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Raoul Walsh

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Raoul Walsh
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(born March 11, 1887, New York, N.Y., U.S. — died Dec. 31, 1980, Simi Valley, near Los Angeles, Calif.) U.S. film director. Walsh began acting for the stage in 1910 and on film in 1912, the same year that he began directing. He was an assistant to D.W. Griffith and appeared in The Birth of a Nation (1915). In his 50-year career, he directed over 200 films, usually characterized by their simplicity and quick action. His White Heat (1949) is a classic study of a pathological criminal, and The Naked and the Dead (1958) is an effective translation of Norman Mailer's novel into film. His other films include What Price Glory? (1926), The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive by Night (1940), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), High Sierra (1941), and A Distant Trumpet (1964).

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Director: Raoul Walsh
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  • Born: Mar 11, 1887 in New York City, New York
  • Died: Dec 31, 1980
  • Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
  • Active: teens-'50s
  • Major Genres: Drama, Romance
  • Career Highlights: White Heat, The Thief of Baghdad, Objective, Burma!
  • First Major Screen Credit: Regeneration (1915)

Biography

One of Hollywood's most prolific and respected action directors, Raoul Walsh was also one of the longest-lived figures in film, with a career that spanned almost a half-century. After running away from home as a boy and working in a variety of capacities, including as a cowboy in the West, Walsh drifted into stage acting in New York and later into motion pictures as an actor. He became an assistant director to D.W. Griffith and, in 1914, made his first movie. By the mid 1920s, Walsh had a reputation for direct, straightforward, no frills narrative, and his style was particularly suited to action films and outdoor dramas, although his biggest film of that decade was the fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad, produced by and starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr., which continues to be shown seven decades later. His work in the 1930s, mostly for 20th Century-Fox, embraced comedy and drama in equal measure, but it was with Warner Bros., beginning at the end of the 1930s, that Walsh came into his own, directing such classics as The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive By Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), Desperate Journey (1942), and Northern Pursuit (1943), starring James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Errol Flynn. Despite his reputation as an action director, Walsh's movies were usually much more sophisticated than was typical for the genre -- he revelled in psychological themes, and he loved offbeat characterizations and unusual narrative structures, attributes best reflected in the dark Western drama Pursued (1947), starring Robert Mitchum, and the crime film White Heat (1949), with James Cagney. He also served as unofficial co-director on one of Humphrey Bogart's most interesting later movies, The Enforcer (1951). His later movies showed a slackening of style, and he never did seem as effective working in color as he did in black-and-white. Walsh lost an eye while working on In Old Arizona in 1929, and his deteriorating sight in the other eye led to his retirement in 1964. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Wikipedia: Raoul Walsh
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Raoul Walsh

Raoul Walsh as John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation.
Born March 11, 1887(1887-03-11)
New York City, New York
Died December 31, 1980 (aged 93)
Simi Valley, California
Spouse(s) Miriam Cooper (February 1916 - 1926)
Lorraine Miller (August 20th, 1928 - 1947)
Mary Simpson (1947 - 1980)

Raoul Walsh (March 11, 1887, New York City – December 31, 1980, Simi Valley, CA) was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the brother of silent screen actor George Walsh. As a young man he was a close friend of Virginia O'Hanlon of "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" fame.

Contents

Film career

Walsh began as a stage actor in New York City, quickly progressing into film acting. Walsh was educated at Seton Hall College and began acting in 1909. In 1914, he became an assistant to D.W. Griffith and made his first full-length feature film The Life of General Villa, followed by the critically-acclaimed Regeneration in 1915, possibly the earliest gangster film. Walsh played John Wilkes Booth in Griffith's epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) for which he was also Assistant Director. Walsh later directed The Thief of Bagdad (1924), starring Douglas Fairbanks and Anna May Wong.

In Sadie Thompson (1928) starring Gloria Swanson as a prostitute seeking a new life in Samoa, Walsh starred as Swanson's boyfriend in his first acting role since 1915; he also directed the film. Walsh was then hired to direct and star in In Old Arizona, a film about The Cisco Kid. While on location for that film Walsh suffered a car accident in which he lost his right eye. He gave up the part (but not the directing job), and never acted again. Walsh would wear an eyepatch for the rest of his life.[1][2]

In the early days of sound with Fox, Walsh directed the first widescreen spectacle, The Big Trail (1930), a wagon train western shot on location across the West. It starred then unknown John Wayne, whom Walsh discovered as prop boy Marion Morrison and renamed after Revolutionary War general Mad Anthony Wayne (Walsh happened to be reading a book about General Wayne at the time). Walsh directed The Bowery (1933), featuring Wallace Beery, George Raft, Fay Wray and Pert Kelton; the movie recounts the story of Steve Brodie, the first man to supposedly jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and live to brag about it.

An undistinguished period followed with Paramount Pictures from 1935 to 1939, but Walsh's career rose to new heights soon after moving to Warner Brothers, with The Roaring Twenties (1939) featuring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart; Dark Command (1940) with John Wayne and Roy Rogers; They Drive By Night (1940) with George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, and Bogart; High Sierra (1941) with Lupino and Bogart again; They Died with Their Boots On (1941) with Errol Flynn as Custer; Manpower (1941) with Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, and George Raft; and White Heat (1949) with Cagney. Walsh's contract at Warners expired in 1953.

He directed several films afterwards, including two with Clark Gable, The Tall Men (1955) and The King and Four Queens (1956). Walsh retired in 1964.

Selected filmography

Walsh unofficially co-directed The Enforcer, with Humphrey Bogart and Zero Mostel, when director Bretaigne Windust fell ill at the beginning of shooting in 1951. Walsh refused to take a screen credit.

Trivia

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 Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (February 2008)
  • After losing his eye, his doctor reportedly asked if he'd like an artificial (glass) one. "Hell, no," Walsh snapped. "Everytime I'd get in a fight, I'd have to put it in my pocket." He wore an eyepatch for the rest of his life.
  • There are echoes in Walsh's films of events in his own life and that of his family: as a child his parents entertained famous Broadway actor of the day Edwin Thomas Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth whom Walsh was later to play in The Birth of a Nation (1915); in They Died with Their Boots On (1941) there is an actor playing a bit part as a tailor to the US cavalry officers that might have been a reference to Walsh's father who made uniforms for General Custer and other high-ranking officers before becoming chief designer for Brooks Brothers in New York.
  • Like his contemporary Howard Hawks, Walsh was known for never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. According to Walsh, in 1942, a few days after John Barrymore had died, Walsh, as a practical joke, picked up Barrymore's body from the mortuary and managed to sit the body, clad in a business suit, in a chair in Errol Flynn's house just before Flynn was due to arrive home. This story—recounted by both Flynn and Walsh in their autobiographies—was disputed by the artist Gene Fowler, a friend to both Barrymore and Flynn. Fowler states in his autobiography that he spent much of the night during which the joke was supposed to have occurred sitting with Barrymore's body in a Hollywood funeral home.
  • Many years earlier, Barrymore had inscribed a photograph of himself to Walsh, with a nod to As You Like It: 'Each man in his time plays many different parts. You have played them all.' Walsh used part of the inscription as the title for his autobiography, Each Man in his Time published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 1974. Leonard Maltin has described the book as "entertaining fiction with an occasional nod at the truth".

References

  1. ^ Directors 2
  2. ^ Raoul Walsh - Films as director:, Other films:

External links


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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
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