Raoul Walsh | Regeneration | Sadie Thompson | The Big Trail | Going Hollywood | The Roaring Twenties | They Drive by Night | High Sierra | Manpower | The Horn Blows at Midnight | White Heat | Colorado Territory | The Enforcer | Gun Fury | The Naked and the Dead | The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw | Esther and the King
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Raoul Walsh is an American director, who made films from the 1910's to the 1960's. He published an autobiography, Each Man in his Time; the life story of a director (1974). There is a good article by Fred Camper on The Big Trail, at his website at: http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Walsh.html.
Some common themes and subjects in Raoul Walsh films:
The poor and working class characters, and the opposition to religious intolerance, derive directly from Walsh's mentor, D. W. Griffith.
Common images in Walsh:
These are not present in every Walsh film. But are common subjects that run through much of Walsh's work.
Regeneration (1915) is Walsh's first American made feature film to survive today. He had previously worked as an assistant to D. W. Griffith. The film deals with poor people in New York City's Bowery district, and was partly shot on location there.
D. W. Griffith and his pupils all made films set among the very poor. These films are mainly shot in slum districts, and deal sympathetically with the plight of their trapped characters. These stories often have tragic endings, in which one or more of the lead characters dies. The stories often deal with the daily lives of the characters. Examples: Griffith's Intolerance (the modern day, "The Mother and the Law" segments), Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and Isn't Life Wonderful, Raoul Walsh's Regeneration, Sailor's Luck, The Bowery, They Drive by Night, Erich von Stroheim's Greed, Tod Browning's Outside the Law, and Freaks, King Vidor's The Crowd, Street Scene. Many of these films have location shooting. Greed strongly influenced Jean Renoir, who used Stroheim as his model for realism in film. Through Renoir, we get the birth of Neorealism, and much of the modern cinema. Griffith and his followers extended their concern to the poor and suffering in Europe: e.g. Griffith's Isn't Life Wonderful, Walsh's The Yellow Ticket. Directors not personally associated with Griffith also made films about the poor, for example, Alice Guy's short film The Sewer (1911). And Marshall Neilan's Mary Pickford vehicle, Amarilly of Clothesline Alley (1918), seems like a comedy-drama, more light-hearted reworking of "The Mother and the Law" section of Intolerance.
Walsh relentlessly cross cuts. This device is often seen in both Griffith and his pupils, such as Tod Browning.
The fire on the boat here anticipates the explosive finale of White Heat. We see people on top of the roughly three story tall boat here, just as Cagney will be on top of the oil tanks at the end of the later film.
The vivid boat sequences here resemble those in Walsh's Captain Horatio Hornblower, made many years later. Walsh shows his great flair for crowd scenes and spectacle, already early in his career. These show large number of extras, all performing their own individual bits of business, and yet all coordinated into well designed visual wholes. Walsh has a powerful geometric sense that allows him to group his crowds into easily understood visual patterns and forms.
Throughout Regeneration, Walsh shoots many scenes from an overhead angle. This allows him to view his crowd scenes as a group. It also creates a sense of drama. The overhead angle is inherently dramatic, emphatic and sensational.
As far back as the funeral scene in Regeneration, Walsh divided the crowd into two groups, one arranged on each side of his overhead shot.
Walsh often shows streams of people, all moving in a direction. The first look at the boat excursion shows a steady stream of people moving along the gangway into the boat. This crowd makes the steady progress of other streams of people that will flow through both Regeneration, and later Walsh films. Such streams are a basic structural unit of both Walsh's crowds, and the visual compositions that contain them.
Walsh often shows more that one stream of people on the screen at once. Sometimes, as in some of the boat shots, these streams are moving in opposite directions. In other cases, such as the two streams of policemen towards the end, who pile into two police cars, these streams are in parallel directions.
Walsh has a unique shot featuring the police. Before they go out on assignment, they group into a rectilinear grid. Then each raises his nightstick into the air, in synchronized motion. This shot shows Walsh's flair for geometric composition, and for the regular motion of crowds. Walsh executes this pattern in record time - it shows his typical speediness and economy used in his shots.
Walsh loves circular masks in this film. These bring circles into his compositions. His later films, such as Hornblower, do not have masks, but they often employ circular arcs in their compositions. Masks are a silent film technology, in which part of the screen is blacked out, allowing the inner part of the image to be framed by a geometric shape. In Regeneration, these masks are usually circular. Walsh clearly carefully composed each such image to harmoniously blend with its circular frame.
There are many other circles in the images, all playing a role in Walsh's compositions. These include:
Some of these circular forms do not just play a visual role, although that is important. They also tend to be key objects, at the center of the plot in the scene in which they appear.
