Documentary: Raoul Walsh Biography

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

  1. Joe Riley

    Joe Riley Supreme Member
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    "This melody written by Victor Young is sung by Jane Russell in the 1955 Raoul Walsh's western movie of the same title: Harmonicas: Hohner Golden Melody in G and C".





     
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  2. Nancy Hart

    Nancy Hart Veteran Member
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    That sounds like a song we used to call Get Along Home, Cindy, Cindy. Here's a version from the movie Rio Bravo (not directed by Walsh) sung by Ricky Nelson.

     
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  3. Nancy Hart

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    Maybe this should be in the "favorite hat" thread. :oops:

    upload_2021-5-8_22-36-59.png
     
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  4. Joe Riley

    Joe Riley Supreme Member
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    Lincoln assassination expert scours Iowa for clues (link)

    "By day, Michael Kauffman, 58, who lives in the Maryland outskirts of the nation's capital, is operations manager for a non-profit broadcasting company. But his true passion is combing through Civil War soldier pension files, death certificates and other remnants of the past to chronicle and cross-reference this signature national tragedy in meticulous detail".

    "He spent 30 years writing the acclaimed Booth biography, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, published in 2004. He continues to cultivate his own vast database of 3,400 people connected to the assassination".

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    "You've heard of the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, how nearly anybody can be connected to the movie actor within half a dozen or fewer steps? Kauffman typically needs just two or three steps to link a person or place to the Lincoln assassination".

    "He cited The Beatles as an example: Booth's sister lived at the address in London that later became Abbey Road Studios".

    "What about Iowan John Wayne? Raoul Walsh portrayed John Wilkes Booth in 1915's The Birth of a Nation — and went on to direct Wayne in his first starring role in 1930's The Big Trail. When producers pushed Marion Morrison to adopt a bold Hollywood pseudonym, it was Walsh who came up with "Wayne," inspired by a Revolutionary War general".





     
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  5. Joe Riley

    Joe Riley Supreme Member
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    By Charles Higham
    • April 14, 1974
    "SANTA SUSANNA, CALIF. RAOUL WALSH'S white clapboard farmhouse stands high above sea level in the Santa Susanna Mountains some 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Outside the windows, orange trees are blanketed in late afternoon mist, horses whip flies with their tails, and ten Fats and four dogs perform arabesques on the lawn".

    "As I arrive, Walsh's wife announces a dramatic little problem: a giant hawk has gotten caught in a bush and broken its wing. Walsh—a tall, grizzled, white moustached man with a black patch over his right eye and wearing a green windbreaker, cream‐colored Chino pants sprinkled with cigarette ash, and cowboy boots—tells her how to tend the bird's wing and what fodder to give it (“bread ‘n’ scratch”)".

    "Let others talk about art: Walsh simply poured his knowledge of riding and herding cattle into Westerns like “The Tall Men” and “Pursued,” his knowledge of the sea into such salty adventures as “The World in His Arms” and “Captain Horatio Hornblower,” and his knowledge of soldiers into “The Naked and the Dead” and “Battle Cry.” He is a celebrator of life. Considered by Many critics orie of the great primitive artists, of the screen, he has never seen himself as anything of the kind. “I just did my job,” he says. “I let others make up the theories.”

    "Walsh created a revolution in talkies by taking the talkie equipment out‐of‐doors. “We did some good things in ‘In Old Arizona.’ I put microphones out in the cactus, and the rocks. The first scene‐ I took was a man fryin' bacon. Audiences went crazy—they could hear it sizzle.”
     
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  6. Nancy Hart

    Nancy Hart Veteran Member
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    Still to this day, whenever I see a picture of John Barrymore, I think of an episode of the Johnny Carson show.

    A guest (can't remember who) told the story about some men retrieving Barrymore's body after he died to play a joke on Errol Flynn. I pictured it in "my mind's eye" at the time and it stuck there permanently. :p :eek:

    So now I've come full circle hearing the story again, only with a man named Raoul Walsh added to the picture. :cool:
     
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  7. Joe Riley

    Joe Riley Supreme Member
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    Raoul Walsh by Peter Hogue (1974)
    [​IMG]
    "In Manpower, a movie about powerline repairmen, there’s a funny scene at a diner. Various workmen are ordering their meals. The counterman shouts each order back to the cook, but—in the time-honored tradition of the American greasy spoon—he translates each request into the surrealistic lingo of short-order chefs. A cup of coffee with cream is “a blackout, and blitz it!” A hamburger to go is a “cow and convoy”; a bowl of chili “with plenty of peppers”—”one Mexican heartburn.” A cut of beef, “juicy and with no fat” = “one impossible”; hash is “take a chance”; and a bowl of cherries, “one George Washington!”


    "Some comedy involving a slot machine intervenes, but the camera returns to the counter where the head lineman, thinking of his wife, makes a request of his own: “Gimme a nice little bottle of wine—and giftwrap it.” The counterman turns toward the kitchen and, facing the camera in closeup, shouts, “The grapes of wrath—in a sport jacket!” End of scene".

