Raoul Walsh

[HerrSchreck]

Well I guess it's safe to say there'll be no Raul Walsh At Fox Box Of Boxes this year for Xmas.

[domino harvey]

To be fair, I don't remember the last time Fox even released a DVD

[Finch]

Slant has a nice appreciation of Walsh and a capsule review of Me and My Gal as well as Band of Angels, both of which little seen these days.

[tarpilot]

EDIT: Removed my Big Brown Eyes review as I was re-using some of it in another thread and I like to do my best to disguise my crossposting. Hopefully I'll think of something to fill this space with before the topic gets bumped. Kind of exciting, huh?

[whaleallright]

my personal favorites are two wartime Errol Flynn vehicles, Gentleman Jim and Objective, Burma!, but his filmography is full of some of the best films made in the studio era. following is a post about his Fox films of the late 1920s/early 1930s, from the thread for the Ford at Fox set:

I had some hopes for something like an Eclipse set of "pre-Code" Walsh films but that was dashed when Fox released Me and My Gal on their (mostly godforsaken) MOD line. the quality on that is decent but I wouldn't say "excellent"--it's an unrestored release print transferred in the VHS era is my guess. the 35mm print that had been circulating looks better, although as with many films of the time it's rather grainy to begin with. the Fox MOD series often doesn't have access to new restorations/prints made by the Fox archives, simply because their production budget is too low to allow for new scans of 35mm material. or at least that is my sense.

most of the Raoul Walsh Fox films of the late silent/early sound period(s) are pretty great, although many of them are so un-PC (from ethnic caricatures to downright racism) as to make me wonder if any company could release them outside of some high-ticket coffee-table set. Me and My Gal is pretty benign in this regard; perhaps that's why it's the only one of these films that has seen release in the digital era.

FWIW (and just to lament what could have been) the keepers of Walsh's early Fox period are, other than The Big Trail:

- What Price Glory? (1926) - epochal, much-imitated war comedy-drama, was once considered a stone classic (which it is) but now seems generally unknown
- The Cock-Eyed World (1929) - a talkie sequel to What Price Glory?
- The Man Who Came Back (1931) - an interesting attempt to extend the Gaynor/Farrell magic into the sound era
- Wild Girl (1932) - Farrell matched with a young Joan Bennett, supposedly sublime (I haven't had a chance to see this one, but it had a very enthusiastic reception at Bologna)
- Me and My Gal (1932) - Bennett again, with Spencer Tracy; probably the best of the lot - hugely entertaining, ecstatic, life-affirming
- Sailor's Luck (1933) - an anarchic shore-leave comedy, striking number of motifs carried over from Me and My Gal (IIRC they were shot almost back-to-back)
- The Bowery (1933) - a kind of retooling of Vidor's The Champ, but even better than that classic - as with several of these films, amazing cast from top to bottom (Wallace Beery, George Raft, Jackie Cooper, Fay Wray...)
- Under Pressure (1935) - not as good as the previous films, but a fitting (temporary) end to Walsh's Fox employment (he went freelance after this)

Most of these films have the same cynical-but-romantic, wisecracking attitude. They feature many of the same actors in similar parts, from the stars down to Fox bit players. One can spot a ridiculous number of visual motifs, gags, etc. that carry (and develop) from film to film. In other words, they would all benefit from being packaged (and viewed) together.

alas...

here's a link to a 2013 Pacific Film Archive series on Walsh; a larger retrospective was held at Bologna in 2013: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/walsh" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[zedz]

Nice selection, but I would absolutely add The Yellow Ticket to the 'essential' pile.

