Background
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.
(Raoul Walsh (1887–1980) was known as one of Hollywood's m...)
Raoul Walsh (1887–1980) was known as one of Hollywood's most adventurous, iconoclastic, and creative directors. He carved out an illustrious career and made films that transformed the Hollywood studio yarn into a thrilling art form. Walsh belonged to that early generation of directors―along with John Ford and Howard Hawks―who worked in the fledgling film industry of the early twentieth century, learning to make movies with shoestring budgets. Walsh's generation invented a Hollywood that made movies seem bigger than life itself. In the first ever full-length biography of Raoul Walsh, author Marilyn Ann Moss recounts Walsh's life and achievements in a career that spanned more than half a century and produced upwards of two hundred films, many of them cinema classics. Walsh originally entered the movie business as an actor, playing the role of John Wilkes Booth in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the same year, under Griffith's tutelage, Walsh began to direct on his own. Soon he left Griffith's company for Fox Pictures, where he stayed for more than twenty years. It was later, at Warner Bros., that he began his golden period of filmmaking. Walsh was known for his romantic flair and playful persona. Involved in a freak auto accident in 1928, Walsh lost his right eye and began wearing an eye patch, which earned him the suitably dashing moniker "the one-eyed bandit." During his long and illustrious career, he directed such heavyweights as Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Errol Flynn, and Marlene Dietrich, and in 1930 he discovered future star John Wayne.
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(This is a funny book by a director working in the early d...)
This is a funny book by a director working in the early days of Hollywood. Some chapter titles give the flavor: Mister Manana, The Censors Will Hang Us, and How to Annoy a Nazi.
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(Pursued [Blu-ray]: Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, Judith ...)
Pursued [Blu-ray]: Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, Judith Anderson, Dean Jagger, Alan Hale, Harry Carey Jr., Raoul Walsh, Milton Sperling, Niven Busch: Movies & TV
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(Buy Blackbeard The Pirate - 1952 - Color: Read 82 Movies ...)
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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.
Like his younger brother, he was part of Omega Gamma Delta in high school. Growing up in New York, Walsh was also a friend of the Barrymore family. (John Barrymore recalled spending time reading in the Walsh family library as a youth.)
As a young man, Walsh worked a variety of jobs in Mexico and Texas. His acting career began in 1907 when he performed onstage in San Antonio. Shortly thereafter he returned to New York (where he took the name Raoul), and by 1909 he was playing cowboy roles in silent films for the Pathé brothers. Around 1913, he began working for D.W. Griffith at Biograph, first as an actor and then as an assistant director. When Griffith’s company left Biograph and moved to Hollywood, Griffith sent Walsh to Mexico to shoot footage of Pancho Villa, which was incorporated into The Life of General Villa (1914), with Walsh both codirecting and playing the part of the young Villa. In The Birth of a Nation (1915), Walsh played Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, but he spent most of his energy directing, earning 18 credits alone in 1915. A contract with Fox followed.
Walsh’s best-known silents include Regeneration (1915), a gritty story about the reform of a New York gangster that was his first film at Fox; the Arabian fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1924) with Douglas Fairbanks, one of the decade’s enduring classics; and What Price Glory? (1926), a seriocomic treatment of World War I with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe as marines Flagg and Quirt. (One of his most-acclaimed silents, The Honor System 1917, about a man falsely imprisoned under brutal conditions, was at the time considered by some, including director John Ford, to be even better than The Birth of a Nation. However, the film has since been lost.) Nearly as famous was Sadie Thompson (1928), for which Walsh wrote the screenplay based on W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Rain” and in which he also starred as the rowdy Sgt. Tim O’Hara, opposite Gloria Swanson in the title role. Walsh was also going to direct and act in In Old Arizona (1929), a Cisco Kid western yarn (based on an O. Henry story) that would have been his first talkie. But Warner Baxter ended up as Cisco when a jackrabbit smashed through the windshield of Walsh’s car early in the production, leaving him with his trademark eye patch. Irving Cummings finished directing the film (and earned an Oscar nomination for it). Instead, Walsh’s first talkie was The Cock-Eyed World (1929), the popular sequel to What Price Glory?, with McLaglen and Lowe’s marines now frolicking in Russia, Brooklyn, and South America.
Walsh now moved to Paramount, where his projects ran exactly contrary to his strengths. Every Night at Eight (1935) offered Raft in the unlikely role of a radio-show bandleader who transforms three factory girls (Alice Faye, Frances Langford, and Patsy Kelly) into singing stars; its one enduring element was the debut of the song “I’m in the Mood for Love.” Klondike Annie (1936) was much more of a typical Walsh film; a kept woman (Mae West) kills her keeper and escapes on a tramp steamer bound for gold-rush Alaska, and she then employs her wiles on the ship’s captain (McLaglen). The mystery-comedy Big Brown Eyes (1936) had rising stars Cary Grant and Bennett as a detective and a reporter, respectively, going after a gang of jewel thieves.
Walsh now took the unusual step of traveling to England in 1937 to make his next two pictures for British companies, the service comedy O.H.M.S. (also called You’re in the Army Now) for Gaumont and the romantic crime drama Jump for Glory (also called When Thief Meets Thief) for Criterion. Back in the United States, he made the screwball musical Artists & Models (1937) with Jack Benny and Ida Lupino. Hitting a New High (1937) and College Swing (1938) were also musical comedies, the former with Lily Pons, the latter with the formidable cast of George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Martha Raye, and Betty Grable.
