In Search Of Raoul Walsh

The work of the old vanguard of the film business is intimidating -- when I started out doing this in 2017, I hadn't even heard of John Ford, Henry King, or Raoul Walsh, much less contemplated working through the entirety of any of their surviving bodies of work. It is something I've slowly come to accept as a valid approach: away from looking for isolated, singular masterworks, and towards a more holistic understanding of a director's oeuvre, both the good and the bad.

My journey through the filmography of Raoul Walsh was seeing 82 extant features out of the 110 he directed, most of his early silent work having been lost to history. He was one of several future masters who apprenticed under D.W. Griffith and did much to shape what became the tastes and generic conventions of Hollywood -- like Ford, King, Allan Dwan, W.S. Van Dyke, and King Vidor, Walsh belonged to a pioneering generation that asked the basic questions of what an American cinema can and should look like, starting from first principles.

His career can be broken up into several distinct periods, covering an enormous length of film history:

• 1914-1929: Independence under silence, Walsh's name is front and center as a creative force to sell his pictures. His voice is indistinct, but he shows an aptitude for stories about outcast women and rambunctious men. What Price Glory, a riff on the huge success of Vidor's The Big Parade, becomes its own box office smash, and Walsh makes several iterations on its formula, including three sequels.

• 1930-1939: After the highly ambitious effort of The Big Trail, which was one of the first ever widescreen films, Walsh loses his way in the new studio system, bouncing around from pre-20th Century Fox to Paramount, his own short-lived independent company, and a couple productions set in the United Kingdom. There are flashes of inspiration during this era, but Walsh gets typecast as a director of musical comedies and not many of these films are capable of illustrating his talents.

• 1939-1950: Walsh becomes a contract director with Warner Brothers and begins a period of extraordinary productivity and quality underneath the fast moving turnover of that studio in what can be considered its prime years. Starting with The Roaring Twenties, Walsh gives Cagney among his three best performances, shepherds Humphrey Bogart from heavy to leading man with High Sierra, somehow squeezes some great thrillers out of George Raft, and most importantly takes over being Errol Flynn's go-to director after Flynn's notorious falling out with Michael Curtiz, and turns Flynn's dashing pretty boy persona into something more thorny, tragic and complicated. The hits vastly outnumber the duds and Walsh rides the lightning of Warners at its time of peak popularity and transition from a minor studio into one of the majors.

• 1951-1964: Walsh becomes a freelancer again as the studio system disintegrates, and without the quality control of Warners his work turns more scattershot and dependent on the various factors going into each project, yet he remains incredibly skilled at ensembles, character studies and wry adventure films. He makes several high quality vehicles for Clark Gable near the end of the star's life and alternates between westerns and war pictures, his final effort being A Distant Trumpet, which, while remaining very much a Walsh picture, also indicates a political and ethical horizon in 60s filmmaking that would usher in the end of the type of direct & simple entertainment that Walsh was so good at crafting.

Walsh's best work, I found, existed in the 40s and 50s, where it was possible for him to direct projects that reflected his personal tall-tale adventurer ethos in concern with the aims of mass appeal: to see the melancholic endings of Gentleman Jim, where a boxer's victory is foregrounded by the prospect of an inevitable defeat, or The Man I Love & The Revolt of Mamie Stover, which refuse the catharsis of our heroines finding love and success in a hard-bitten world. Walsh is excellent at entangling us in these romances and adventures where the ultimate point isn't total victory or finding true love, what matters is that these characters go through a cycle of disillusionment, then finding a different path from the one they expected. This keys right into one of the types of action pictures he favored, where we start off at the beginning of the story with a map or a mission plan of what will happen, and then in the middle of fulfilling that expectation, the team is sabotaged by some unforeseen event and have to improvise a way out. The inverse of this formula is also something Walsh was skilled with: the rise-and-fall narrative, not just with gangsters but with cowboys and torch singers and boxers and even slave owners. Rather than the horizontal terrain explored in a film like Objective Burma, we move up and down the vertical social ladder in The Roaring Twenties or Band of Angels.