[whaleallright]

I've never seen that one! it doesn't seem to have much of a reputation, and admittedly I get it mixed up with the other silent and early-sound adaptations of the same ca. 1914 stage play by Michael Morton, which is itself highly derivative of “La Tosca.” I tried to disentangle these a few months ago, because there’s a lot of confusion online and even in some scholarly histories:

1) 1914 Polish film (lost) starring the yet-to-become-an-international-star Pola Negri -- this one is referenced in a few places but is not on IMDB (and may only be a rumor)

2) 1916 American film (lost) The Yellow Passport produced by the Shubert Film Corporation, an extension of the major Shubert theater chain, who also made Maurice Tourneur's The Wishing Ring

3) 1918 American film The Yellow Ticket starring Fanny Ward and Walter Oland, produced by Astra Films (survives)

4) 1918 German film Der gelbe Schein, also w/ Negri, released in the USA as The Devil's Pawn -- this was co-written by Ernst Lubitsch's regular collaborator Hanns Kraly, and produced by the same company that made Lubitsch's films as actor and director (until he left for Hollywood). this survives and may be the best-known version, not that that’s saying much.

5) 1928 Soviet film by Mehzrapom studio, directed by Fyodor Otsep and starring Anna Sten. Russian title translates to Land in Captivity (survives). has a strong reputation.

6) 1931 American sound film The Yellow Ticket, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Elissa Landi, Lionel Barrymore, and Laurence Olivier (!)

(& no idea what if anything Raul Ruiz's 2009 film El pasaporte amarillo has to do with all this)

the only one I've seen is #4, though I have #5 and will get around to it.

tell me/us about the Walsh version!

[edited for spelling]

[zedz]

The Walsh version is great. Dark and moody, with a climactic scene staged in two adjoining apartments / hotel rooms that Walsh plays out with a characteristically brilliant use of deep space composition. It's a creaky old melodrama, but Walsh sharpens everything up and keeps the pace cracking.

[liam fennell]

Thanks for that list and descriptions, Jonah, it is much appreciated. It's a shame about the non-PC aspect of these things, I can definitely imagine it being a little over the top in these early Walsh films as his sense of humor in general is a little over the top! Which was something I definitely had to adjust to (especially the way he directs Alan Hale!) but once I did I came to appreciate his goofball humor very much.

Me and My Gal really is something else! It would make a strange but funny double bill with Father of the Bride.

I also often think Gentleman Jim, along with the tonally similar Strawberry Blonde, as his best and my favorite. The thing is just so fun and perfect in every way. It doesn't even have a story or any conflict at all, really. It cruises along almost solely on the strength of Flynn's charm and Walsh's seemingly effortless direction. Such a slight film in many ways and somehow that is its greatest strength!!! Fascinating stuff. It is the kind of rare movie that makes me look at and appreciate movies differently.

[hearthesilence]

I didn't have time to go see the IB Tech print of Rio Bravo at Metrograph, but despite the ridiculous train rerouting this weekend, I made it to Me and My Gal at MoMA. This was a "new 4K restoration from nitrate elements held by MoMA, funded by Twentieth Century Fox," and as always you definitely know you're watching a DCP. I've never seen this before, but I'm guessing they did a remarkable job of fixing any damage because there wasn't any to be seen. As with many Hollywood films of this vintage, what survives is a gauzy looking picture. It still looks nice, especially in close up. I was surprised Manny Farber pegged this as Raoul Walsh's best, and to be fair, it has gained quite a few fans over the years. While I can't say it's one of my favorites, Walsh is quite adventurous in his filmmaking here. (The Eugene O'Neill joke and the final shot are very much left field choices for a film like this.) I didn't even recognize Joan Bennett, and having missed the credits, I didn't know she was in the film. And Spencer Tracy is wonderful - his presence just amazingly natural on-screen.

[zedz]

DISTANT DRUMS

Very disappointing Raoul Walsh film, which doesn’t even have his normally fine staging of action scenes to recommend it. It’s a standard western in a non-standard setting (the Florida everglades), but it doesn’t work for several reasons:
- Gary Cooper is the lead, and he’s fine, but the film includes a focal character who’s not only largely irrelevant (I’m guessing he was figured in mainly to allow Cooper’s character to have a star entrance), but embodied by an actor who’s stiff as a board. Once Cooper enters, this second banana just hangs around with nothing to do, stinking the place up.
- The plot, which soon boils down to a chase through the swamp, is weirdly dull. Rather than ratcheting up tension by showing us a dogged pursuit, the chase is staged as a series of close shaves from which the soldiers narrowly escape, until, surprise!, the Indians suddenly catch up with them again and they have another narrow escape.