Many of the characters in Regeneration are called "gangsters". In 1915, this term has a slightly different meaning than it will in the late 1920's and beyond. These men are criminals. But they are two bit crooks. They are members of small gangs of street corner criminals, and hence known as "gangsters". But they are not big bosses of organized crime. Their tiny gangs bear little resemblance to the large, powerful mobs of later years. Among other things, this means that though Regeneration is a movie about "gangsters", it is not clear that it is a "gangster film" in the sense that the term will later be used. It shares few of the conventions of later, genuine gangster films, including Walsh's own The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941) or White Heat (1949). The major cycle of true gangster films seem to have originated with Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927). I do not know enough about the history of silent movie era crime films to describe what intermediate bridges, if any, occur between Regeneration (1915) and Underworld (1927). For example, Lon Chaney reportedly played a gangster in the lost film, Voices of the City (1922) (what a beautiful title!).
When Raoul Walsh visited our campus in 1972, we asked him about Sternberg's gangster movies. He disclaimed any affinity between them and his own. He poked some satirical fun at them, suggesting that they were elaborate and somewhat arty productions. One could tell that he was not trying to say they were bad movies - underneath his humor, he clearly had a lot of respect for Sternberg. But he also plainly felt that they were an essentially different kind of cinema from his own.
The battling foster parents here return in The Bowery (1933) as the fighting couple at the melee. In The Bowery, this is played purely for laughs, but it is mixed in tone in Regeneration. It is partly comic, and partly also terrifying for the little kid who is trapped in the middle between these two giants. He is literally in the middle of them, and Walsh irises in on him to emphasize his trapped feelings. In both films, the couple are purely of the lowest classes, and their behavior is physical, uninhibited and almost absurdly violent.
Two early scenes emphasize ideals of masculinity. In Walsh, a real man is someone who sticks up for people weaker than himself. His teenage hero shows he has the right stuff by protecting a smaller kid who is being bullied. Walsh repeatedly shows the look of adoration on the smaller kid's face for this tough guy who is standing up to a leader of a whole gang. This ideal was part of a whole generation of filmmakers' concepts. A hero was the protector of the weak. He would fight, but only to help the powerless. The scene also underlines Walsh's concepts of male bonding.
The scene is repeated later, with variations. Here the grown-up hero defends the district attorney when he is attacked by a gang of toughs. Here the hero only intervenes when he sees the pleading eyes of the heroine. Also, the district attorney is physically weaker than the crooks, but he is not purely powerless. He is a wealthy, powerful member of the upper classes, symbolized by his white tie and tails. Meanwhile, both the hero and the tough are in the rough clothes of the lowest classes. The film suggests that feelings of brotherhood are flowing across class lines. It also anticipates the finale of The Roaring Twenties (1939), when gangster Cagney sacrifices himself to protect his ex-girl friend's upper crust district attorney boyfriend. In both cases, the upper class man is attractive, but much less strong than the lower class gangster. The whole situation is a complex set of ambiguous feelings, with the two men being both class rivals, romantic rivals, and men who are bonding together. The situation gives a rare opportunity for a lower class man to be in a position of ascendancy over an upper class man. In this it anticipates Sadie Thompson, and the duel between the noble Marine Sergeant, a lower class man played by Walsh himself, and the powerful upper crust reformer who is lording it over the islands. Here too, the district attorney is a reformer. However, the DA in Regeneration is a much more likable figure, being basically an honorable person, unlike the sinister reformer in Sadie Thompson. He is also far more masculine and macho.
The rowdy music hall in Regeneration is one of many lower class dance halls and bars that will reappear in Walsh's work. Later on they will be major settings in The Bowery, Sailor's Luck, The Roaring Twenties, Manpower, Glory Alley and The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, as well as his Marine Corps films. Much of the audience is on balconies here, anticipating the many tiered orchestra platform at the finale of Going Hollywood. Music in Walsh is often associated with both dancing and the working classes. The entertainers on his stages tend to be as raffish as the people in the audience. They have little hauteur or show biz remoteness from ordinary folk.
Sadie Thompson (1928) is the first screen version of Somerset Maugham's tale. It is a pretty grim story, and far from one of my favorite Walsh movies. Still, it has some impressive qualities.
The film is a thorough condemnation of what we now call the Religious Right. Walsh's concern with repressive reformers echoes D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916). In both films the reformers are explicitly motivated by religious fanaticism, something both filmmakers view with horror. Both films show the reformers going to the authorities, and interfering with other people's lives. These sinister reformers will recur in a comic way in Going Hollywood (1933), in the leaders of the girls' school. Walsh opens Sadie Thompson with a brief plea for tolerance, contained in one of the early titles. One of Walsh's final films, Esther and the King (1960), will also explicitly denounce religious "intolerance".
Walsh will make another film about the dangers of religious fanaticism in The Yellow Ticket (1931). He will also look critically at fanatic Indian haters in They Died with Their Boots On (1941) and A Distant Trumpet (1964).
Walsh is a consistent supporter of religion in his movies, but he wants religion to be gentle and supportive of people, not fanatic. Sympathetic priest characters appear throughout his work, in such films as Regeneration, Gentleman Jim and Colorado Territory. Often times, these priests form a mentor to the hero. There are also the sympathetic Jewish characters and Southern preacher in The Naked and the Dead, whose religious commitment play such a positive role in the finale of that film. In the settlement house in Regeneration, the hero sees a sign saying "God Is Love". This quote from the Bible sums up Walsh's religious views.
