Year: Day to Day Men: March 11
Juxtaposition
The eleventh of March in 1887 marks the birth date of Raoul Walsh, an American film director, actor, and founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Born Albert Edward Walsh in New York, Raoul Walsh studied at Seton Hall College, a private Roman Catholic research university in New Jersey. In 1909, he began an acting career in New York City theaters. Walsh became an assistant to film director David Wark Griffith in 1914. He acted in his first full-length feature film, D.W. Griffith’s 1914 silent drama “The Life of General Villa”. Shot on location in Mexico, the film starred Pancho Villa as himself in actual as well as recreated filmed battles; Walsh played the role of Villa as a younger man.
In 1915, Walsh served as assistant director on D.W. Griffith’s silent epic “The Birth of a Nation”, the first non-serial American twelve-reel film ever made. In the film, he had the role of John Wilkes Booth, the stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. Walsh and Carl Harbaugh created the screenplay for Walsh’s directorial debut from an adaptation of Owen Kildare’s 1903 memoir “My Mamie Rose”. This critically acclaimed 1915 silent drama “Regeneration”, shot on location in Manhattan’s Bowery district, was the first full-length feature gangster film.
After his service in the United States Army during World War I, Raoul Walsh directed United Artist’s 1924 silent “The Thief of Bagdad” which starred and was produced by Douglas Fairbanks. One of the most expensive films of the 1920s, the film was lavishly staged on a Hollywood studio set and contained state of the art special effects. In 1926, Walsh directed “What Price Glory?”, a synchronized sound film with a music score and sound effects, that starred Dolores del Rio and Victor McLaglen.
Walsh directed the 1928 “Sadie Thompson”, which starred Gloria Swanson, and appeared in the role of Swanson’s boyfriend; this was his first acting role since 1915 and his last as well. While directing and acting in the 1928 western “In Old Arizona”, Walsh was in a car crash that resulted in the loss of his right eye; he would wear an eye patch for the rest of his life. Walsh directed his first widescreen film for Fox Studios in 1930, the epic wagon train western “The Big Trail” which starred the then unknown John Wayne, a former prop man. In 1933, he directed “The Bowery”, a historic drama of residents in New York’s Bowery district during the 1890s. The first film produced by Twentieth Century Pictures, it starred Wallace Beery, George Raft, Fay Wray, and child actor Jackie Cooper.
After an undistinguished period with Paramount Pictures, Raoul Walsh’s career soared with his work at Warner Brothers from 1939 to the end of his contract in 1953. During this period, he directed many of the major studio stars in Hollywood. Among his films were the 1939 “Roaring Twenties” with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart; the 1940 crime western “Dark Command”, made under Republic Pictures, with Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Walter Pidgeon and Roy Rogers; the 1941 “High Sierra” with Bogart and Ida Lupino: the 1941 “Manpower” with Edward G. Robinson, George Raft and Marlene Dietrich; and the 1949 “White Heat” with James Cagney.
Walsh made his last films as a freelancer for five different studios. Among these were the 1952 “Blackbeard the Pirate” with Robert Newton in the lead role; the 1953 “The Lawless Breed” with Rock Hudson in an early starring role as gunman John Wesley Hardin; the 1958 “The Naked and the Dead”, an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s World War II novel; and Walsh’s first Cinemascope production, the 1955 “Battle Cry” starring Tab Hunter, Aldo Ray and Hugh Van Heflin with a screenplay by author Leon Uris.
By the early 1960s, Raoul Walsh was suffering from physical difficulties, most notably fading sight in his good eye. He retired from the film industry in 1964. Walsh died from a heart attack on the last day of December in 1980 in Palm Springs, California at the age of ninety-three. His legacy of sixty-nine sound pictures as well as the many earlier silent films remains among the most-impressive bodies of work submitted by any Hollywood director.