[Ovader]

I wanted to find out more information of a song's origins and curious if this is correct that Walsh co-wrote a song titled Let's Dream In The Moonlight? I was listening to a fine debut album by Samara Joy and that song appears on the album featuring my favourite guitarist Pasquale Grasso.

[Red Screamer]

This is my 31st Raoul Walsh film and, while he's made some movies I like, I am by now wholly unconvinced that there is any auteur argument to be made here any more than for, say, a far less lauded workhorse like Henry Hathaway. I think it's also pretty obvious why Walsh has not maintained the kind of lasting modern reputation of many of his lauded contemporaries-- his work is too varied, too uneven, and filled with too few objective highlights to survive a cohesive argument (and it's telling that those who try bring in only a small percentage of his films to make their arguments). Walsh is to directing what this cast of this film is to acting-- he showed up, but was subject to the material at hand and could not rise above it.

I attended a bunch of films at a Walsh retrospective recently and found on balance too many forgettable, anonymous works as well, though I think I like him more than you do. When he's interested in the material and, perhaps even more essentially, the actors, he can be exceptional and daring and, in his prime, he has a technical facility that can make even the more generic ones stand out among their peers. Even more so than the great films, the invention and power of works ahead of their time like Regeneration or The Big Trail makes bigger defenses tempting, but I'm also not convinced of an "every nook and cranny" approach—which the final remnants of the MacMahonians still seem to push for.

Then again, I'm not sure that's essential to be a great filmmaker when you have a number of wonderful titles to your name. As zedz mentions at the beginning of this thread, Walsh also requires a bit of a different lens than Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, etc. since his films tend to be more fully identified with/fulfilling their genres. Well, that, and I wouldn't put him in their league, as Dave Kehr does, for the reasons you mention. For the record, Tag Gallagher gives the major films as: Regeneration, Me and My Gal, The Bowery, The Roaring Twenties, The Strawberry Blonde, They Died with Their Boots On, Uncertain Glory, Pursued, Captain Horatio Hornblower, The World in His Arms, and Band of Angels.

I'm also a big fan of The Big Trail, Sadie Thompson, They Drive by Night, and Gentleman Jim, among others. I will add, on the level of curiosities, seeing so many of his films back to back highlighted some weird recurring personal touches. A fear of dentists and an extra investment in films set around the year of his birth, sure, but also: is there any American filmmaker who features as many illiterate characters in their films as Raoul Walsh?

[domino harvey]

Your cogent point on whether being an "auteur" even matters in terms of being able to produce worthwhile films is a fair one. The problem for me, I guess, is that unlike other wildly uneven but verified auteurs like Wilder or Ford, there is not a single Walsh film I've seen that I'd call a five star/Capital G Great film, so there's no framework in which I can entertain him as a major figure even aside from auteurist necessities. That said, I quite like several Walsh films, particularly Band of Angels, the Big Trail (though I've cooled somewhat on the initial wow factor of its mere existence in the interim years), the Revolt of Mamie Stover, White Heat, and Colorado Territory (the last of which I just caught up with recently and can understand why the MacMahonists considered it his best-- like Hawks' A Song is Born, the director's autoremake is better than the original, though I haven't heard too many claim the same for his musical remake of the Strawberry Blonde with Dennis Morgan!). But many fall into "good enough" territory (A Distant Trumpet, Battle Cry, &c) and far too many factor far lower than that for me (Esther and the King, Northern Pursuit, &c).

Of course, given his prolific output, me seeing 31 films is still only about a third of his filmography, so who knows, maybe I'll get my wish and reassess upwards. But I still don't think I could in good conscience ever recommend someone go down a Walsh rabbit hole without checking off dozens of other directors first

[knives]

This is not in disagreement with anyone, but just to add to the discussion/ answer the Hathaway question.

Since the auteur/ journeyman distinction has no use in determining quality (you can have Z grade auteurs and great journeymen) I think it’s only really useful as a critical tool. Walsh’s career seems too random to really use that auteur tool so I suspect most people nowadays would agree that he’s a journeyman (and if people bring up that he often produced and wrote his scripts so did Hathaway and even journeyman par excellence Curtiz).

