“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
‘The Man I Love’ Shows at Least One Studio Still Sees Life in Physical Media "Warners' new Blu-ray of the Raoul Walsh-Ida Lupino classic is a heroic feat of film preservation and restoration that deserves applause." 'The Man I Love'Courtesy Everett Collection "There’s been a lot of talk lately about how the studios have lost interest in physical media, with Disney outsourcing its discs to Sony and questions over where the business is going in the wake of Redbox’s demise and Best Buy’s decision to stop selling Blu-rays and DVDs. Yet not only have the rumors of physical media’s death been greatly exaggerated as boutique labels step in to pick up the slack, but even at the studio level, praiseworthy efforts to showcase archival treasures are alive and well. Take, for example, the new Warner Archive Blu-ray of Raoul Walsh‘s 1946 classic “The Man I Love.” "There haven’t exactly been hordes clamoring for a restoration, yet some hero in the Warner Bros. archives took the time and effort to clear the music, clean up the sound and image, and make “The Man I Love” accessible in a flawless presentation. It’s par for the course for Warner Archive, a label overseen by film historian George Feltenstein that has spent the last 15 years mining the studio’s catalog for important but not necessarily well-known films; in just recent months, for example, Warner Archive has released excellent new editions of Fred Zinneman’s taut film noir “Act of Violence,” George Roy Hill’s underrated John Le Carré adaptation “The Little Drummer Girl” with Diane Keaton, and the complete 1990 iteration of the “Flash” TV series." "Raoul Walsh has been particularly well served by the label, with “The Man I Love” joining earlier pressings of “Gentleman Jim,” “A Lion Is In the Streets,” “Objective Burma,” “Strawberry Blonde,” and “They Drive by Night.” Taken together, the Warner Archive releases give an immediate sense of just what a versatile filmmaker Walsh was — proficient in the biopic, political drama, war film, romantic comedy, and film noir traditions. “The Man I Love” is especially impressive in combining so many of these genres in one. On its surface a melodrama about a lounge singer (Ida Lupino) unable to find enduring love, it’s also a musical, a crime film, and a post-war social drama that has more than a few things in common with William Wyler’s “Best Years of Our Lives,” which was released a few months earlier and took home the Oscar for Best Picture." READ MORE
Old Timer - Raoul Walsh, chats with Gloria Swanson at New York's Museum of Modern Art.. , Photo is dated 1974.