The heroine hangs out with the Marines here, and manages to communicate easily with them. She is one of a long line of Walsh heroines who relate well in a man's world. Hornblower is most impressed with Virginia Mayo when she deals with the epidemic aboard ship, and Jane Russell joins right up with the other cowboys in The Tall Men. Even someone as refined as Olivia de Havilland functions well as an Army wife in They Died with Their Boots On, stepping right up and dealing with the issues of the film.
Sadie Thompson is most interesting for Walsh's own acting job within it. He plays Marine Sergeant Tim O'Hara, a man who romances the heroine, played by Gloria Swanson. Walsh and Swanson were having a real life love affair at the time, one that is still celebrated. According to his autobiography, Walsh was trying to launch an acting career with this role. He would have liked to have become a regular leading man in films. Walsh had acted a great deal during his earliest, pre-1915 days in film, but this was his only sizable role after he became established as a director after 1915. One also suspects that Walsh was projecting his own feelings with this role. Tim O'Hara is one of many Walsh heroes who is a member of a group of men. Such male bonding is very important to Walsh. Walsh had given the most idealized portrait of male friendship in What Price Glory? (1926), in which his heroes were two Marines, and he would repeat his Marine friendships in Battle Cry (1955) and Marines, Lets Go (1961). All of Walsh's heroes are kind hearted men who have the warmest feelings for other people. They want to be friends and pals with others, and to be accepted as part of the group. There is no malice whatsoever to these men - they simply want friendship and social acceptance.
Like other Walsh heroes, Tim O'Hara is deeply, passionately in love with the heroine. He gives her his total support, and deep romantic commitment. Andrew Sarris has pointed out the paradoxes in Walsh's heroes. Because they are already depicted as very successful at traditional male roles, they are able to express the most romantic personal feelings without any loss of face. The emotional directness, openness and sincerity of Walsh's heroes is deeply impressive.
The Marine Corps uniforms and Sergeant's stripes here also serve as indicators of masculinity. Walsh frequently cast his heroes in such uniforms. It was clearly very important to Walsh to embody such a hero himself. By 1928, Walsh had directed around 35 feature films. But when he constructed a screen image for himself, it was as a penniless Marine Sergeant. Walsh was expressing feelings that are common to many men. But his profession of film director allowed him to live out his fantasies and ideals in a way not open to most other guys.
Raoul Walsh was clearly deeply oriented to his friends. His stories that he told us in 1972 often concentrated on the exuberant adventures he had with his buddies. In his autobiography he is proudest of having discovered John Wayne: Walsh gave him his first starring role in The Big Trail (1930). Also, when I asked him whether he knew Frank Borzage when they both worked at Fox around 1930, he lit up like a Christmas tree. Walsh and Borzage had been friends, and the memories this triggered of his old friend delighted him. He was plainly touched that we remembered Borzage's work.
The record player is full of the complex rounded surfaces Walsh loved in machines. The records that Sadie plays furnish further large circles. So do the rounded arches over the doors of the set, and the hanging lanterns on the ceiling. Sadie also wears a bracelet that involves many interlocking circles. The wicker furniture also involves circular forms.
The Big Trail (1930) is a lavishly produced early sound Western. It is best known today for giving John Wayne his first starring role. The women pioneers here work and fight right alongside of the men, typical of Walsh's fondness for women who function as men's equals.
The Big Trail starts right out with Walsh's favorite figure, the circle. The wagon trains in the opening shot have circular entrances and frames at their rear. These fall into the category of "circular containers for humans", a Walsh trademark. They also have circular wagon wheels, that show up everywhere in Walsh's shots. Soon, we see compositions centering on the circular washtub, where a woman is doing laundry, and a huge wagon wheel behind. The pioneers also seem to specialize in moving circular barrels westward - most shots of the characters outside of their wagons are full of these circular objects. John Wayne wears a hat with a broad circular brim, and a nearly cylindrical conical central region sticking up.
Eventually, the pioneers will gather their wagons in a circle to ward off an attack. Walsh shoots this from above, at a slightly elevated angle, creating vast landscapes with the circle of wagons in the middle. We also see smaller arcs of the wagon circle, in other compositions. Walsh fills the center of the circle with the pioneers' moving horses, while the attackers are also in movement outside. This gives a dynamic quality to these circle-centered compositions. They remind one of the dynamic crowd imagery of the boat scenes in Regeneration. And of the train depot in Going Hollywood. Just as the crowds in that film often split into two independently moving groups, so do the movements inside and outside the circle of wagons function in counterpoint here.
