"Raoul Walsh’s life and times are as compelling as the movies he made, from his youth in New York City – where his parents regularly entertained dinner guests Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes Booth), Buffalo Bill, Frederick Remington and Teddy Roosevelt – to his apprenticeship as an assistant director to D.W. Griffith, where, for instance, Walsh himself convinced the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa that his life (and the execution of his enemies) should be made into a movie". "Walsh was an imposing figure in Hollywood, contributing movies that were as energetic as his own lifestyle. He loved to recount how he stood up to mobster Bugsy Siegel’s attempt to bribe him, how he was a committed drinking buddy of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn, and an upstanding figure in the Hollywood Irish mafia that included Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien and a host of Irish directors and actors". "The details of Walsh’s amazing life shape up into a fascinating story that he himself would have liked to direct".
College Swing Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1938. Vintage black and white photograph from the set of the 1938 film. Shown are director Raoul Walsh, explaining a scene to George Burns and his wife (and co-star) Gracie Allen. With a mimeo snipe describing the photo printed on the verso. The only photograph from the set of this film we have ever seen. Gracie sets up the action in the film by trying to graduate college in order to gain an inheritance. She hires glib tutor Bob Hope to get her through exams, takes over the college, and introduces the campus to wild parties, the Jitterbug, swing bands, and radio broadcast
Carmen Carmen is a 1915 American silent drama film, written and directed by Raoul Walsh, which starred Theda Bara. It is based on the 1845 novella Carmen, the film was shot at the Fox Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It is now considered lost. Synopsis "Don Jose, a young Spanish soldier, visits his aged mother and his sweetheart Michaela in his small village. Later in Córdoba he meets Carmen, an alluring tobacco stripper, who ignores other soldiers' calls as she tries to interest Don Jose. After Don Jose arrests Carmen for slashing another woman in the tobacco factory, she kisses him and gets him to allow her to escape. Don Jose is court-martialed and imprisoned, after which he kills Captain Morales in a duel provoked when Morales catches him embracing Carmen. After Carmen helps Don Jose escape to the Andalusian mountains, he joins her gypsy friends and becomes an outlaw murderer, while their love affair flourishes. She grows restless, however, and goes to Seville where she deserts Don Jose for the famous toreador Escamillo. Don Jose returns home to be with his mother as she dies. He escapes from officers twice and returns to Seville. During a bullfight, Don Jose stabs Carmen, who the previous evening had her death foretold. After she dies smiling at Escamillo, Don Jose madly rides his horse over a cliff". (surviving film adaption of Carmen also released in November 1915 directed by Cecil B. DeMille)
A lost film ... The Honor System (1917) "The film was shot, in part, at the Arizona State Penitentiary in Yuma, and reportedly used up to 6,000 real-life convicts from prisons at Yuma and Florence as extras. Director Raoul Walsh ... spent a few days in prison before shooting to pick up the vibe.".. SYNOPSIS (LINK)
Regeneration (1915) A Silent Film Review "Walsh had been directing since 1913 but Regeneration really told audiences and critics that he had arrived as an important filmmaker. Walsh worked for Fox and much of his early work has decayed (Fox also let Theda Bara’s entire career rot, curse their eyes). We are very fortunate that Regeneration has survived". "Regeneration also fits into the then-popular social film genre. In 1915, the realization that the First World War would change the world forever had not quite sunk in for American audiences and they enjoyed films that assured them that social problems could be solved with a little know-how and a lot of hard work". "So, with all of this in mind, let’s take a look at Regeneration".
The Red Dance The Red Dance (also known as The Red Dancer of Moscow) is a 1928 American film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Dolores del Río and Charles Farrell that was inspired in the novel by Henry Leyford Gates.Although silent, it was released with synchronized music and sound effects. Director Raoul Walsh gets the most out of Demetrius Alexis
Raoul Walsh (1887-1980) holds a Double Barreled Percussion Cap Pistol as John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation. (1915) Italian (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) Percussion cap pistol, converted from flintlock, circa mid-19th century - .69 caliber (17.7mm)
The Birth of a Nation (1915) Then-novice actor Joseph Henabery took on the important role. Because he was a few inches shorter than Lincoln, Henabery is usually shown sitting down in the film.
The Enforcer (1951) Trivia: After several days of filming, director Bretaigne Windust fell seriously ill and was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Humphrey Bogart asked his old friend, director Raoul Walsh, to come in and shoot the picture until Windust recovered. "Broadway theater veteran Bretaigne Windust is credited with making The Enforcer, but it was action film veteran Raoul Walsh, working uncredited, who actually directed a major chunk of the movie, including all of the violent scenes. Between the two filmmakers, they created a film so engrossing that viewers were able to willingly suspend their disbelief". "In that regard, The Enforcer is more effective than the much more painstakingly accurate 20th Century Fox movie Murder, Inc. (1960), drawing the viewer into its complex story tapestry and overcoming some of the worst lapses in the script".
In 1941 Raoul Walsh directed four of the key films of his career, each a significant and, in some cases, quite innovative example of a particular genre. In comparison to the other films of Walsh’s banner year, High Sierra, Manpower, and They Died with Their Boots On, The Strawberry Blonde may initially seem to be a somewhat minor work, a patently nostalgic and highly affectionate visitation of 1890s New York – a memorialisation of the “world” into which both Walsh and his endlessly propulsive star, James Cagney, were born. But The Strawberry Blonde is, like most of Walsh’s best films (and I consider it amongst his greatest), marked by an extraordinary energy and boisterousness, featuring characters bouncing across the often populated and packed frame, and crammed with incident rather than a particularly elaborate narrative structure. In fact, the machinations of the plot – ostensibly involving Biff (James Cagney) and Hugo’s (Jack Carson) rivalry in business and romance and their place in society’s pecking order (it is also a film that touches on issues of class) – are hardly the film’s most edifying aspects, in some respects merely paying lip-service to the episodic rise-and-fall chronicles that mark Cagney’s career (dating back to William Wellman’s The Public Enemy in 1931). As Peter Hogue suggests, The Strawberry Blonde was “unusually domestic for a Walsh film”, relating its specific period representation to the director’s own formative experiences . As Walsh himself said, “It brought me back to my childhood” "Raoul Walsh first filmed this endearing comedy-drama in 1941 as The Strawberry Blonde with James Cagney as Biff...... ......then stepped behind the camera again for a Technicolor® musical remake (One Sunday Afternoon). The period-perfect score is by Ralph Blane (Meet Me in St. Louis), who captures in song the timeless charm of romance and the irresistible nostalgia of barbershop quartets, straw boaters and bicycles built for two".