Action, Action, Action

The Early Cinema of Raoul Walsh

Tom Conley

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781438488868
  9781438488851
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438488875
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Studies the force of action, motion, and vision in the early cinema of Hollywood director Raoul Walsh.

Director of over 150 films from 1912 to 1964, Raoul Walsh was a core figure in Hollywood from its beginnings to the end of the studio system. Perhaps best known for such films as The Big Trail (starring John Wayne in his first leading role), High Sierra, and White Heat, Walsh cut his teeth under D. W. Griffith, and, like his contemporary John Ford, found a style and signature in his silent cinema and early talkies. Through close analysis of seven of his films, six shot between 1915 and 1933 and one a remake from 1956, and stressing the visual character of their settings and situations, Tom Conley examines how composition and montage-or action-often overtake the crisp narratives these films convey. Rife with contradiction, they ask us to see what makes them possible and how they contend with prevailing codes. Films discussed include Regeneration (1915); Sadie Thompson (1928) and a likely avatar, The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956); The Cock-Eyed World (1929); The Big Trail (1930); Me and My Gal (1932); and The Bowery (1933).

1

On the Lower East Side

Regeneration (1915)

REGENERATION IS BASED ON Owen Kildare’s My Mamie Rose, an Autobiography and a Parable of Self-Redemption. Published in 1903, quickly witnessing lucrative sales, his account found a sympathetic and enthusiastic public.¹ Set in the early twentieth century, the memoir is a somewhat picaresque confession and story of the early life and hard times of a person born on the Bowery, thanks to a woman’s care and love, who mends his ways and becomes a noted journalist. Orphaned in infancy, Kildare lives with foster parents who welcome him into their household. A strapping figure in his youth and in his early twenties, a feared pugilist, he makes his living as a bouncer in taverns in his neighborhood. He briefly travels to France and Algeria before returning to the slums where his prestige remains unquestioned. Two-thirds of the way into the memoir, he recalls how, on a street one warm afternoon in the month of June, “‘Skinny’ McCarthy, one of my intimate pals … who belonged to the class of meanest grifters” (200), wanted to display his prowess to his hooligan friends. Catching sight of an attractive female who was passing by, Skinny accosts her to make a show of his gumption. First enthused, then confused, at the sight of Skinny’s actions, Owen suddenly sees himself and his cronies being seen by the woman in her desperation. “Before my facial muscles had time to sharpen themselves into a brutish laugh the girl wheeled around, looked at McCarthy, at me, at all of us and, quite distinctly could I read there the sentence: ‘And you are MEN!’” (202).

The episode is a turning point in the first-person narrative. Then an illiterate, thuggish wastrel, Owen intuitively reads on her face the words we see on the printed page—especially the majuscules and exclamation point. His impression of her reaction conveys what he believes is a female’s anger and resentment at being a pawn in a “man’s world.” In a rush of empathy and pity (Kildare’s prose exuding disavowed self-interest and “manliness”), Owen strikes Skinny with a blow to his ear, flattening his ally and friend. “The doors of my old life creakingly began to turn on their rusty hinges and slowly started to close themselves entirely” (204). Thus begins a regeneration. He soon learns that the woman’s name is Marie Deering and that she is a schoolteacher. He submits to her charm, calling her “Mamie” as if she were a maternal object, and eagerly subscribes to her lessons in reading and writing. Through her encouragement he discovers his innate talents as a writer. And through her impetus and his own labors in learning how to write, he and Mamie fall in love and decide to marry. Early in 1900, a month before their nuptials, Mamie catches pneumonia and dies. Acknowledging that she changed his life in helping him discover his innate gifts and to look forward in life, he attributes his success at the New York Sunday News to her example. Yet, when all is said and done, when Mamie degenerates, Owen regenerates. The hero’s success comes with the demise of the female who cared for him.

Yet on that day in June, when her facial gesture told Owen that she abhorred how men treated women, Mamie expressed anger and frustration that mark many of the females in Raoul Walsh’s early cinema, in at least three films, The Lucky Lady (1926), Sadie Thompson (1927), The Yellow Ticket (1933), and much later, perhaps tellingly, in the story of another “Mamie,” in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956). From this perspective Regeneration (1915) qualifies as a precocious feature and template for other films under Walsh’s direction. While Kildare’s best-seller of times past is confined to the vaults of university libraries, were it not for cinephiles or a team of archivists and restorers at the Museum of Modern Art, Regeneration (1915) might have had a similar fate. Although the feature is initially based on My Mamie Rose, we quickly discover that in taking leave of Kildare’s self-aggrandizing autobiography, the feature centers less on the hero’s resurrection than on unresolved conflict and, best of all, on cinema as such: in other words, on what the film is doing as a moving pictorial and graphic medium. First shown on September 15, 1915, Regeneration reminds us of the virtues both of the silent style and of the first traits of its director’s signature. Its editing is uniquely open ended, and its montage is relentlessly fast paced and crosscut. On initial viewing it resembles parts of The Birth of a Nation (first shown on March 15, 1915)—notably, the sequence in which Walsh, playing John Wilkes Booth, assassinates Lincoln—while anticipating Intolerance that would premiere the following year.