The Indians have an astonishing range of conical teepees - one of the best landscape panoramas in the film. Their feather headdresses form a full, complete circle, something that is not standard in Western movies. Walsh often shoots these from above, so that one sees the circular opening of the headdress top, framed by feathers all around. These shots remind one a bit of the headdresses worn by the dancers near the end of Going Hollywood. One of the Indians pounds on a large, cylindrical drum. This summons the tribe together - another instance of Walsh's fascination with sound-based communication devices.
The finale takes place in a redwood forest. The tall, cylindrical boles of the trees remind one of the circular column that ends Regeneration. In both films, there is an elegiac, mournful tone to this finale, with the hero rededicating himself to his principles, in a symbolic, emotionally laden landscape.
Walsh only made a handful of musicals, but he excelled with the genre. Although many sources list Going Hollywood as a 1933 film, its dialogue explicitly sets it in 1934. The film's plot is similar in a comic way to that of George Cukor's What Price Hollywood? (1932), which also dealt with an aspiring young unknown woman on her way up in Hollywood, contrasted with an established male Hollywood figure who is on his way down due to alcoholism. This same plot was unofficially remade in the three versions of A Star is Born, the second of which was also directed by Cukor, thus completing the circle. The similarity in the plots of What Price Hollywood? and Going Hollywood was perhaps suggested by Turner Classic Movies, which showed them back to back on May 29, 2001. Going Hollywood does not seem to be an especially "inside" look at Hollywood filmmaking. Instead, it reminds one of Warners backstage musicals such as Mervyn Le Roy's Gold Diggers of 1933. The presence here of Ned Sparks as the director of the "film musical within the film" heightens this resemblance.
Marion Davies expresses a wish to break out of her regimented existence, and discover romance at the beginning of Going Hollywood. Such dreams are common in Walsh heroes. One thinks of Hornblower's striving to make romantic contact through his straight-jacket of stiff military discipline in Captain Horatio Hornblower, or tough guy Bogart's longing for romance in High Sierra.
The hero here eventually develops big problems with alcohol, and has to try to get on the wagon before his life is completely ruined by drink. Walsh earlier expressed skepticism about drinking in Regeneration, where the heroine tries to get the hero to stop drinking. And the hero's life tragically degenerates into alcoholism towards the end of The Roaring Twenties. One also recalls the way the hero of They Drive by Night is constantly refusing drinks; the film makes a big deal about his disinterest in alcohol, and suggests he is a role model for people. Alcohol is clearly an enemy of the life force and vitality that Walsh celebrated in his gung ho heroes. At the depths of his addiction, the hero of Going Hollywood also becomes alone and friendless - something that Walsh clearly views as a horror.
Bing Crosby sings his "Beautiful Girl" number in his hotel room, surrounded by sound recording men trailing him with microphones. We see their equipment in detail, and the ability of the mike to be mobile around the entire hotel suite. This scene shows Walsh's fondness for high tech sound equipment, something that will show up again with the tracking devices in White Heat. One also recalls the record player in Sadie Thompson, the early 1920's radio set in The Roaring Twenties, the long-distance telephone calls in They Drive by Night, the radio broadcast and control booth in The Horn Blows at Midnight, the loudspeakers at the end of The Enforcer, the radio in Objective Burma and The Naked and the Dead, and the walkie talkies in Marines, Lets Go. And while there are no high tech devices in Esther and the King, which is set in Ancient Persia, much is made of gongs used as alarms, and horns used to sound signals over distance. Similarly, the drum in The Big Trail summons the Native American tribe together. The scene in Going Hollywood involves a complex camera movement, as the characters move around a corner of the elaborate Art Deco apartment. Crosby gets dressed here, and his actions are shared by the sound recordist and his publicity man. Such shared actions involve male bonding.
The big "Going Hollywood" number takes place in a train depot, and is Walsh at his most exuberant. The number shows Walsh's tremendous flair for directing crowd scenes. Each person in the depot here is in full motion. As is typical of Walsh, everybody is an individual, yet the motion of the crowd as a whole is also coherent. The group of young reporters here remind one of the other male groups in Walsh; they always function together as a team. Such teams generate warm feelings of male bonding. Like most of Walsh's teams, they are dressed in similar clothes, here good suits. They are often arranged in a circle, around some central person: also a Walsh staging tradition. Walsh can also use triangles to group his men, in other films. They are often staring at one location or person: a typical Walsh way of organizing his teams, and making them share common ideas and actions. Here sometimes they are all looking at Ned Sparks or Bing Crosby; another scene has Crosby making them all look at the painted stars on the ceiling of the depot, a shot that is hypnotically fascinating.
Many of the crowd scenes involve a contrast between the movement of the crowd as a whole, and a single prominent individual they are all staring at. The crowd can also subdivide into two crowds, each with its own pattern of motion. These directly recall the crowd shots in Regeneration built around two moving streams of people. The shots seem to go by at a tremendously fast pace. Just as we have figured out the pattern underlying one shot, Walsh cuts to another, with a different architecture and pattern of movement.
