Raoul Walsh

Raoul Walsh (born March 11, 1887, New York City, New York, U.S.—died December 31, 1980, Simi Valley, California) was an American motion-picture director popular in the 1930s and 1940s for his tough, masculine films starring such actors as Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and James Cagney.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Early work

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.

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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.

Films of the 1930s

One of 1930’s biggest hits, The Big Trail was a western epic with young John Wayne in his first starring role as the head of a wagon train on the Oregon Trail and was filmed in an early widescreen process. Women of All Nations (1931) was yet another go-round with marines Flagg and Quirt (again McLaglen and Lowe), this time carousing through Sweden, Nicaragua, and Egypt.

The Yellow Ticket (1931) was set in tsarist Russia; to visit her imprisoned father, a Jewish schoolteacher (Elissa Landi) must obtain a yellow ticket meant for prostitutes so as to circumvent a decree against travel by Jews. Me and My Gal (1932) was a romantic crime yarn, starring Spencer Tracy as a policeman who falls for a waitress (Joan Bennett) only to learn that her sister (Marion Burns) is embroiled with gangsters. The boisterous comedy The Bowery (1933) returned Walsh to the familiar turf of his childhood, with George Raft and Wallace Beery as rival saloon owners in 1890s New York City. On loan to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), he made Going Hollywood (1933), a musical with Bing Crosby and Marion Davies, followed by the perky Baby Face Harrington (1935), a minor parody of gangster pictures.

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.

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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.

At Warner Brothers: The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, and White Heat

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 flavorful 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]).

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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.

Manpower (1941) pitted two power-company workers (Edward G. Robinson and Raft) against each other for the prize of a café hostess (Marlene Dietrich), and They Died with Their Boots On (1941), which starred Errol Flynn as a highly sanitized George Armstrong Custer, completed an extraordinary year for Walsh. Flynn preferred working with Walsh to Warner Brothers’ other top action director, Michael Curtiz, and they teamed again twice in 1942. Desperate Journey was a tale of five Allied pilots (Ronald Reagan among them) who are shot down over Germany and try to make their way back to England. Gentleman Jim was a biopic of boxing champ Jim Corbett (with Ward Bond as a memorable John L. Sullivan) set during the days of Walsh’s youth in New York; it was a special project for him, and it was also a favorite role of Flynn’s.

Background to Danger (1943) was an adaptation of Eric Ambler’s novel of World War II espionage; in it, an American agent (Raft) is sent into the fray in Turkey, where he is suitably menaced by a Nazi colonel (Sydney Greenstreet) and a Russian spy (Peter Lorre). Then it was Flynn again with more patriotic derring-do in Northern Pursuit (1943), as a Mountie going undercover in a ring of Nazi saboteurs. Walsh and Flynn reteamed for Uncertain Glory (1944), in which a French criminal must make the supreme sacrifice to save 100 hostages held by the Nazis. Their next collaboration, Objective, Burma! (1945), was one of the decade’s best—and grittiest—war movies, with Flynn starring in one of his finest performances as the leader of 50 paratroopers trapped behind Japanese lines in the jungle.

The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) was not as successful at the box office, but this oddball fantasy at least was original; Benny played a trumpet player who falls asleep and dreams he is an angel sent to destroy the world by blowing on the Last Trumpet. Salty O’Rourke (1945) returned Walsh to safer ground with a pleasant yarn about a racetrack con man (Alan Ladd) falling for a schoolteacher (Gail Russell).

Walsh then made The Man I Love (1947), a vehicle for Lupino, who played a feisty nightclub singer harassed by a gangster boss (Robert Alda). Pursued (1947) was Walsh’s first western in many years, and it was a good one, with new star Robert Mitchum as an orphan haunted by disturbing dreams about his family’s murder. Cheyenne (1947) was a less-adventurous western with Dennis Morgan and Jane Wyman. Silver River (1948) starred Flynn as a ruthless silver baron in the Nevada Territory; it was Walsh’s final project with Flynn.

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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.

Last films

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.

Battle Cry (1955) was an ode to the marines of World War II that remained as faithful as was then possible under the Production Code to the epic novel by Leon Uris (who also wrote the screenplay). It was Walsh’s first Cinemascope production and starred Van Heflin, Aldo Ray, and Tab Hunter. The cattle-drive western soap-opera The Tall Men (1955) had an excellent cast of Clark Gable, Robert Ryan, and Jane Russell.

Walsh used Russell again in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956), casting her as a saloon singer in World War II Honolulu. The King and Four Queens (1956) was a mediocre western with Gable as a con man trying to swindle a rancher (Jo Van Fleet) and her four daughters-in-law out of a fortune in stolen gold. In Band of Angels (1957) Gable and Walsh teamed again in a compromised version of Robert Penn Warren’s novel about the antebellum south. Dubbed “The Ghost of Gone with the Wind,” the film was a box-office failure. Walsh tackled his most-daunting literary source with The Naked and the Dead (1958), adapted from Norman Mailer’s novel about a platoon of American soldiers trying to capture a Pacific island during World War II.

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.