World of Walsh – Regeneration / 1915

Raoul Walsh as John Wilkes Booth, in The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Which movies do people mean when they say, “they don’t make ’em like they used to”? Among the old films, that is to say the classical Hollywood films, there are some film-makers whose works have retained a vogue. Their films have a certain feeling for modern life that touches audiences as directly as they did in their first runs. One thinks of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan and Howard Hawks. Then there are those film-makers whose works have a cult appeal like the westerns of Anthony Mann, the crime films of Otto Preminger, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, the RKO horror films of Val Lewton, Vincente Minnelli’s musicals or Sirk’s 50s colour melodramas. Then of course there are international treasures such as John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.

Where does this leave a film-maker by the name of Raoul Walsh? Walsh is known and admired for his crime films – The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra and of course, White Heat. A masterpiece like The Strawberry Blonde, starring James Cagney, Olivia DeHavilland and a Rita Hayworth-before-she-became-Rita Hayworth; while still little known is at least available via the Warner Archive stable and its cast is sure to attract attention. The Man I Love one of the greatest films about the immediate post-war American society was made available recently. Unfortunately many films are lost, including The Honor System which John Ford ranked as one of his ten favorite films. There are still obscurities and rare treasures to unearth in Walsh’s oeuvre. Gentlemen Jim isn’t exactly unknown (it was a favorite of Max Ophuls’), but another collaboration with Errol Flynn, Uncertain Glory most definitely is. And another major film, made at the end of his career is the 1957 Band of Angels, a favorite of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s. The early 30s include such cult favorites as Me and My Gal(regarded by Manny Farber as his masterpiece) and the wild and controversialThe Bowery.

It’s always good to start a rediscovery from the beginning, and Regeneration is, to my knowledge, Walsh’s earliest surviving feature film as a director. It’s also a great film.

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The earliest surviving Walsh film is Regeneration (1915), a gangster film made well before the craze officially took of in the 1930s. The world’s first gangster film is of course D. W. Griffith’s groundbreaking 1912 short, The Musketeers of Pig Alley. The gangsters there are called “musketeers”. The main hero of the film is a thug who saves the object of his affection, Lillian Gish from being date raped and who in turn relies on her favor to escape the law at the end. What is striking in Griffith’s short is the sense of working class atmosphere, much of it aided by location shooting in New York and even today, you get a strong sense of ghetto life coming through in Griffith’s film. Walsh’s Regeneration is visibly inspired by Griffith and by The Musketeers of Pig Alley.

 

 

And yet Walsh’s achievement in this film is already singular. Griffith’s films as visually accomplished they are, even in something like Way Down East and Broken Blossoms, rely on fairly simple dramaturgical structures. The characters are pre-defined and for all the exemplary acting by the likes of Lillian Gish and others, there’s very little evidence of inner life and change.

In Regeneration we are already somewhere different. The main hero of the film is Owen Conway who grows up in a tough, working class neighbourhood(the film was mostly shot on the Lower East Side of New York City). The young Owen Conway is played by a boy actor John McCann and the film’s look at orphanage(the boy gazes at his mother’s funeral through the window) and poverty is tough and unsentimental, lacking all the surface glamour that later Depression period-epics would coat this period in. The opening sequence shows the gradual growing up of Owen from boy to man, becoming the leader of a street gang, but living by a certain unexpressed chivalric code, which in the film stems from his lost childhood and attachment to his mother.

Regeneration is a classic gangster story of tangled love(a girl pined after by the gangster-hero and the district attorney), rivalry and revenge. The film even ends with a classic gangster showdown, though between rival factions and a death scene that anticipates the classic bloody finales of several 30s gangster films, including Walsh’s own The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra and White Heat. But what’s surprising is the depth of the characterization, the way the adult Owen Conway (played by Rockcliffe Fellowes, who ought to have had a longer career on the basis of that name alone) is divided between his softer instincts, represented by his attraction to Anna Q. Nilsson’s character, and his inability to move past his violent environment. In this way, Regeneration, is the birth of the modern crime drama, expanding on the possibilities opened up by Griffith.

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