The film's choreographer, Albertina Rasch, is not a household name today, even among film historians. She did Ernst Lubitsch's The Merry Widow (1934), Josef von Sternberg's The King Steps Out (1936), and W. S. Van Dyke's Rosalie (1937), Marie Antoinette (1938) and Sweethearts (1938). These were mainly MGM productions.
The finale of Going Hollywood shows Walsh's fondness for circles in his compositions. The chorines wear elaborate headdresses made up of arching plumes. These plumes form circular arcs. The chorines show up not just in the musical number, but in the backstage rehearsal scene preceding it. Their arcs soar over the crowd of men in suits. This scene is typical of Walsh's crowd shots, many of which are full of circular patterns in their composition. Also circular in the finale: the orchestra is seated in a huge, steep, circular amphitheater. Walsh shows us this scene from both the front and from above. In each case, the numerous circles of the different levels of the amphitheater are prominent. It is a whole world made up out of circles. Like the oil truck at the end of White Heat, it takes us to a world made up out of pure geometric, mainly circular regions. Like the truck, it contains a large number of men inside it.
The Roaring Twenties (1939) is a gangster movie, set against the historical background of the 1920's. This is the film that was unofficially spoofed by Amy Heckerling's Johnny Dangerously (1984). Despite its often serious surface, The Roaring Twenties is itself often slightly tongue in cheek. It is filled with comedy, and is considerably more light hearted than many gangster films. It is a lot of fun with James Cagney as the good gangster (a species that only exists in movies) and Humphrey Bogart as the bad gangster (and he is really, really, rotten!) Walsh's dynamic storytelling is at full tilt throughout.
Villainous gangster Bogart commits the senseless murder of an unarmed man here, in the warehouse raid scene. Such vicious killings mark out the villains of Walsh films. Similar needless killings recur with gangster protagonist Cagney in White Heat, the evil sergeant in The Naked and the Dead, and Haman in Esther and the King. All of these men are shown to be deeply emotionally disturbed. They are cut off from other humans, and unable to relate to them emotionally.
Cagney actually refers to the young lawyer (and his romantic rival) as "big, dumb and good looking". This too is a type in Walsh's cinema. Such young rivals will recur in White Heat, with Steve Cochran's character, and in High Sierra. The lawyer is dressed in better and better suits throughout the film; at the climax, he is in pinstripes, showing he has achieved the acme of social and romantic respectability.
This gangster film has as many scenes as possible in speakeasies and saloons. Walsh loved such places, and they are a key locale for his films. Most of the scenes also include music, with many old standards from the 1920's. These speakeasies are full of raffish characters, and the rowdy action typical of Walsh's nightclubs. Here they are provided over by character actress and comedienne Gladys George, who shows the gusto Walsh liked in actors.
One scene shows the heroine using a primitive, early 1920's radio set. This is typical of Walsh's love of sound equipment. This set must have brought back nostalgic memories for many 1939 viewers. Everybody in that era had a regular radio receiver: by 1939, radio was the dominant entertainment medium in the US, found in every home.
Bogart's bodyguards at the end are all dressed alike, in matching spiffy tuxedos. This is one of many male groups in Walsh, that share both a common profession and common clothes. Earlier, during the shipboard scene, the common visored nautical caps worn by Bogart and Cagney underscores their sense of brotherhood. Both men are actually impersonating sailors; both are actually bootleggers. The visored caps are part of this disguise. The visors show Walsh's love of complex curving forms.
The finale shows the hero aspiring to reach symbolic heights: the top of the church steps. It anticipates later tragic finales in Walsh, with the hero trying to reach a mountain top: High Sierra, or the top of the oil tankers: White Heat.
The close-up of the plate of spaghetti is one of the delightful shots in this film. It always makes me hungry. The plate is one of Walsh's favorite shapes, a circle. Viewed at an angle, it makes an ellipse on the screen. While this is a simple image, it is very satisfying. It is an example of the geometric delight Walsh brings to his compositions. We watch as a gangster covers the top of the spaghetti with cheese, a shot which appeals to the sense of taste. But it also forms a pure geometric pattern, the filling up of a circular region with a covering. Watching such a geometric process in action is an example of Walsh's geometric cinema.
Circles also fill the scene on the boat. We see portholes and circular life preservers in the background walls of the shot, just like the circular object on the tenement wall in Regeneration. There are also table lamps whose shades are perfect hemispheres, and nearly hemispherical lights on the walls. Walsh also shoots the big fight through hanging cables, that make caternary shaped curved arcs in the composition. Other scenes in the film occasionally include circles, too, such as the semicircular headdress worn by Priscilla Lane while singing "It Had to be You", and the steering wheel of Cagney's taxicab near the end. The floral displays near Priscilla Lane in one scene also show curving arcs.
Other scenes in the film have sets that include regularly repeated straight lines. These include the warehouse, with its huge, repeated, trapezoidal flanges, and the church at the end, with its huge outdoor staircase. Both scenes allow people to enter and wander around within a purely geometrical world, a world made entirely of straight lines. The Italian restaurant, with its regularly repeating checkerboard tablecloths, also has something of the status of a geometric world.
The closest ancestor I have been able to discover for The Roaring Twenties, and the 1930's Hollywood gangster film in general, is the play Broadway (1926), by Philip Dunning and George Abbott. This play was a huge commercial and critical success in 1926, and did much to popularize the world of gangsters and speakeasies in entertainment media. It conveys the milieu that would later appear in gangster films with startling vividness. Some of the play's characters are gangsters, bootleggers who are conducting turf wars for control of the illegal liquor industry during Prohibition. These men hijack each others trucks, and gun each other down in cold blood, just as in Walsh's film, and other gangster works. They also control liquor distribution in well defined geographic areas of New York City. As in Walsh's film, there is a scene in which they force an unwilling night club owner to take their booze. The gangsters are all dressed in tuxedos, just as in The Roaring Twenties, and many other gangster films.
Other characters in Broadway are show biz types, singers and dancers who work in mob controlled night clubs. These characters are not criminals or dishonest, but they have to coexist with the gangsters in a common environment. Such night clubs and their entertainers are also featured prominently in The Roaring Twenties, and other gangster movies. The honest, two-bit hoofer who has to confront the gangsters in Broadway was originally played on stage by Lee Tracy, who became a big 1930's movie star himself, after he was imported to Hollywood to appear in another stage adaptation, Roy Del Ruth's Blessed Event (1932).
The subject matter of Broadway is not its only link to Hollywood. The snappy, slang filled, vernacular dialogue of Broadway anticipates countless 1930's talkies. In fact, the archetypal Warner Brothers picture of the 1930's, featuring tough but honest characters who cope with working class poverty with a wisecrack, seems to come directly out of Broadway. Reading it, I had to constantly remind myself that this was 1926, and not some 1930's movie.
Broadway is far from being a perfect work. It ethnically stereotypes some of its crooks, something that is not morally acceptable. Commendably, this problem is not shared by The Roaring Twenties, which looks as if it has made a conscious effort to gives its various gangsters names not associated with any ethnic group.
At one point in its development, Broadway was known as The Roaring Forties. The phrase still survives in the text of the finished play. It refers not to the decade of the 1940's, but rather to such New York City streets as 42nd Street, the locale for the play's action. Broadway is a somewhat misleading title, by today's standards. The work deals not with the New York theater, which is what the phrase "Broadway" usually conjures up today, but with the speakeasies and gangsters who once thrived in the neighborhood of Broadway.
Broadway is easily available in book form in many libraries. It was reprinted, for example, in Famous Plays of Crime and Detection (1946), edited by Van H. Cartmell and Bennett Cerf. Like comic books, plays and the theater are a once popular and hugely influential medium, that are now sinking slowly off most contemporary readers' radar screens. People will only develop a real understanding of popular culture when they explore all of its media, rather than simply restricting themselves to film alone.
There is also a film version of the play, Broadway (1929), directed by Paul Fejos. Like other works by Fejos, it is very hard to see today, and most contemporary filmgoers, myself included, are completely unfamiliar with this early talkie. Thomas E. Jackson repeated his stage role as the police detective in the movie version, and went on to play supporting roles as policemen and District Attorney's for the next forty years in Hollywood. And Evelyn Brent, who had appeared in Sternberg's gangster films, plays a major role in the film version.
They Drive by Night (1940) opens with a relentless look at the problems of working class truck drivers. It shows how these men are exploited by their bosses, and face atrocious working conditions and endless financial hardships. The film is filled with detail about their profession, and virtually serves as a documentary about an industry. The extreme poverty of the characters reminds one that Walsh was a disciple of D. W. Griffith, and regularly made films about the poor. These men are not slum dwellers or members of an underclass, however: they are working class people at their most financially desperate.
They Drive by Night also anticipates The Naked and the Dead (1958), in that it shows an all-powerful system driving like a juggernaut over the lives of ordinary people trapped within it. In The Naked and the Dead, the system is modern warfare; here it is the exploitative system of contract truckers. Both movies are constructed almost like documentaries, giving a systematic exposition of the social systems they describe.
They Drive by Night also shares a subject with The Naked and the Dead: exhaustion. The night-driving truck drivers are in a constant state of exhaustion, and are desperate throughout for a good night's sleep. The film builds up a hypnotic mood, with the characters' near-sleep, hypnogogic state being evoked by the film's mise-en-scène. Exhaustion also plays a key role in the finale of The Naked and the Dead, where the characters struggle heroically against it.
Many of the exteriors in They Drive by Night are shot on location, on California highways. Such rural California locales will return in High Sierra. In both films, these locations look desolate and even downright primitive. The locales seem sinister, menacing, and full of danger for the heroes. There is little about them that is friendly or consoling, unlike many artists who find the countryside uplifting.
The attempts to board moving trucks from other vehicles recall the train robbery in Colorado Territory. These action sequences usually have Walsh moving with his camera along side vehicles, often at high speeds.
