9/5/23
Newsletter #449
The Crack of Dawn
I am a big fan of the director Raoul Walsh. I admire his straightforward, no-nonsense approach to filmmaking. Walsh started his career as an actor, playing the part of John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). After shooting Lincoln, Walsh impressively jumped from Lincoln’s second story theater box to the stage, got his spur caught in the American flag, just like he was supposed to, twisted his ankle, hollered, “Sic semper tyrannis” (death to tyrants) and limped offstage. Beyond his showy little part, Raoul Walsh spent as much time as he could on set watching D.W. Griffith work. In 1915, Griffith’s set was the only place in the world to learn how to make movies as they would be made from there on out. Raoul Walsh completely understood what Griffith was doing, immediately became a director, and quickly made the first full-length gangster movie, Regeneration (1915), which he boldly shot in its proper location in the Bowery in New York City. The film is as creaky and old-fashioned as a movie can be, but one thing was clear to me, Walsh was so solid in his technique that he was already a better director than Griffith.
Regeneration was a big hit, and Raoul Walsh never stopped working as a director. But he quit acting. Walsh made two of the biggest hit films of the 1920s, The Thief of Bagdad (1924), with Douglas Fairbanks that’s loaded with fabulous old special effects of flying around on a magic carpet.
In 1926 he made a film that went completely through the roof, one of the biggest hits of the 1920s, What Price Glory, starring Victor McLaglen, Edmund Lowe and Delores Del Rio. It’s the story of two marine buddies during WWI who comically bicker and argue the whole film. Since it was silent, Walsh didn’t give a damn what they said and got the two actors to improvise dialogue and really swear up a storm, getting them to give lively, energetic performances. What he hadn’t considered was the deaf people who could read lips, and McLaglen and Lowe really never stop swearing the whole movie. Suddenly, everybody turned into a lip-reader, and it was a scandal. Which also helped make the film such a big hit.
The biggest female star, Gloria Swanson, who had her own production company at Paramount, hired Raoul Walsh to direct her film, Sadie Thompson (1928). It was an expensive movie, and they could afford anyone they wanted to play her leading man, but Gloria Swanson, the producer, demanded that Raoul Walsh play the lead marine himself. The dormant actor lurking inside him emerged and he took the part. The movie was a big hit. Suddenly, Raoul Walsh’s acting career returned.
Stick with me, this pays off. It was 1929 and sound arrived in the movies. Many silent directors couldn’t make the change, but it meant nothing to Raoul Walsh who had always had a complete command and understanding of how movies worked that sound was just another aspect and he automatically knew how to use it. But what I find amusing is that when Raoul Walsh saw himself up on the screen he was thinking, “I’m a movie star.”
Walsh found himself a really showy part, the Cisco Kid, a famous O. Henry character, in the film, In Old Arizona (1929), a really early talkie. But he had a good low voice, and look at him with the bandolier of bullets, he’s a stud.
So, as he and the assistant director were driving a pickup truck through the Arizona desert scouting locations, a jackrabbit jumped up, went right through the windshield and took out Raoul Walsh’s right eye. When telling this story, he noted that safety glass was introduced the next year. Anyway, that ended Raoul Walsh’s acting career. Instead, he got Warner Baxter for the part of the Cisco Kid. Baxter won the Oscar for Best Actor for In Old Arizona.
Raoul Walsh went on to make some of the best films, like The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941), Strawberry Blonde (1941, a personal favorite), They Died with Their Boots On (1941) Gentlemen Jim (1942, another favorite), and White Heat (1949), to name a few. He made a great Humphry Bogart movie, a great Erroll Flynn movie and a great James Cagney movie — two, actually.
Raoul Walsh was one of the very few directors in Hollywood who was older than John Ford. When they occasionally met, at DGA meetings, Walsh would make sure to remind Ford that he gave John Wayne his first lead in The Big Trail (1930). That’s true, but Wayne didn’t become a star until John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939.
I’ve read a number of accounts of what actors thought of Raoul Walsh, and this where Raoul and I have something in common as directors. He and I both rolled, or roll, our own cigarettes.
The rolling process seems like it takes all of your attention, but it really doesn’t take any. Nobody can tell what the hell you’re thinking, but they assume it’s probably, “This is a well-rolled cigarette.”
There isn’t much footage of Raoul Walsh. He gave a lengthy interview at UCLA in the late-1970s — when he was 90 — during which he fiddles with a self-rolled cigarette throughout, but he never lights it.
Ah-ha! I’ve beaten the dawn again.