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Walsh would wear an eyepatch for the rest of his life. John Wayne in The Big Trail. In the early days of sound with Fox, Walsh directed the first widescreen spectacle, The Big Trail (1930), an epic wagon train western shot on location, across the West.
Mar 11, 2014 · Raoul Walsh, the director in an eye patch long before John Ford or Nicholas Ray, had a long career in films spanning the pioneering years of D. W. Griffith in the silents to wide screen Technicolor epics of the mid-‘60’s. He specialized in action pictures—gritty crime dramas, westerns, war movies.
- Regeneration
- Me and My Gal
- The Bowery
- The Roaring Twenties
- They Died with Their Boots on
- The Strawberry Blonde
- Pursued
- Colorado Territory
- Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.
- The World in His Arms
Walsh’s apprenticeship under Griffith paid off with his first feature, commonly recognised as the first gangster picture. We’re a long way from the archetypal likes of Scarface (1932) though, as Regenerationangles for an authentic presentation of a young man dragged up through the slums. Walsh was no sentimentalist, and the film isn’t shy in its de...
The plot might be almost non-existent, and Walsh would be the first first to disavow any readings approaching thematic intent, but there’s no mistaking Me and My Gal for anything but a rough-n-tumble masterpiece, and perhaps Walsh’s best film. Ripe, pre-Code dialogue, zero tolerance for bullshit, drunken fisticuffs – it’s all here: the Raoul Walsh ...
The authentically inhabited sense of character and milieu that served Me and My Gal so well continues into The Bowery, another narrative meander, this time through the “livest mile on the face of the globe” in “gay 90s” New York. Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper re-team following King Vidor’s sentimental slugfest The Champ the previous year. Walsh d...
“This is Eddie Bartlett… He used to be a big shot.” The final lines of the quintessential Warner Brothers picture, spoken on the steps of a church – a pietà that was later transposed to those of an opera house by Francis Ford Coppola for the climax of The Godfather Part III (1990). High praise indeed. James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Jeffrey Lynn ...
Once embedded within the studio system, Walsh cultivated a series of working relationships with his leading men. Cagney and Bogart headed a handful of flicks apiece, while Errol Flynn starred in a series of seven films that deserve similar standing to the famous sequence of westerns made by director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott. They Die...
One of Walsh’s own favourites among his films, and destined to be the same for anyone who seeks it out, the hilarious, gloriously romantic Strawberry Blonde shows up the filmmaker’s soft side without neglecting his more pugnacious inclinations. James Cagney is the trainee dentist, learning his trade by mail-order at the tail end of the 19th century...
Walsh directed a number of oaters at his peak, but none as downbeat as Pursued, a psychological drama that fused noir sensibilities to the western. Luridly Freudian, and told in flashback, it sees Robert Mitchumbattling repressed trauma and the open wounds of a family feud he played no part in. “I told you not to look backward, look ahead,” says Mi...
Ida Lupino may have taken top billing in Walsh’s 1941 proto-noir High Sierra, adapted from the novel by W.R. Burnett, but it was Humphrey Bogart whose career went stratospheric following one of his best early leads. Walsh returned to the material in 1949, this time as a western, with Joel McCrea in the lead and the earlier film’s bank job transpose...
Adapted for the screen by C.S. Forester from his own novels, Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. looks at first glance like it’s set to be a spirited slice of high-seas derring-do, in the mould of a Douglas Fairbanks vehicle or Walsh’s own, subsequent Sea Devils(1953). But nothing could be further from the truth. Not that it’s necessarily lacking for a...
Walsh took to the ocean waves again with Hornblower lead Gregory Peck for this barnstorming Technicolor epic set in 1850. Peck is schooner captain and seal-hunter Jonathan Clark, one eye on the purchase of Alaska for the United States, the other on Russian countess Ann Blyth. Anthony Quinnplays the competition in work and love, the scallywag pirate...
That same year, Walsh lost an eye in a car accident when a rabbit went through his windshield. He sported an eye patch from then on, focusing exclusively on directing and excelling at it for the next thirty five years.
Jan 3, 1981 · A black patch replaced his right eye, which he lost in 1928 when a jackrabbit crashed into the windshield of his car. Raoul Walsh was born in Manhattan on March 11, 1887.
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Jun 1, 2011 · Involved in a freak auto accident in 1928, Walsh lost his right eye and began wearing an eye patch, which earned him the suitably dashing moniker Òthe one-eyed bandit.Ó During his long and...