Happy Anniversary, Raoul Walsh!

Happy Anniversary, Raoul Walsh (March 11, 1887 - December 31, 1980). “I’m a lone wolf in this business,” Raoul Walsh told Hedda Hopper in an interview in January 1965.


"The Bowery" (1933) directed by Raoul Walsh, is a historical film about the Lower East Side of Manhattan around the start of the 20th century, starring Wallace Beery and George Raft.

Director Raoul Walsh filming "The Bowery" (1933) with scenarist James Gleason, cameraman Bert Glennon and star George Raft

In New York City, the Bowery that Walsh later put on film was already a sprawling tenement full of lower-class concert halls, brothels, and flophouses, an area Walsh soon relished as a childhood hangout. The ships and schooners that he spent hours sniffing out as a kid and that billowed into huge proportions in his films Captain Horatio Hornblower and Blackbeard the Pirate already stirred his imagination—there they were, docked at New York’s Peck’s Slip, a romantic neck of the city that Walsh and his younger brother, George, loitered in regularly. Even the gangs on the Lower East Side were taking over Hell’s Kitchen and adjacent neighborhoods that Walsh later re-created on the “New York” streets of Warner Bros. for The Roaring Twenties, his Cagney-Bogart gangster picture.

Known in Hollywood as the San Quentin of the movie studios, Warner Bros. earned the moniker, not only because the company’s signature product—dark social realism and gangster pictures—made great profits during the 1930s and 1940s, but also because Warner’s obsession with running a tight ship was almost legendary. Walsh thought that he had found studio nirvana, especially after his freelance days following his parting from William Fox nine years earlier. To him, Warner Bros. was “a plum for any director.” Not only did Warner’s no-nonsense style in turning out pictures suit him, but the studio’s essentially somber, naturalistic view of the world—which produced stories about men and women trying to change their often unalterable fate or rallying against it—also suited Walsh’s own worldview. His heroes, usually fleeing from one world to find a better one and not usually succeeding, made him a good choice for the top material Warner Bros. contract writers produced.

With its dark and gritty palate, its brokendown characters who try to but cannot outdistance or overcome their milieu of psychological and economic hard times, They Drive by Night is quintessential Warner Bros. of the 1940s, a picture in the tradition of what the critic Manny Farber later called the “broken field journey,” his descriptive way of talking about films in which characters break down emotionally on a road fraught with peril. Drawn partly from a novel by A. I. Bezzerides, and partly recycled from an earlier Warner Bros. picture, Bordertown, starring Bette Davis, this picture, like Walsh’s Manpower to come, offers moviegoers the cinematic equivalent of literary naturalism—a story characterized by the inability of men and women to control or to get out from under the unforgiving social forces that loom large and significant around them. Walsh gave his hard-knocks characters both a lyricism and a biting wit in this story of two brothers who try to make a go of it as truckers in Los Angeles but find only heartache and hard times for their efforts.

With a shooting script now in place, filming of "High Sierra" began just outside Lone Pine, California, on August 5, 1940, even though numerous other locations in the area were also used. Walsh shot the climactic chase scene fifteen miles west of Lone Pine on a slope at the side of Mt. Whitney, about eighty miles from the “sink” of Death Valley. A group of twenty men from the studio worked for four days to clear a path so that mountain-trained mules, packing cameras and other equipment, could get up to the shooting area. But the event most everyone remembered was Walsh’s colorful wardrobe. Since the cast and crew did a good amount of hunting and fishing, Walsh wore a seven-colored jacket at Arrowhead and Palm Spring locations—to make certain that hunters there would not mistake him for a deer. Bogart had to run three miles up a mountainside for two days for the ending sequence, and everyone was surprised that the only injury he received was a skinned knee.

High Sierra is Walsh’s riskiest film of the early Warner Bros. period because of the emotional depth he gives the characters. Unlike They Drive by Night, which is moved by the same kind of raw swagger that would characterize the sensibility of the upcoming Manpower, High Sierra swiftly dives inside the hearts of its characters and finds in them a deep sense of sadness and loss. The pervasive sorrow that defines Earle and Marie originates, of course, in Burnett’s novel. But Walsh taps into it so readily, clicks into place with it so firmly, that at some level his own psyche merges with those of his characters. Unconsciously or not, he allows himself close proximity to their vulnerabilities. His camera catches them in medium shots and close-ups—close enough to their faces, earmarking their sad posturing. Their anxiety and worry pervade the entire film frame. Earle and Marie are not the hard-as-nails firecrackers from They Drive by Night.

Burnett’s novel makes it explicit that Earle is a conflicted soul, easily joining Walsh’s repertoire of characters longing for an unattainable sense of peace who emerge in his 1940s Warner Bros. films. Burnett first paints him clearly: “Roy came blinking out into the sunlight. He had on a neat blue serge suit Big Mac had sent him. He didn’t look so bad except for his prison-bleached complexion. But his coarse dark hair had silvery streaks in it and his dark eyes were weary and sad.” Earle is “weary and sad” from the start, and Walsh could understand a man like him without much trouble.

Earle the gangster is still a human being with a soft side. He remembers a childhood that he lost long ago and now idealizes. Walsh could claim the same thing. Roy Earle is on the run from his past, not only his criminal past, but also an innocent past that left him long ago. Walsh always was fascinated with characters on the run, running somewhere better than where they had been before and where they are now. The past was traumatic, just as Walsh’s had been. Walsh and Earle idealize the past nevertheless.

Peter Bogdanovich interviewed Walsh twice, the first time in 1970. He remembered: [Walsh] was very friendly, and his wife [Mary] was very hospitable. She made us some great orange juice from oranges they had growing there. It was a sprawling ranch style, but not that big. He was not that tall by then, maybe five foot ten or so. Oh, he was attractive, though, still attractive. He was very vital and funny. He was a guy. Men aren’t like that anymore. He was macho but he was gentle, and he liked women. He wasn’t the type of macho guy who doesn’t like women that [we] mostly [have] now. He was kind of courtly. —"Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director" (2011) by Marilyn Ann Moss