    "This sequence has to do with food and the funny ways people say things, and—like many such moments in Walsh—it deals with physical pleasure and sensation in a direct, unintellectualized way. Much of the scene is treated in standard terms: the actors perform with vigor, and the director and his camera act as interested but unobtrusive observers. But the final wisecrack shouted directly into the camera, a device Walsh uses to good effect in several films, suggests an unexpected bit of the daring stylist beneath the vigorous efficiency of Walsh’s direction".

    "The homely boisterousness of the men in the scene is felt in many Walsh films. And there is also a somewhat characteristic undercurrent of pathos: the giftwrapped wine is for an ill-chosen wife whose imminent visit will provoke a fatal climax. Walsh’s heroes are often less bright and more fallible than the supposed Hollywood archetypes, and “the grapes of wrath” wisecrack, which has literary and historical associations that undercut its playful wit, echoes the ironies and incongruities of the main character".
     
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  8. Joe Riley

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    [​IMG]
    Jack Benny Meets Raoul Walsh: The Horn Blows White Heat at Midnight

    "Jack Benny meets Raoul Walsh at the top of the world: Heaven".


    "This pairing of two such disparate talents, the collaboration of the inimitable stand-up comic master of the verbal pause and perfectly timed response with the director who took Bogart to High Sierra and Cagney to White Heat Momma’s boy obsession and psychotic violence, is as bizarre as the concept for the movie The Horn Blows at Midnight, that they meet creatively for one time only".


    "Maybe the pairing isn’t as bizarre as the plotline for the movie itself". (Continue)


     
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  9. Nancy Hart

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    I always wondered what Mr. Walsh's last house looked like. This is supposed to be the den.

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    Photo by Maynard L. Parker. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. LINK

    LARGER IMAGE .(Wish it was large enough to read the book titles :()
     
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  10. Joe Riley

    Joe Riley Supreme Member
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    Thanks for that link, Nancy! Great pictures! ....although, I couldn't read the liquor labels!:(
     
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  11. Joe Riley

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    [​IMG]
    "Surprisingly, Walsh is the most neglected major figure in American movies. He never won an Oscar, and though he lived until 1981, dying at age 94, he was never even recognized by the Academy with a Lifetime Achievement Award. His most famous films are available on DVD but, alone among great American directors, no comprehensive collection of his work exists. Perhaps his versatility has prevented him from being instantly identified with a particular genre, like Ford with Westerns, Hitchcock with Suspense or Sturges with Screwball Comedies".


    "Though he lived a life more fabulous than any depicted in his films, Walsh has never had a definitive biography (at least in English; two have been published in French). And, scandalously, his 1974 memoirs has been out of print for decades".
     
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  12. Joe Riley

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    The Big Picture
    [​IMG]

    "From the silents through the studio days, Raoul Walsh perhaps made more movies than anyone, yet is largely forgotten today. In a personal appreciation, Richard Schickel considers the director’s contribution to film history".

    BY RICHARD SCHICKEL

    "Raoul Walsh didn’t always follow the action he was filming with stark concentration. He would listen to the dialogue his actors were reciting while wandering, with apparent aimlessness, around the set. He sometimes referred to the words as “titles,” and when they ran their course he would call “cut,” and according to the likes of Robert Mitchum would inquire how it had gone".

    “All right, I guess,” the actor would reply. “Knocked over the lamp halfway through.”

    “Pick it up?” Walsh would ask. “Look natural?”

    “Yeah, I guess so,” would come the response.

    “OK, print it.”

    "Mitchum was, of course, exaggerating a bit, but the truth was that that’s the way Walsh made movies--casually, confidently, and above all, prolifically. He co-directed his first film in 1914 and made his last one, 140 or so later, in 1964 (for the record, it was a pretty good cavalry Western called A Distant Trumpet, starring Troy Donahue)".

    "I think these films were dependent on their lack of self-consciousness, the way they tossed off comedy and tragedy, and the range of emotions in between those two states, as they galloped along. Raoul often talked about finishing a picture on a Saturday night and hearing a script thump down on his front porch and starting to prepare for it some time in the next day or two. He did not usually think he was making art, though he had a fairly acute sense of the difference between the good and the bad. He was, on the whole, a man doing a job". (Read More)
     
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  13. Nancy Hart

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    "There are Not Thirty-six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse"

    A short film directed by Nicolás Zukerfeld. Repeat presentation coming to The Lincoln Center, June 22, 2021

    "The first half is entirely made up of clips chosen from Raoul Walsh’s 140 films, which are rhythmically and thematically arranged into a feast for eyes and the brain. We start with men getting on horses. More than 36 of them. Many of them the same way, from the left, of course. One jumps up from the back. One guy falls off the horse and tries mounting again. Horses without saddles, lots of them, a style is developing. Is it shown the same way? You’ll be the judge.

    "In the second half we hear of a professor who quotes the title of the film to his class as something Walsh had expressed in an interview. But he mistrusts his memory. What follows is the entertaining and stubborn search of a scholar to get to the roots of the quote."


    Promotional video

     
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  14. Joe Riley

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    #209
  15. Nancy Hart

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    [​IMG]
    Don't know what to tell you. It's The Lincoln Center Channel. Works for me in Edge and Chrome, logged in or not.

    Try this LINK ..(different YouTube channel)
     
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