I believe the man on the right is John Mills. This is likely in England during the filming of O.H.M.S. (aka, You're in the Army Now, 1937) [
My dad used to talk about Gloria Swanson when I was very young. I always thought she was a relative. I didn't pay much attention to what was said about her. I guess I wasn't very smart.
Truner Classics has a Raoul Walsh marathon today. I missed most of it. Caught the last 2/3 of Northern Pursuit. It was pretty good. More suspense than Alfred Hitchcock. .6:00 AM They Drive by Night (1940) .7:45 AM High Sierra (1941) .9:30 AM Desperate Journey (1942) 11:30 AM Background to Danger (1943) .1:00 PM Northern Pursuit (1943) .2:45 PM White Heat (1949) .4:45 PM Along the Great Divide (1951) .6:15 PM A Lion Is in the Streets (1953)
“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.” (1) "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.” (2) "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." MORE
Walsh was born in New York as Albert Edward Walsh to Elizabeth T. Bruff, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, and Thomas W. Walsh, an Englishman.
As a teenager Walsh was nearly drowned in a storm sailing his uncle’s yacht from Cuba to Florida. Apparently deciding that the sea was not for him, he spent the next two years of his life riding, roping and trail blazing in Texas and other parts of the old frontier. What the Cowboy Life Taught Raoul Walsh "He soon learned that “I could ride anything with hair on it,” he recorded in his rollicking 1974 memoirs Each Man in His Own Time. But he found out that “Although I could fork a horse, throw a rope, roll a cigarette with one hand, I knew nothing about trail-driving.” "Schooled by a Texas vaquero named Ramirez, he learned quickly: “Knowledge came the hard way in drifting the herd away from populated centers where local strays might join in and cause trouble; in standing night watch; in learning to sing and talk to the resting herd and to slap my chaps, so the cattle would not spook at the silence in which the howl of a coyote might make them stampede.” "The pay was $30 a month and “found.” “The ‘found’ was beans, sometimes moldy bacon that gave me stomach cramps, and coffee strong enough to melt the spoon. It was a tough life, but I had asked for it. In later years, I would receive a hundred times that much just for telling people how it should be done.” After a few months “I was as brown as an Indian and as hard as nails.”
"Often described as the first psychoanalytic western, Raoul Walsh’s 1947 Pursued plays out the traumas of Robert Mitchum’s homecoming Civil War vet as an existential maelstrom of violence, isolation and psychopathy. In this video essay made for our Deep Focus season exploring the history of the psychological western, Tag Gallagher offers a psychological reading of one of Hollywood’s weirdest westerns." A speck in the cosmos: the inner frontiers of Raoul Walsh’s Pursued
This sounds interesting. Will try to watch it some time. There is a colorized version on YouTube. I think B&W would be better, but that's just me. Pursued | COLORIZED | Cowboys | Full Western Movie (youtube.com)