The composition of almost seventy-two minutes draws attention to how the images invite viewers to see the film at once from within and outside of the narrative frame. Its photographic virtue suggests that the film is as much about its ocular and lenticular character as the tale it tells. Shot outdoors, on location in lower Manhattan, and indoors in claustrophobic settings of tenements, gangsters’ dens, a dance hall and a settlement house while shifting incessantly from one closed area to another, the film is a study of conflict and social hierarchies at war with one another in ever-confined and confining spaces. In practically every one of its more than nine-hundred shots, a multifaceted visual composition stresses unyielding contradiction. Setting the tempo of what follows, by virtue of rapid-fire crosscutting, the first hundred shots of the film take up 8:12 minutes (each averaging 4.9 seconds). Of oppressive stasis and immobility, the world depicted in this feature—the world of Walsh and his Irish forebears—is riddled with action. Crosscutting is rife. We witness an art that builds visual and psychic tensions on the time-held traditions of fraternal rivalry or enemy brothers; focuses on a copresence of shallow and great depth of field; presents a condition where war and violence sustain the economy of life; shows how conflict, a total social fact, is punctuated only intermittently in the breath we take during infrequent but vital moments of peace and calm.

The Narrative

As if inspired not only by Kildare’s memoir but also Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives and The Battle with the Slum), Dickens (Oliver Twist), Chaplin (Caught in a Cabaret [1914], a one-reeler about members of an idle class who go slumming), or Griffith (The Musketeers of Pig Alley [1912]), Regeneration mixes melodrama and cinema verité. The film tells of labors of social reform and, albeit less obviously, what it means to make a documentary fiction. The feature is composed of four panels: (1) the first depicts Owen (John McCann) age ten, following the death of his mother, orphaned and alone in a squalid apartment. Alone, left on his own, from the window of a cluttered flat he watches a hearse carry off the casket containing his mother’s corpse. Maggie Conway (Maggie Weston), a matronly and robust neighbor living in a flat across the stairway, invites him to move into her household, a pigsty under the rule of husband Jim Conway (James Marcus), an abusive, obese, and drunken husband. Ever at odds with Jim, Owen eventually takes to the streets where he becomes a ragamuffin (1:00–09:31). (2) The second, albeit brief, establishes the world of war in which Owen has grown up. Now, age seventeen, a svelte adolescent and an icebreaker who works on the docks of the New York harbor, Owen (played by H. McCoy), works with a diminutive hunchback, a youth (unnamed and unattributed in the film) who is taunted by a young hooligan (William Sheer) and his friends. Defending the boy, witnessed by local color worthy of caricature (no doubt residents of the Bowery), Owen confronts, tussles, and pummels the thug (who happens to be Skinny—although he is not yet identified by an eyepatch—an attribute that will become one of Walsh’s emblems). Coming to the boy’s defense, two Irish locals and an old man (afflicted with a grotesquely deformed nose, shown in close-up) witness the scene and applaud the winner of the fight (09:52–11:20).

We discover in next panel (3), seven years later (11:20–1:04:48), that the hunchback has become Owen’s faithful friend, and the hooligan, now wearing an eyepatch, is a comrade in crime named “Skinny.” Enter Marie Deering (Anna Q. Nilsson), an idle maiden of upper Manhattan and her erstwhile brother, Ames Deering (Carl Harbaugh), a newly elected district attorney vowing to wipe out crime. Marie takes interest in “how the other half lives” while Ames, at the very least to be faithful to his calling, wishes to get a better sense of immigrant life and squalor in the nether regions. They dare to journey to the Bowery where they visit Grogan’s, a rough-and-tumble tavern and dance hall (an establishment of the same name that will play a role eighteen years later in The Bowery). Indolent, Owen (now played by Rockcliffe Fellowes) happens to be sitting at a table in the company of the gang members. Inexplicably, he begins to contemplate his past and present life when peering into a mug of beer. Looking into the schooner, in a protracted dissolve he sees himself in his childhood licking an ice cream cone.² Raising his eyes, he glimpses Marie, Ames, and their company, whom his brutish friends suddenly rattle and intimidate. Attracted to Marie, he successfully escorts the frightened group to a limousine that awaits them outside to safety near where a boyish, Ivy League–like social worker wearing tortoise shell glasses preaches reform.