What unites these two types of story is the excitement that comes from the characters discovering something about themselves and their world that they might not otherwise have if everything went accordingly: what matters to Walsh is that moment when subjective expectation meets objective reality, and then what a person does in response, how they act or change. This is why I think his cinema is one which is centered on the question of agency, the how and why of people doing something rather than nothing. It is never in doubt during his films that his characters must confront themselves and their life choices -- Cagney's nostalgic dentist in The Strawberry Blonde must decide to love the present instead of wallowing in the past, and Ralph Meeker's boxer in Glory Alley must deal with his own fear of rejection and shame to then find success on his terms. Walsh's camera is rooted in the interpersonal hopes of his heroes and heroines, but it searches out for the conflict and struggle which will challenge them and give them a more complete understanding of their place in the world. In the vernacular of classicism, Walsh's cinema is about integration, acceptance, and living in good faith rather than ressentiment -- he remains open to the spontaneity of existence, but it does not come at the expense of his characters, he does not see them as trapped or helpless. Even at his most fatalistic in a film like White Heat, Walsh crucially does not ever express, as Lang does, the idea that all of this is preordained or logical -- Cagney's suicidal heights at the end of that movie are the result of his physical delirium and sickness, it is not inevitable that he had to end things there, he chooses glorious death over the enfeeblement of illness, just as Errol Flynn's thief chooses to become a glorious hero of the Resistance even as it is against his self-interest as a cutpurse.

That word, 'glory', is one that is uniquely suited to Walsh's art. Several of his films are named after this idea: What Price Glory, Uncertain Glory, Glory Alley, the dictionary definition being something which attains to magnificence or great beauty. Walsh's autobiography is filled with lies, half-truths, and complete fictions, like his invention of a sibling who never existed; his very first film was a documentary where he rode with the real Pancho Villa, a man who lived his own legend, and doubtless must have made a great impression upon a young Walsh. By the time he retired from the motion picture business, Walsh was a true dinosaur, being interviewed by the likes of Peter Bogdanovich and others who were trying to nail down the single truth of how cinema came to be the way it is: but for Walsh, the truth was in the telling, unbound by a historian's rigor. Walsh invented himself in the process of becoming an old master of film, lived for almost a century, with a childhood in the Gay Nineties and then getting to see Ronald Reagan, a young man who he directed in several pictures, become President of the United States -- what price glory, indeed. That glory of being a tough guy who decided that each film was its own chapter in the saga of life, a one-eyed director who made pirate pictures and 3D movies, who joined John Ford in being irascible Irishmen that believed in the necessity of myth -- not fact, not lies, but a fiction that served a larger purpose, that gave people a sense of themselves, that told them they mattered, that they belonged to this world.

For six decades, Walsh gave his audience not just a good time at the movies, but a meaningful time -- his work has enough room for tears and fisticuffs and embraces and war and love, he never chose one or the other, it was all of one piece to him, one story being told from several people living their own version of it. Even though he is not as well known today, it is easy to see how he blazed the path that several others walked after. Without The Roaring Twenties, there is no Goodfellas; without The Big Trail, there is no Stagecoach; without High Sierra, there is no Casablanca; without Battle Cry, there is no Big Wednesday. Walsh's films are often unimposing in scope, but they make a big splash because of the forceful vigor with which he shoots them, his creation of a style robust enough to handle big stampedes of horses as well as a lonely woman listening to her lover's gentle piano playing -- he was a ruffian with a sentimental heart, and I think that's why his body of work became so compelling to me. In an age like today's where on-screen action is divorced from character, Walsh offers a vision of an cohesive and intermingled philosophy, a belief that our acts define us more than any rhetoric, and that it's fine and normal to lose once in a while, to be humbled, as long as you don't stop fighting for what you want, that you learn the right lessons and keep moving forward. His indomitable seekers are never satisfied, they always want to see what's on the other side of the hill -- Walsh is one of America's great optimistic artists, and he deserves a larger slice of our attention for the persistence and power of his endeavor, a searcher never limited by what he found.