The look at the problems of contract truckers takes up the entire first half of They Drive by Night, the first 45 minutes. After this, the second half switches gears entirely, and becomes virtually a second movie. The second half is a crime melodrama. It is a strange variation on James M. Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). In Cain's novel, the young wife of a rich older man seduces a macho young drifter, a working class mechanic, and murder ensues. This film looks at the same basic set-up, but at what might have happened if the young man had rejected the seduction, and been not interested in the wife. Here the young mechanic is replaced by the young truck driver lead of the film, George Raft. Both works deal with road material, with trucks, and highway-side cafes. The whole idea is interesting. It takes a popular, much filmed novel, and develops a "what if" variation on its famous plot, showing how a different set of choices might have resulted in a different path in the characters' lives. The whole "what if" concept anticipates the Imaginary Stories that will be developed in the 1950's and 1960's in Superman comic books. It also anticipates the multi-path movies of contemporary cinema, such as Tom Tykwer's Lola Rennt / Run, Lola, Run (1998). It is also probably the only film version of The Postman Always Rings Twice not to have run into censorship trouble, because no adultery actually occurs. Walsh is not the only director to have created variants on Postman. Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957) seems like variations on the subject matter and style of Luchino Visconti's Postman adaptation, Ossessione (1942). And Tay Garnett's 1946 film version of The Postman Always Rings Twice makes significant changes to the original novel.
They Drive by Night is far from my favorite Walsh movie. It is relentlessly downbeat and grim. It also shows less visual pizzazz that some Walsh movies. I certainly do not want to inflict any film this downbeat on my readers, who are hereby warned! However, the storytelling is gripping throughout. It takes one into its world, and moves along like a dream within it.
Both halves of the film show Walsh's interest in technology. The first half is filled with long-distance telephone calls. These are among the many sound-oriented communication devices in Walsh, such as the radio and walkie-talkies in his later military pictures. Walsh even includes a split-screen shot, showing Raft on the phone on one side of the frame, his girlfriend on the phone in another, and a shot of a telephone pole in between them. The pole and its wires represents the sound communications technology linking the two characters. This pole anticipates the power lines of Walsh's Manpower (1941).
It seems a little odd, to see 1940 truck drivers without the Citizen Band radios that are such a feature of modern day movies and TV shows about truckers. The film shows how hard it is for the truckers to function, when their only communication mechanism is long distance phone calls from road side truck stop cafes. By the way, these cafes seem relentlessly cheap and grungy. They are some of the dumpiest lunch counters anywhere in old film.
The second half also has a high tech feature, but one not related to sound communication. These are automatic doors operated by electric eyes. They are a photogenic piece of technology, and Walsh gets considerable mileage out of them. At the time, they were probably fairly new. They used to fascinate me as a kid in grocery stores.
High Sierra (1941) tells the story of a robber.
The radio broadcaster on the rocks at the end is also prominent. He is treated as a person of glamour: radio was vastly important in 1941, both in the public eye, and also, one suspects, in Walsh's. The broadcaster is the best dressed man in the film. He is neither in the sports clothes of the idle rich, worn by the mean car driver and the well-to-do at the resort, nor is he in the poverty stricken clothes of the working people. Instead, he is a really good suit. He looks like the social ideal of the period, a man with a constructive, highly admired job.
Manpower (1941) is a film about power line repairmen. It is one of many sympathetic films Warner Brothers produced about working class Americans. Its subject matter recalls Edward L. Cahn's film Bad Guy (1937), which was also about men who do dangerous repair work on lines. The heights at which these characters work, and the danger they face, also recall Frank Borzage's outstanding film about bridge builders, Stranded (1935).
Within the larger group, there is an idealized male bonding between George Raft and Edward G. Robinson. One of the men even tells the other that he loves him, something that is very rare in film dialogue. Walsh develops a dramatic plot here, that underscores the two men's deep affection for each other.
The clothes in Manpower are by Milo Anderson, Warner Brothers' specialist in making male stars glamorous. Anderson had previously used shiny black slickers in the rain-drenched finale of William Clemens' Once a Doctor (1937), where they were similarly effective.
Walsh uses the power lines and the poles that support them to make many brilliant compositions on the screen. The sequence is a symphony of straight lines, running at many different angles on screen. It takes us to a purely geometric world, like other climactic sequences in Walsh.
Manpower is full of Walsh's trademark raucous comedy. Once again, this is done both by a group of men, and by a tough, resourceful woman who can hold her own with them (Marlene Dietrich).
Manpower has Alan Hale doing comedy relief. 1930's and 1940's scenarios often had one or two characters whose job was to add comedy to what was otherwise a fairly serious themed movie, such as a whodunit or adventure story like Manpower. These characters will clown relentlessly throughout the movie, while everyone else will behave more seriously. This convention now seems to have disappeared from film construction. These characters often seem oddly disconnected from everything around them. The comic relief character, like Alan Hale's line repairman here, tends to be gainfully employed and respectable. He is definitely not a low life or a bum, like many comic characters in modern films.