Marie is moved by the quality of life she has witnessed. Following her brother’s will to reform the city, she establishes a settlement house that as the story unfolds will become the counterpart to the gang’s den. There follows a celebrated sequence of the settlement’s annual outing on the New York harbor (24:08–32:17): Marie shepherds her flock of indigents to board the Shamrock Queen, a pleasure craft hired for an afternoon of sightseeing. She coaxes Owen and his cronies—and even beckons the spectator (25:22)—to come along to enjoy an afternoon of dancing and dining. During the excursion, sitting apart from the community, Skinny flicks a cigarette butt onto a pile of frayed rope. Soon ignited, it sets the boat aflame. In the pandemonium men and women jump from the upper decks into the waters while Owen and Marie, gathering the children in their arms and lifting them into lifeboats, become the heroes of the day.

Marie brings Owen into her orbit. Upon her command, putting his fists to good use, he rescues a baby from an abusive household (32:18–41:58) and, unbeknownst to himself, feels an affection for forlorn infants and children.³ Marie convinces Owen to devote his energies to the settlement house where, along with other homeless ne’er-do-wells, she teaches him how to read and write (44:32–46:13). In Owen’s absence, Skinny, now the appointed leader of the gang, confronts and knifes a police inspector who had knocked at the door of the gang’s den. Fleeing in panic, Skinny seeks sanctuary in the settlement house where Owen reluctantly offers him a place to hide. A plainclothesman arrives, finds no one, but insists that Owen is in collusion with the gang. Distraught, torn between devotion to Owen and her zealous brother’s wish that she be rid of him, Marie despairs. Distraught over losing her sympathy, Owen confesses to a priest. Inspired, now having learned how to write, he scripts a note telling Skinny to get lost. His long-standing pal, the hunchback, delivers it to the gang (46:14–56:47).

The narrative hastens: upon reading the message, crazed, Skinny and his thugs thrash and knock the boy unconscious, kick and shove him under the stairwell leading to the entry. Anguished, Marie runs to the gangster’s den in search of Owen. Peering through a hole in the door to the entry, Skinny recognizes her and welcomes her into their lair. The hunchback recovers his senses, glimpses Marie, furtively crawls into a sewer main, emerges from under a manhole cover, and dashes off to inform Owen and the police of the fate awaiting Marie at the hands of Skinny and his gang. Meanwhile, back at the den, Skinny lures Marie into a room where he molests her before she breaks free and locks herself in a closet. Owen enters the lair, confronting and fighting the gang in the basement while, simultaneously, the hunchback informs the police and leads two carloads of officers who drive to the scene at breakneck speed. In the melee on the lower floor, Owen lays waste to his opponents. The police arrive, club the criminals (and even suffer a loss when one of the gang members shoots an officer clambering into the den). Above, Skinny hacks at the door of the closet in which Marie hides in anguish. Owen arrives, smashes his way into the room, confronts Skinny (wielding a gun), who escapes from a window from where he fires a shot that strikes Marie. Owen opens the closet door then discovers and rescues Marie, tousled, who wilts in his arms. Skinny climbs a fire escape while below, and inside the lair the police put an end to the battle with the gang of thugs. Owen lovingly carries Marie away (56:47–1:04:48).

(4) The final panel, “The Journey Homeward” (1:04:49–1:11:33), sets Marie’s death in counterpoint with Owen’s pursuit of Skinny. While inside, the heroine expires in bed amidst the company of Ames, the hunchback, and Owen (who kisses her goodbye), in another compartment Skinny packs his effects together. Removing his eyepatch (that will be one of the director’s emblems) and changing his clothes, he sets about to escape unnoticed. Owen hustles to the rooftop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• 1 On the Lower East Side: Regeneration
• 2 A Monkey Talks to Sadie Thompson
• 3 Eyes and Cockeyes: The Cock-Eyed World
• 4 From Sadie to Mamie: The Revolt of Mamie Stover
• 5 Big Trees, Tall Men: The Big Trail
• 6 Me, My Gal, My Brother: Me and My Gal
• 7 The Good, The Bad, The Bowery
• Conclusion: What Became of The Wrath of the Just?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover