My  hopscotching education in Raoul Walsh skitters on this week, with five gut-punching thrillers. I’m jumping through his career haphazardly, watching whatever I can easily acquire. Last week led me from 1930 to 1955, but today I’m mired in the 1940s, thanks to the Warner Bros.-TCM box set, Errol Flynn Adventures (feel free to ignore this post if you think the TCM branding compromises my objectivity).  Along with Lewis Milestone’s Edge of Darkness, it includes the Walsh-directed Desperate Journey (1942), Northern Pursuit (1943), Uncertain Glory (1944) and Objective, Burma! (1945). I supplemented these with the Warner Archive disc of Manpower (1941).

The images at the top present two communities of wisecracking men, and Marlene Dietrich, sending off one of their own. They are from Manpower and Desperate Journey, two mournful studies of male camaraderie. Manpower takes the love triangle (and Edward G. Robinson) from Howard Hawks’ Tiger Shark (1932) and moves it from a fishing village to the road crew for a power company. It’s there that Robinson and buddy George Raft tell tall tales about their amorous accomplishments with fellow boozers Alan Hale, Ward Bond and a group of other grinning mugs. Walsh packs the frame with group shots, of leering, laughing and impulsive men. They gather in semi-circles to trade quips, and end the film in the same group formations saying their final goodbyes.

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I can still recall the first time that I saw Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933). I was just a teenager flipping channels one lazy afternoon and suddenly the opening credits appeared on my television. I noticed Colin Clive’s name so I paused. I was familiar with the actor thanks to his role as Doctor Frankenstein in James Whale’s Frankenstein films and I was a big fan. The wonderfully eerie opening theme composed by Roy Webb (Cat People; 1942, I Walked with A Zombie; 1943, The Seventh Victim; 1943, The Spiral Staircase; 1945, The Body Snatcher; 1945, Mighty Joe Young; 1949, etc.) for Christopher Strong was rather ominous and I immediately thought I was going to be seeing another horror film or thriller starring Colin Clive but I soon discovered that I was wrong. Christopher Strong isn’t a horror film. It’s a romantic melodrama with some unexpected action featuring a spectacular star performance from the wonderful Katharine Hepburn. The movie captivated me and surprised me. It also made me a lifelong Hepburn fan.

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The Big Trail (top, 1930) & The Tall Men (btm, 1955)

Raoul Walsh was nothing if not adaptable. As a teenager, he tagged along with his uncle on a trading mission to Cuba and Mexico. The schooner was damaged in a storm and had a long layover in Vera Cruz. It was there, Walsh claimed, that he learned roping from a man he only knew as Ramirez, whom he paid in Cuban rum. He stayed ashore when the ship returned to NYC, and was soon hired as a cowboy to drive cattle into Texas. His accidentally gained expertise landed him a horse riding gig on Broadway (in a version of THE CLANSMAN, later filmed by D.W. Griffith as THE BIRTH OF A NATION, in which Walsh played John Wilkes Booth), and later got him hired at the Pathe Film Studios, who also needed a horseman. Once he was primed to break out as a leading man in IN OLD ARIZONA, a jackrabbit flew through his windshield, and the glass shards gouged out an eye (he was replaced by Warner Baxter). Hence his eyepatch, and his practically-minded move behind the camera.

Dave Kehr commented on on his blog, relating to his NY Times piece on the Errol Flynn Adventures box set that TCM released with Warner Bros., that “for me Walsh belongs with Ford and Hawks as one of the Big Three American directors, but there has been surprisingly little of substance written about him in English or in French.”  I felt I should be as practical as the director and take this as a sign to dig further into Walsh’s work. There was further discussion of how little he’s esteemed in the under-30 crowd, of which I’m a member for the next few months. And it’s undeniably true. I’ve never had a conversation about Walsh with anyone of my own age group.  So until I hit that magic number in February, I’ll be assessing and re-assessing his work, to find my way through Walsh’s massive filmography and hopefully spark further discussion about this major figure in film history.

Kehr’s erudite readers also took up the challenge, especially Blake Lucas, who wrote an essay-long breakdown of Walsh’s career. Spring 2011 promises a flood of material, with an essay on Walsh in Kehr’s eagerly awaited collection When Movies Mattered, and a forthcoming biography, Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director (University Press of Kentucky), by Marilyn Ann Moss. I’m adding my rather undigested thoughts here, and will contribute more in the coming weeks the more I see. I watched The Big Trail  (1930), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Battle Cry (1955), and The Tall Men (1955) in quick succession with comment below, and my bits on Me and My Gal (1932) and Colorado Territory (1949) are here and here.

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On July 2nd, 1980, AIRPLANE! was released in the United States. For its 30th anniversary, the Film Society at Lincoln Center held a screening and a Q&A last night with directors and writers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (hereafter known as ZAZ). Ever since I stumbled out of THE NAKED GUN (1988) as a giddy seven-year-old, the ZAZ initials have been emblazoned in my consciousness, their screenplays replacing large chunks of my grey matter. I am not an impartial observer. But it wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that ZAZ’s peak equaled those of the Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks in the density of quality jokes-per-minute. Their approach was unique in that these comedies didn’t use comedians. Their laughs came from the cognitive dissonance of watching handsome leading men spout intricate absurdities. All of the performers play the straight man, while the writing is the star.

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I hope you’ve all gained as much respect and admiration for actor Woody Strode as I have after reading all the great posts this week, and after watching Strode in action.  Jeff referred to himself as the “loose caboose” in our Woody Strode blogathon, but I may be an even looser one.  Because I’m a particular devotee of TV, I wanted to take a look at what Woody had done in television, a medium that is often and usually less forward-thinking than the movies (possible less so today, believe it or not, I think, more because movies are so timid, not because TV is so bold).  Back in the 1950s when Strode began his acting career in earnest, America was still uneasy with mainstream black performers, even ones who had risen from the most egalitarian and open of playing fields, which happened to be the actual playing fields of sports, where Strode had made a name as one of the best college football players around and was recruited for the world-famous Los Angeles Rams team.  Clearly his impressive physicality, gridiron fame and extraordinary good looks made him an easy candidate for Hollywood talent scouts, but the color of his skin sometimes limited the kinds of roles offered to him. 

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In the late ’60s many aging American actors were finding it hard to get good roles in Hollywood. The old studio system was collapsing and younger audiences wanted to see films featuring new faces and fresh blood. During this transitional period the Italian film industry was thriving and European directors expressed interest in working with Hollywood performers that they had admired from afar. This led actors like Woody Strode to start accepting roles in Italian genre films such as spaghetti westerns as well as giallo (thrillers) and poliziottesco (crime) movies where they often received top billing and were treated like stars. As an African American actor Woody Strode had other strikes against him in Hollywood where race relations were still extremely complicated and by 1968 he had grown increasingly frustrated by the racism he was experiencing in the US. At the time Europe was much more progressive in the way that it was handling race relations and many black performers found that very liberating.

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August marks TCM‘s annual Summer Under the Stars festival, and the Morlock’s have been given their marching orders: pick one overlooked star deserving of a week-long tribute. In 2008 it was Fred MacMurray. In 2009 it was Gloria Grahame. This year it’s Woody Strode (1914 – 1994). Strode was an athlete who turned to acting. He also broke several color barriers. First as one of four blacks who, in 1946, integrated major league pro football and, later, as a prolific actor whose first big break was in the title role of Sergeant Rutledge (1960) – which was released the same year as another memorable role for him in Spartacus. Another barrier he broke had nothing to do with the color of his skin as he was, according to Todd von Hoffman (co-author of The von Hoffman Bros.’ Big Damn Book of Sheer Manliness), “Simply one of the most ridiculously perfect human specimens to ever walk the Earth.”

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Tippi Hedren modeling a Jacques Fath dress in 1954

I love to waste time flipping through old women’s magazines. There’s something strangely appealing about the vintage advertisements and forgotten articles that told women how they should dress and explained how to cook a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s easy to imagine my own grandmother or mother taking fashion notes or cutting out recipes so they could plan their next family gathering while reading these dusty publications. Now that so many magazines seem to be going out of print and readers are more likely to search for recipes and beauty tips online, there’s something vaguely comforting about loosing myself in the past for a few hours while reading an old issue of McCall’s or Better Homes & Gardens.

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Like a herd of cattle ready to run down a restive kidnapper, Olive Films bursts into stores today with a phalanx of five DVDs licensed from Paramount Pictures: Union Station (1950), Appointment With Danger (1951), Dark City (1951), Crack in the World (1965, our Richard Harland Smith wrote about it here), and Hannie Caulder (1971, which Kimberly Lindbergs dealt with here). A wholesale distributor and retailer of independent and art-house releases, Olive is now expanding its own acquisitions slate, starting with this brawny group of  genre titles. With multiple studios now experimenting with the mixed blessings of burn-on-demand technology (more releases, but higher prices and less quality control) for their library titles, it’s encouraging that a company is still willing to put out fully authored discs, in strong new transfers.

With the forthcoming, and essential, Josef Von Sternberg collection coming from Criterion, it’s clear that Paramount is becoming more aggressive in licensing its material.  Olive will release 27 Paramounts over the next year or so, including Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents, Otto Preminger’s legendary and fascinating flop Skidoo, and Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face. I spoke with the Director of Acquisitions and Sales at Olive, Frank Tarzi, and he confirms that much more is on the way. Olive has closed deals with multiple studios, and their future slate shows off adventurous and eclectic taste, with Tarzi confirming the following: Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Billy Wilder’s Fedora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, The Stationmaster’s Wife (uncut), and I Only Want You to Love Me (uncut), Abel Gance’s J’Accuse, Claude Chabrol’s Ophelia, and, most exciting of all, Jean-Luc Godard’s complete Histoire(s) du cinema.

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