tarzan), were also in the movie. And none of those were the stars. What a cast! Looks like it's a very "controversial" .film. "Author Melvin Stokes apparently doesn’t just dislike Birth; he calls it an 'evil film.' " Melvin Stokes (2008). D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time, Oxford University Press. Reference:. A Film Divided Against Itself: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)
@Nancy Hart Three Hours?! It was a very controversial movie at the time. Donald Crisp Bio Note: Crisp's final screen role was as Grandpa Spencer opposite Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara in Spencer's Mountain (1963). This film, adapted from the novel by Earl Hamner Jr., was the basis for the popular television series The Waltons (1972). He died in 1974. "The original “Birth of a Nation” premiered in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 1915, under its original title, “The Clansmen.” Before its premiere, City Council members had voted to suppress the film because of its racist content even after local censors had approved it, and it was shown only after a court intervened. This article chronicling the premiere was originally published by The Times on Feb. 9, 1915".
The long-awaited biography of one of the lustiest filmmakers ever promises adventure but has trouble sorting fact from fiction. (2011) Walsh with Ida Lupino at the Macambo nightclub in Hollywood, 1945. "Those of us privileged to spend time with Walsh knew him as one of the most genial, warm-blooded and masculine of men, an incurable flirt to the end, a crafty sort allergic to intellectualization and a spinner of tall tales you were welcome to believe or not. Like many filmmakers, he was something of a mythomaniac, prone to taking credit, reshaping stories to reflect favorably on himself and inventing them out of whole cloth". (Read More)
Here are more details of how Walsh lost his eye. "One night, in the autumn of 1929, Raoul Walsh was driving along a desolate highway in the Utah desert, scouting locations for his next movie. Suddenly, a jackrabbit skittered across the road. Hurtled into the air by the force of the speeding jeep, the rabbit crashed through the windshield, spraying Walsh’s face with glass. When doctors told him they would have to remove his right eye, he acquiesced; what else, after all, could he do? But when they suggested he be fitted for a glass replacement, however, Walsh adamantly refused. “Why”, he said. “I’d have to take it out every time I got in a fight.”
Discovering John Wayne "Before John Wayne became one of America’s most iconic actors, he was a good-looking ex-football player embarrassed by his dreams of stardom. In his book John Wayne: The Life and Legend, Scott Eymann relies on interviews with the actor’s friends and associates as well as material drawn from years worth of audiences with “The Duke” himself to create an indelible portrait of a complicated man who loved Latin women, big country, and the pioneer spirit he came to embody for so many Americans". “the male lead must be a true replica of the pioneer type — somewhat diffident with women, being unused to them, but a bear-cat among the men of the plains. Walsh was afraid that the sophistication of an experienced actor would creep through and be apparent to the audience. As against that was the probability that a man chosen from the ranks of the inexperienced would be unable to carry the part in so big a picture.” "Morrison reported back to Raoul Walsh, who set up a different test. There was no script, no lines to memorize. Instead, Walsh had Ian Keith and Marguerite Churchill, both experienced actors, ask him questions in character, with Duke responding in character". "How long was the trip? Will we see buffalo? Any danger of Indian attack? Wayne felt self-conscious with the camera on him, a feeling that would plague him for years, so he combatively turned the tables. “Where you from, Mister?” he asked Keith. “Why do you want to go west? Can you handle a rifle?” "Walsh called “Cut!” A week later John Ford told the boy he had the job. He was no longer making $35 a week; Fox generously gave their new star a whopping $75 a week".