For a man who toiled in the studio system for close to 50 years, cranking out genre quickies and prestige productions with equal aplomb, Raoul Walsh’s work remains astonishingly coherent. My grab-bag syle of viewing has made this resoundingly clear. This week I watched his earliest work, Regeneration (1915) and The Thief of Bagdad (1925) through two films he made in 1953: The Lawless Breed and Gun Fury. The above still is from Along the Great Divide, a spare, Oedipal Western from 1951. All of them, in one guise or another, deals with Walsh’s major concern, the benefits (freedom) and costs (self-absorption, loneliness) of individuality.

In Along the Great Divide (available from the Warner Archive), men are subsumed under vaulting rock formations, isolated and doomed. Kirk Douglas, in his first Western, plays a neurotic U.S. Marshal intent on protecting a cattle rustler accused of murder (Walter Brennan) from his would-be lynchers, and on bringing him to justice. He pushes his deputies as hard as his prisoners, eventually alienating all of them over a harsh drive through the desert. Douglas represses his world-devouring charisma into a bottled-up rage, unleashed only when a bemused, sardonic Brennan starts incessantly humming a tune, “Down In the Valley”, that the Marshal’s Dad used to sing, triggering unwelcome memories.

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As one of the movies being presented as part of TCM’s 24-Hour Tribute to the Telluride Film Festival on Monday evening, September 6th at 2 am (ET), THE CHALLENGE (1938) is a bit of an oddity. Rarely seen in the U.S. and not one of the better known films about a famous mountain-climbing expedition, it is nonetheless an intriguing bridge between the German mountain films of Arnold Fanck (White Hell of Pitz Palu, 1929) and contemporary man-against-nature survival tales such as Philipp Stozl’s Northface (2008), where two Germans and two Austrians try to scale the Eiger in Switzerland, and Kevin Macdonald’s documentary reenactment Touching the Void (2003),  the ill-fated trek by Joe Simpson and Simon Yates up the face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes.     READ MORE

Opening on September 3rd and running until September 22nd, 2010, Gallery1988 in Los Angeles (in conjunction with The Autumn Society of Philadelphia) will be home to an exhibit of original artwork inspired by the classic 80s era sci-fi/fantasy/horror comedies GREMLINS (1984), GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) and THE GOONIES (1985).  Now at the quarter century mark, these one-time box office hits and pop culture milestones have trickled into the American collective consciousness, where “Who you gonna call?” and “Goonies never say die!” have become the modern equivalents of “Follow the yellow brick road” and “As God is my witness, tomorrow is another day. “  Even though the merciless Southern California sun has burnished me throughout these summer months a deep raw umber, you can color me excited!

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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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“If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”  -  Leonard Cohen

Missing in action since it was first filmed by Tony Palmer in 1972, BIRD ON A WIRE, a documentary account of Leonard Cohen’s European tour, has finally surfaced on DVD after being painstakenly restored frame by frame by the director who recently recounted for the DVD release the long, complicated history of this landmark document. For Cohen fans, the movie is essential viewing and just as candid, raw and intimate as D.A. Pennebaker’s remarkable Bob Dylan portrait, Don’t Look Back (1967), which covered that singer/songwriter’s tour of England in 1965.       READ MORE

Bela Lugosi lives… in the funny pages. READ MORE

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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I spent two weeks working round-the-clock to put together my fall film calendar and to meet my printer’s deadline last Friday. I celebrated with top-shelf beers and a 16mm screening in my backyard of The Night of the Hunter (1955). It was the great actor Charles Laughton’s only directorial excursion, using a script by Pulitzer Prize winning author James Agee, and is supposedly Robert Mitchum’s favorite role. As is my custom, I grabbed a few books for choice excerpts to read by way of introduction but, at the last-minute, I was moved by the spirits to toss the books aside and share a personal recollection instead. In retrospect, it was an anecdote that ran parallel to the highly memorable speech Robert Mitchum gives as Rev. Harry Powell when he talks about his tattooed fingers which spell out H-A-T-E and L-O-V-E.  READ MORE