So I think in the question of how he’s different from Hathaway is how much I can trust him to deliver. I can go into a Walsh film and assume the possibility of enjoyment, but can’t really do the same for Hathaway. Off the top of my head I can think of several, largely mentioned in this thread already, Walsh films I’d rewatch in a heartbeat and have a great time with. Alternatively, there aren’t that many Hathaway films I enjoyed the first time and even his best film seen by me, Peter Ibbetson, wins mostly on oddness and wouldn’t rank with the top five Walsh’s I’ve seen. I’d call Walsh a greater director based on the simple measure of having a higher ceiling and floor.

[domino harvey]

Watched two more Walsh films, Uncertain Glory and Objective: Burma! and am no closer to reassessing my downward viewpoint on Walsh. Uncertain Glory is the better of the two, and it falls into the "Okay" category I identified earlier, but I spent much of the film confused by what turned out to be an offhand remark by Flynn about him (falsely) being responsible for the RAF attack that freed him from prison and so it didn't even register until deep in the film that he was supposed to be a bad guy who turns good and not a spy keeping his cover. Beyond this, I found the film entirely pedestrian but there are a lot of good ideas here that could have made for a truly great film-- a guilty man being convinced to take the blame for a different crime who is, simultaneously, being set up as the fall guy by the townspeople who know he didn't do it but need someone to burn to save their own. That could make for a tense morality play, but it doesn't here. Objective: Burma! fares much worse, particularly its punishing two and a half hour running time. Telling more or less the same story as Fuller's Merrill's Marauders, Flynn is a total non-entity here as the platoon leader trying to get his men through the titular jungle. There is a ten minute section near the end concerning a nighttime attack on the soldiers' position that registers well, but it is lonely with all the more familiar trappings surrounding it.

[Drucker]

Appreciate your write-ups, Dom. I've only seen a handful of these Walsh films and have mostly seen the most renowned ones. I am due for a rewatch but am somewhat surprised nobody's mentioned Manpower, which is a film I admittedly don't remember much about (watched the film once years ago) but I do remember enjoying. I also remember the opening scenes, and the explosive energy and Ward Bond's performance in that first reel are still something I can strongly recall enjoying.

[therewillbeblus]

Revisited White Heat, and it's even more deliciously brutal than I remember. Walsh splashes around gifts of pleasure in the narrative, but most impressively he holds a consistent tone that's at once sincerely stark and bombastically playful. It never reaches camp because it's so lucid to cruelty's utility and consequence, yet it also leans into that cruelty with an unbelievably confident distance of sharp audience engagement. Walsh keeps things lowkey and.. highkey(?) at the same time. It's so much fun while it's demonstrating such chaos, like some of the scariest noirs. Cagney helps a bundle - and is essentially solely responsible for the shocking barbarity - but it's Walsh that takes the time to make us stew in the sludge of violent, hopeless individualism, though oscillating between digestibly fleshing it out and curtly doling out rapid assassinations that make a modern audience member gulp. Something keeps this from becoming a Great film, and it's in the procedural last act that the movie stumbles, losing some momentum, but the infamous finale sticks the landing. If you shaved off maybe 15 minutes, this could be a perfect film.

[domino harvey]

One last Walsh before the year ends, the completely forgotten Fox Cinemascope quasi-musical, A Private's Affair-- not even the most devoted of Walsh auteurists seems to want to touch this one, and for good reason: here, at last, is a film that gives us a plot worthy of rising to the level of the stupidest screenplay of all time, Too Many Husbands. But, unlike in that fiasco, this plot is soo admirably dumb that it's mildly impressive at some point. I will actually not reveal what happens, which you would never see coming from the first thirty minutes anyway, but the barebones here are Sal Mineo, Bing Crosby's son, and the future Mr Goodwrench join the Army, encounter future sitcom staples Barbara Eden and Bob Denver among others (including Terry Moore, at the tail end of her QT period), and perform two excellent (!) musical numbers, cruelly bookended on either side of the aforementioned stupid plot. What is immediately apparent within seconds of watching this is that Sal Mineo should have been on screen at all times and is infinitely more charismatic than any of his co-stars by a factor of a billion. Sadly, second to the idiocy of the plot, the next biggest fumble here is that Mineo, who starts the film as the lead, is sidelined for the rest of it, reduced to quips and asides in one of the biggest studio blunders imaginable, especially since the structure of the film indicates that there was more material for Mineo/Moore that was cut here. All that said... I could not deny I was entertained, in a trainwreck kind of way. And the two musical numbers are so good that I'm not clear why the rest of the film isn't a full musical. But anyone trying to tie to this to an auteurist reading of Walsh is really gonna have to work for it...

