Oscar Profile #569: Raoul Walsh

Born March 11, 1887, Albert Edward Walsh was the son of noted tailor Thomas W. Walsh, who made his reputation designing the uniforms for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. He grew up in a mansion on New York’s Riverside Drive, where his parents entertained noted dignitaries from Roosevelt to John Barrymore.

It was inevitable that Walsh, who took the more exotic sounding stage name of Raoul, would become an actor, first on stage in 1909, then in film from 1913.

Apprenticed to legendary film director D.W. Griffith, where he became an assistant director as well as an actor, writer, and all-around go-to guy, Walsh was sent by Griffith to film Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in late 1913. The resultant film, 1914’s The Life of General Villa, featured live combat scenes including Villa’s execution of captured Mexican federal soldiers. Villa played himself in contemporaneous scenes while Walsh played him as a younger man in flashback scenes of this now lost film.

In 1915 alone, Griffith directed 18 films and shorts and acted in 10. His most famous role was that of John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation where he leaps onto the Ford Theatre stage after assassinating Abraham Lincoln, breaking his leg in the same place that Booth broke his. He would marry actress Miriam Cooper in 1916 with whom he adopted two children. They would divorce in 1926.

Walsh’s reputation as a director was solidified when Douglas Fairbanks asked him to direct 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad for United Artists, the company founded by Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Griffith. The film was a resounding success.

The director’s 1926 film of Maxwell Anderson’s What Price Glory and his 1928 film of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain, retitled Sadie Thompson in which he co-starred opposite Gloria Swanson, would be his last two major silent films. In 1927, he became one of the founding members of AMPAS (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).

Walsh began shooting his first talkie, 1928’s In Old Arizona for Paramount, in which he had cast himself in the starring role of the Cisco Kid when a road accident cost him his right eye. He had to drop out of both acting in and directing the film. He would never act again. He married second wife Lorraine Miller that same year. They would divorce in 1947 when he would marry third wife Mary Simpson with whom he would remain for the rest of his life.

In 1930, Walsh directed The Big Trail, the first widescreen film starring his discovery, John Wayne. The film flopped, as did most of Walsh’s films for Paramount. Moving to Warner Brothers in 1939, Walsh regained his reputation.

Among his major Warner Bros. successes over the next twenty-five years were The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, They Died with Their Boots On, The Man I Love, White Heat, Battle Cry, The Tall Men, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, The Naked and the Dead, and A Distant Trumpet, his last at the age of 77.

Raoul Walsh died December 31, 1980 at the age of 93.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

SADIE THOMPSON (1928)

Gloria Swanson asked Walsh to both direct her and co-star opposite her in this well-regarded first film version of W. Somerset Maugham’s classic play, Rain. Swanson was titled the prostitute who lands in Pago Pago, at once attracting Army sergeant Walsh and drawing the enmity of Lionel Barrymore and Blanche Fridiricki as the meddlesome preacher and his wife. Later filmed as Rain with Joan Crawford in 1932 and as Miss Sadie Thompson in 1953, this is silent version is still regarded as the definitive version. It was nominated for two Oscars at the first Academy Awards.

THE ROARING TWENTIES (1939)

After a series of flops at Paramount, for which Walsh directed his first talkies, he moved to Warner Bros. where he would remain for the next twenty-five years, directing some of the studio’s most prestigious films. This classic gangster film was the first, as well as his first film working with James Cagney who had star billing alongside Priscilla Lane, and Humphrey Bogart who led the supporting cast that included Gladys George, Jeffrey Lynn, Frank McHugh, Paul Kelly, and Joe Sawyer. Two years later he directed Bogart in his first starring role in High Sierra and Cagney in his breakout comedy role in The Strawberry Blonde.

WHITE HEAT (1949)

Walsh directed Cagney in his first gangster role in a decade in this classic actioner which received an Oscar nomination for Best Motion Picture Story. Cagney plays his most ruthless, mean, and unbalanced character in a performance many regard as his greatest. He is ably assisted by Virginia Mayo as his treacherous two-timing wife, Edmond O’Brien as a slimy undercover agent, and Margaret Wycherly in an outstanding career defining performance as Cagney’s equally insane mother. Also in the cast are Steve Cochran as Mayo’s lover on the side, Wally Cassell, and Olympic champion Jim Thorpre.

BATTLE CRY (1955)

Walsh’s film of Leon Uris’ famed novel has been criticized for being more of a woman’s picture than what one would expect from Hollywood’s greatest maker of action films. Walsh blamed that on Jack Warner’s interference. Nevertheless, the film offers a strong balance of both with the love scenes between Aldo Ray and Nancy Olson and Tab Hunter and Dorothy Malone a lot steamier than conventions of the day generally allowed. Van Heflin, Mona Freeman, James Whitmore, Raymond Massey, Anne Francis, William Campbell, John Lupton, L.Q. Jones, Perry Lopez, Fess Parker, Susan Morrow, and Allyn Ann McLerie also have prominent roles.

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (1958)

Originally planned as a film by Charles Laughton who got cold feet after the disappointing box-office of 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, author Norman Mailer claimed that Walsh had to be carried from his deathbed to be his replacement, which wasn’t true. Walsh continued making films for another seven years and lived for sixteen more after that. Mailer’s biggest complaint was that the murder of one of the major characters at the end of his novel was eliminated in the film version starring Aldo Ray as the mad sergeant and Cliff Robertson as his targeted superior. With Raymond Massey, Lili St. Cyr, and Barbara Nichols.