“Here’s to girls and gunpowder!” —Gregory Peck in The World in His Arms (1952). "When Peter Bogdanovich was interviewing Raoul Walsh and mentioned Miriam Cooper, with whom Walsh had made 18 movies, Walsh replied: “I was married to Miriam Cooper. Don’t put it down, turn [the tape recorder] off: it’s a nice sunny day. Now the clouds will come and the wind is roaring when you mention [her] name.” "Walsh was 86. Forty years had passed since his split with Cooper. Yet the past he could not support still launched him into Irish images, taking us with him. Welcome to Walsh’s cinema, to love and adventure in the first person." "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.” "Walsh is famous for action. And it’s difficult to think of vaster vistas in the whole of cinema than some of those in The Big Trail and The Tall Men (1955). But most everything in his movies happens on faces. As in Griffith. Griffith invented the face in cinema, insofar as he made an art of it, as he did with parallel montage. But perhaps it is not Griffith but Griffith’s pupil who invented the face gazing into the lens, the point-of-view shot and the geometry of Hollywood editing, and cinema in the first person." READ MORE
What a good read Joe thank you for posting this so interesting. I'm going to see if I can find a couple of his movies I've never seen before!!
This year represents the 100th anniversary of the release of The Thief of Bagdad, and since the image above has become wrapped in "the Cloak of Invisibility," I'll add some. "Douglas Fairbanks, who was writer, producer and star of The Thief of Bagdad, sought to make an epic. Lavishly staged on a Hollywood studio set, it was one of the most expensive films of the 1920s. Fairbanks' meticulous attention to detail, as well as complex visual imagery, required the use of state-of-the-art special effects." Click anywhere on the image below to see an aerial photo of the movie set: The restored version of the film is available on YouTube: LINK
The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) "Hardened fans of the action movie often deplore the inclusion of a love story. It disrupts the narrative, they protest, and is only driven by commercial imperatives (the action film too commercial?!). But they might have a point. In a film like The Thief of Bagdad, the story is of a child – a 40-year-old child, mind – becoming a man, putting away childish things to enter maturity and prove himself worthy of the woman who has physically and spiritually stirred him. Of course, this is the subtext of most heterosexist myths. But it must be confessed that The Thief of Bagdad is a lot more fun and engaging when it concentrates on childish things." MORE