[hearthesilence]

FWIW, MoMA is screening a restored print of The Big Trail on July 4th in the afternoon. They had one screening today, and it is indeed the longer "Grandeur" edition shot in 70mm, albeit projected from a 35mm print. (The July 4th screening will be in the larger theater 1, unlike today.)

Fred Camper has a great write-up from 1988, when the Grandeur edition was restored and reissued, and unfortunately his comments on the sound still apply:

At the beginning of the sound era, in 1930, several studios, seeing that theater owners were willing to reequip their movie houses for sound, reasoned that they might also buy wide-screen projection equipment of the studios’ own design. Fox introduced the Grandeur process, in which the image was photographed on 70-millimeter film rather than the standard 35-millimeter. The Big Trail, one of the few Grandeur films, was shot in two versions, 35-millimeter as well as 70-millimeter, because Fox knew that not all theaters would be equipped for the new process. As it turned out, few theater owners bought into wide-screen, and The Big Trail was shown in Grandeur only in New York and Los Angeles. But the wide-screen version has recently been restored, and although the sound track isn’t always intelligible, the film’s unique response to wide-screen makes its Chicago premiere June 18 and 19 at the Film Center well worth seeing.

You may have to strain to hear the dialogue most of the time, but to be brutally honest, the acting, story and dialogue are unremarkable. They can be charming in their own way, especially considering this is John Wayne's first lead role - he acts with a youthful awkwardness that goes against the star persona he'd later establish. It really is quite a spectacle, packed and dense with detail even in the medium shots, and seeing this projected only plays up to those strength - I found a copy on YouTube just now, probably ripped from the Blu-ray, and the film feels substantially diminished when shrunken down to the size of a computer screen. It's quite a trip to see a film of this vintage in widescreen, if you didn't know better you'd think it was a projection mistake, but the compositions are perfect and pictorially this may be one of Walsh's best films - not a great film IMHO (sorry) but it is great filmmaking.

EDIT: Actually one thing is remarkable - Wayne's character lived with Native Americans and this is a film that goes against the idea that Native Americans were simply "villains," so much that when one of the main characters refers to them as savages right in front of them, it has an awkwardness and racist intent that doesn't feel lost on Wayne's character, nor does it feel unusual as Wayne's character is aware that his viewpoint is out of step with most white Americans.

[therewillbeblus]

Background to Danger is a wonderfully surprising strange beast of a movie. It occasionally shows its bits and pieces as a B-spy thriller starring the awful George Raft, but Walsh crafts this yarn with such relentless forward momentum that I was genuinely on the edge of my seat or chillingly disturbed (like a surreal encounter with an upright dead man - I think I know where Blue Velvet got some inspiration!) at various points. Exhibit A of Walsh's wit for suspense, which builds to a cartoonish double climax, even if it doesn't entirely cover up the silly faults. Also, Peter Lorre steals scenes as the most inappropriately blasé foil, and the role definitely belongs with his more well-known career highlights

[therewillbeblus]

Desperate Journey could be described as Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, and Arthur Kennedy beating up Nazis for two hours, and that wouldn't necessarily be wrong. However, there are a lot of nuanced bits to the action and memorably rich little narrative pauses that make this more than just a war programmer. Here is another picture that's better than it has any right to be thanks to Walsh's directorial prowess and agile movement through exciting set pieces. The trivial characterization -or poor acting from Reagan- didn't bother me (not nearly as much as Raft in Background to Danger) thanks to the animated nature of the cyclical patterns they go about besting the baddies. Walsh straddles the line between cartoonishness and sincerity, and somehow succeeds in sustaining a middle wavelength of captivating boyish adventure