Walsh had made 22 films thus far in the 1930s, but none equaled his last of the decade. The Roaring Twenties (1939) was his first for Warner Brothers and the culmination of that studio’s 1930s gangster pictures. Walsh turned out a crisp mini-epic spanning 15 years in the life of a gangster (James Cagney at the top of his form) who is forced into racketeering in order to survive after World War I and then develops a taste for it. They Drive by Night (1940) began as a flavourful story of two brothers’ (Humphrey Bogart and Raft, surprisingly well matched) struggles in the trucking business but shifted halfway through to become a murder story (taken in part from Archie Mayo’s Bordertown 1935).
Walsh slipped over to Republic to make Dark Command (1940), a lively telling of the Quantrill’s Raiders tale starring Wayne and Claire Trevor (who had recently teamed in Ford’s Stagecoach 1939) as Kansans battling renegade William Cantrell (Walter Pidgeon) during the Civil War. With High Sierra (1941) Walsh enjoyed a breakthrough, as did star Bogart, who had the lucky chance of both Paul Muni and Raft turning down the part of Mad Dog Earle, a sensitive robber sprung from prison to pull off a big heist. High Sierra is considered a classic, thanks in part to the script by John Huston, the spectacular location photography of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the fine supporting performance of Lupino as Marie, a dance-hall girl who truly understands Earle. The romantic comedy The Strawberry Blonde (1941) was lighter fare, but again Walsh had a top cast—Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Rita Hayworth—and their ensemble work helped make this a box-office hit.
Fighter Squadron (1948) was a clichéd war movie with Edmond O’Brien as a fighter pilot, and One Sunday Afternoon (1948) was a pallid Technicolor musical remake of his own The Strawberry Blonde, starring Dennis Morgan and Janis Paige. In a remake mood, Walsh reworked High Sierra into Colorado Territory (1949), which worked well as a western with Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, and Dorothy Malone. But it was White Heat (1949) that showed Walsh once more at the peak of his powers; Cagney had one of his greatest roles as Cody Jarrett, a psychopathic yet pathetically tortured killer. Walsh eschewed the conventions of the then-popular film noir to make this an homage to Warner Brothers’s crime pictures of the early 1930s.
Walsh shot Along the Great Divide (1951), a conventional western strengthened by some good location photography, with Kirk Douglas as a U.S. marshal escorting a prisoner to trial. Walsh had one of his biggest hits with Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951), a well-mounted version of the C.S. Forester novels, which starred Gregory Peck as the British naval commander who conquers all during the Napoleonic Wars. Distant Drums (1951) recycled the story structure from Objective, Burma!, transposing the struggle to 1840 during the Second Seminole War in the Florida Everglades. This ended Walsh’s 12-year term at Warner Brothers, where much of his best moviemaking had taken place.
Now a freelancer, Walsh made his next seven films at five different studios. Glory Alley (1952) was a better-than-average boxing yarn with Ralph Meeker and Leslie Caron, set in New Orleans. The World in His Arms (1952) sent Peck back to sea, this time in 1850 as the captain of a sealing schooner romancing a runaway Russian countess (Ann Blyth). Walsh moved another century back in time for Blackbeard, the Pirate (1952), with Robert Newton tendering a ripe performance as the title character.
The Lawless Breed (1953) had Rock Hudson in an early starring role as legendary gunman John Wesley Hardin, but Sea Devils (1953), filmed in England, used Hudson less well as a Channel Islands smuggler in about 1800 who gets mixed up with a spy (Yvonne De Carlo). Although the thinly disguised Huey Long drama A Lion Is in the Streets (1953) did not deliver on its promise, it offered mesmerizing performances by Cagney as the demagogue and Anne Francis as the temptress Flamingo McManamee. Gun Fury (also 1953) was originally shot in 3-D, but even without that novelty, its story of a cowboy (Hudson) tracking down the gang that kidnapped his bride-to-be (Donna Reed), complemented by stunning Arizona location photography, made this more than an ordinary western. Saskatchewan (1954) permitted Walsh to explore the topography of the Canadian Rockies, with Ladd as a Mountie who tries to keep the Sioux and Cree from an uprising.
The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958) was a light western comedy made in England with Kenneth More and Jayne Mansfield. A Private’s Affair (1959) was another lightweight product, a service comedy starring Sal Mineo and Barbara Eden.
Walsh’s contribution to the Bible story wave of the 1950s and 1960s was Esther and the King (1960), a U.S.-Italian coproduction that starred Joan Collins as Esther and Richard Egan as the king Ahasuerus. Marines, Let’s Go (1961) returned Walsh to the relatively familiar ground of the Korean War.
Walsh was able to partially redeem these disappointments with A Distant Trumpet (1964), a rather familiar tale of cavalry battling Indians in 1883 Arizona. It managed to echo some of his earlier western triumphs without equaling them. But Walsh himself was suffering from physical difficulties, primarily fading sight in his one good eye, and he had to retire after this. His legacy of 69 sound pictures (and scores of earlier silents) remains among the most-impressive bodies of work submitted by any Hollywood director. Walsh’s autobiography, Each Man in His Time, was published in 1974.
(Raoul Walsh (1887–1980) was known as one of Hollywood's m...)
(This is a funny book by a director working in the early d...)
(167pages. in8. broché.)
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