Turner Classic Movies Rescues Raoul Walsh

Note to aspiring filmmakers: If you’re looking for a film school, give Raoul Walsh’s curriculum a try. It’s called life.Between 1915 and 1961, Walsh (1887-1980) directed or co-directed some 140 features in every conceivable genre. No other director has done more to establish and sustain the careers of so many great film actors. John Wayne, James Cagney, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Poitier, Ann Sheridan, and Ida Lupino all either made their breakthrough films or did their best work with Walsh. And no one in Hollywood history had a wider range. From silents to talkies, from black-and-white through Technicolor, Walsh was an architect of what we know today as cinema.He is also, without doubt, the most neglected major figure in American movies. Walsh never won an Oscar, and though he lived to 93, he was never even recognized by the Academy with a lifetime achievement award. His most famous films are available individually on DVD, but, alone among great American directors, there is no comprehensive collection of his work. Though he lived a more fabulous life than any depicted in his films, Walsh has never been the subject of a definitive biography (at least in English; there have been two published in France), and his rollicking 1974 memoir, “Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director,” has been out of print for decades.But Walsh and his films are still very much with us. Last month, “The Big Trail” (1930), the first widescreen Western feature and the film that gave John Wayne his big break, was released on a two-disc DVD that includes a superb 1973 documentary by Richard Schickel (which will be aired by Turner Classic Movies on September 2). Beginning Friday and stretching through the summer, TCM will broadcast eight of Walsh’s most popular films: “Silver River” (1948), with Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan; “Gentleman Jim” (1942), Walsh’s fanciful biography of heavyweight boxing champion Jim Corbett, played by Flynn; “High Sierra” (1941), the film that established Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino as major stars; “Colorado Territory” (1949), a Western remake, with Joel McCrea, of Walsh’s own “High Sierra”; “The Roaring Twenties” (1939), the quintessential Prohibition-era gangster movie, with Cagney and Bogart; “Blackbeard, the Pirate” (1952), with Robert Newton; “The Horn Blows at Midnight” (1945), with Jack Benny and Alexis Smith, and “Background to Danger” (1943), a wartime spy thriller with George Raft, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet.Before he was old enough to vote, Walsh had seen more adventure than most filmmakers do in a lifetime. He was born in New York in 1887 to a Spanish mother and an Irish father. Thomas Walsh had been a rebel in the old country, but in America he settled into the comfortable trade of designing men’s clothing. (One of his clients was George Armstrong Custer.) Young Raoul grew up surrounded by the rich and famous; houseguests included the tenor Enrico Caruso, Buffalo Bill Cody, Diamond Jim Brady, and the artist Frederic Remington. Two of his father’s acquaintances made lasting impressions: the boxer James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, whose life Walsh would romanticize in a film classic, and the actor Edwin Booth, whose brother, John Wilkes, Walsh would play in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation.”As a teenager, Walsh was nearly drowned in a storm while sailing his uncle’s yacht from Cuba to Florida; he spent the next two years of his life riding, roping, and trailblazing in Texas and other parts of the old frontier. John Ford, Howard Hawks, and other great directors of Westerns could never claim to have been so intimately acquainted with the West.After a fling with stage acting in New York, Walsh became an apprentice to the man who would teach him the grammar of film, D.W. Griffith. It was Griffith who sent him on his greatest adventure, perhaps one of the most bizarre episodes in Hollywood history. In 1914, the Mutual Film Company contracted with the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa to make a combination documentary and fictional film about Villa’s life. Mutual Film financed Villa’s battles, for all intents and purposes subsidizing the Mexican Revolution. To top it off, Griffith threw in several thousand Confederate uniforms from “The Birth of a Nation.” Walsh co-directed and played Villa as a young man; Villa played himself in later scenes.Incredibly, the film is lost to history except some scraps of the real Villa leading his troops into battle that survive in a Mexican film vault. (The making of the film is depicted in Bruce Beresford’s 2003 television movie, “And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself,” with Antonio Banderas as the general and Kyle Chandler as Walsh.)His acting career ended abruptly in 1929 during the filming of the first outdoor sound feature, “In Old Arizona,” in which Walsh was playing the Cisco Kid. While driving through the Utah desert at night, a jackrabbit crashed through the windshield. The shattered glass cost Walsh his right eye — but it did earn him an eye patch, which made him one of the most recognizable figures in Hollywood. As the ’30s dawned, the 43-year-old Walsh had already directed more than 60 films and had the bulk of his production ahead of him.It’s strange that Walsh’s image faded so quickly after his retirement in 1964. Perhaps he was too prolific for critics and festival organizers to select a truly representative sampling of his work. Perhaps, too, his versatility has prevented him from being instantly identified with a particular genre, like Ford with Westerns, Alfred Hitchcock with suspense, or Preston Sturges with screwball comedies. Whatever the reason, Walsh’s life and work remain, for the uninitiated, an untapped source of movie treasure. For the rest of us, it is a gateway to a golden era only dimly remembered but still strongly felt.

Turner Classic Movies Rescues Raoul Walsh

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