[therewillbeblus]

Uncertain Glory proves that Errol Flynn had some range, giving a very authentically 'human' perf. The first section is a lot more exciting than the back half. For a while there, this felt like it could be a 39 Steps-type man-on-the-run chaser, but the film dissipates into romantic tragedy and moralizes for an extended period of time. Still, a lot of the drama does feel earned, thanks to Paul Lukas' complicated, equally human performance, enriching the dynamic between the two men and making the ethical dilemma somewhat stimulating rather than simply predictable and lame.

I have very little to say about Fighter Squadron, one of the dullest films about aviation out there. It takes a very long time to build to some nice moments of camaraderie, and there's a couple serviceable air fight scenes, but the lasting impression is a mismanaged, uneven film and a waste of talent.

[domino harvey]

Jean-Pierre Melville on why he excluded Walsh from his 63-name long list of Pre-War American Directors

Now, as it happens, I didn’t like any of Walsh’s pre-war
films, because they were all marginal and they all had something
wrong. Take my word for it, Walsh is a poor film-maker.
It is tragic to see how far young critics can be deceived, how
much influence one kid can have on a whole generation. I am
thinking of Pierre Rissient. He thought Walsh had talent, he
said so, and he has said it so often that a kind of religion has
sprung up in Paris with people worshipping Walsh. The only
Walsh film I ever liked was Objective Burma, which he made
in 1945. I would have to see it again before being definite
about it, because it may well not stand up now.

And here’s the aforementioned list, btw

Spoiler

In that case, how does it happen that your celebrated list of sixty-three pre-war American directors does not include the names of Chaplin, Walsh or De Mille?

At that time the American cinema comprised a famous trinity:
Capra, Ford and Wyler. I am not talking here about our
tastes, but of their genuine importance in the cinematographic hierarchy of the period. But for a director to be included in my
list, all that was necessary was that he should have made one
film, just one, which I loved. I did not include Chaplin because
he is God, and therefore beyond classification. I drew up that
list, which relates only to the sound era, after much careful
research and a great deal of thought and critical analysis:

Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley, Richard Boleslavski, Frank
Borzage, Clarence Brown, Harold S. Bucquet, Frank Capra,
Jack Conway, Merian C. Cooper, John Cromwell, James
Cruze, George Cukor, Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle,
Allan Dwan, Ray Enright, George Fitzmaurice, Robert
Flaherty, Victor Fleming, John Ford, Sidney Franklin, Tay
Garnett, Edmund Goulding, Alfred Green, Edward Griffith,
Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, Garson Kanin,
William Keighley, Henry King, Henry Koster, Gregory
LaCava, Fritz Lang, Sidney Lanfield, Mitchell Leisen,
Robert Z. Leonard, Mervyn LeRoy, Frank Lloyd, Ernst
Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, Norman Z. McLeod, Rouben
Mamoulian, Archie Mayo, Lewis Milestone, Elliot Nugent,
Henry C. Potter, Gregory Ratoff, Roy del Ruth, Mark
Sandrich, Alfred Santell, Ernest Schoedsack, John M. Stahl,
Josef von Sternberg, George Stevens, Norman Taurog,
Richard Thorpe, W. S. Van Dyke, King Vidor, William
Wellman, James Whale, Sam Wood, William Wyler.

(From Melville on Melville)

[mizo]

Interesting list. A lot of names that are familiar to me but don't recall any films. I wonder which Dr. Kildare movie wowed Melville enough to make him list Harold S. Bucquet (and I hope it's pronounced "Bucket")

The names Ray Enright, George Fitzmaurice, Sidney Franklin, Edward Griffith, Sidney Lanfield, Elliott Nugent, Alfred Santell, and Richard Thorpe similarly make me go "Who?"

Any secret auteurs here? Or even any idea what singular masterworks caught Melville's attention?