The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) is a strange fantasy-comedy, with Jack Benny as an angel sent to Earth.
Sound equipment. The Horn Blows at Midnight shows Walsh's interest in sound equipment. The plot centers around Benny's trumpet, and another scene shows Reginald Gardner conducting an orchestra, that is later revealed to be playing on record only. There are also scenes that show a radio broadcast and control booth.
Circles. The cylindrical rocket ship in which both the Rocket Man and Benny ride is another of Walsh's "cylindrical containers for men."
The orchestra in Heaven, consists of a series of huge, concentric circles in which the players sit. Its vast panorama is the ultimate expression in Walsh of people forming concentric circles, an idea that goes back to the dancing kids in Regeneration (1915).
There are other circular control mechanisms, including the circular indicator above the hotel elevator, and the globe used to symbolize Earth.
The Hotel Lobby. The hotel lobby here recalls the train depot in Going Hollywood. Both are large scale, public places, full of well dressed, affluent travelers in constant motion. One can feel the energy pulsing off the screen from these vigorous beehives of activity. They are positive places in Walsh. The motion of their denizens is vigorous throughout. Both also have substantial staircases, and huge, high ceilings.
Finale: Height and a Geometric World. The finale, with its roof, skyscraper wall, and elaborate coffeepot mechanism, is another of Walsh's elaborate, purely geometrical worlds. This one is quite complex. These worlds tend to be large, and allow people to wander around in them. Like the power lines in Manpower, they are at an elevated height, further adding to their otherworldly quality. The coffee items are almost totally geometrized. Walsh's films often have finales involving danger at heights. These are often trips to high mountainous areas outdoors. In The Naked and the Dead, one of the characters has a tragic fall off a mountain pass at the end; here Jack Benny suffers comic falls from a skyscraper at the finale.
The skyscraper scenes here recall those in Harold Lloyd's silent comedies. In general, there are some slapstick elements here that recall silent comedy in general. Walsh's sound films are full of comedy, but they rarely venture into full-blown slapstick, the way The Horn Blows at Midnight does. One wonders if there are some slapstick oriented silent movies in Walsh's huge catalogue of little-seen silent films.
The Horn Blows at Midnight is one of a series of religion-based fantasies that Hollywood made at this time. These tend to show Heaven, Hell, angels, devils, and ordinary humans making moral choices. These include Alexander Hall's Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943), Archie Mayo's Angel on My Shoulder (1946) and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). There is also the strange short film, Inflation (1942), made by soon to be blacklisted Communist director Cy Endfield. This features Edward Arnold as Satan, trying to cause inflation on Earth. Edward Arnold often played evil capitalists, so there is clearly some Marxist propaganda in Inflation! Like most Hollywood films of this type, The Horn Blows at Midnight is completely non-denominational. It follows a universalized religious framework that should be acceptable to members of many different religious faiths. At one point, however, Jack Benny's character uses the Roman Catholic religious term "mortal sin". One is perhaps seeing a sign of Walsh's own Catholicism here.
The dream framework of this film recalls The Wizard of Oz (1939). In both movies, ordinary people seen in the non-dream framework that opens and closes the movie, take on new and fantastic roles in the dream sequence that makes up the bulk of the film.
Another fantastic element: the Heaven sequences here have a title stating they take place in 1945-1946. Seeing a range of years like this is odd. It is unclear about why these two years are here. One possible explanation: the filmmakers thought the film might still be playing in 1946, so they put both years on the movie. This is similar to the unusual dates in Going Hollywood, where the year given in the film's dialogue is different from the film's release date. A less likely explanation: the film is supposed to be set in the near future, a few months beyond the film's release year of 1945. There are no signs of any futuristic elements in the movie, however.
Jack Benny plays an angel, who is sent to Earth and has to deal with a nest of crooks. Like the hero of The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, Benny plays a naïve, idealistic outsider, who moves into a strange environment filled with dangerous criminals. Both of these films are Walsh comedies, and the hero's ignorance of his new environment in both is played for laughs. Alexis Smith's heroine is one of a long line of Walsh heroines who are highly competent, strong, and who fit in well into a world of men. Both within the dream sequence and outside of it, Smith plays a sympathetic working woman here. She seems quite different in her characterization here than in Walsh's Gentleman Jim; this is typical of the protean nature of Walsh's actresses, who often seem to be just playing themselves, but who are wildly different from film to film.
The casting here is different from Walsh's usual macho men. Jack Benny, Reginald Gardiner, Allyn Joslyn and Guy Kibbee are all distinctly non-macho types. They do show Walsh's typical gusto and enthusiasm. The casting of Franklin Pangborn, Hollywood's most conspicuous effeminate male, fits in well with all of these players. Walsh does not mock Pangborn, or deal with homophobic stereotypes. All of Pangborn's comedy relates to his role in the plot, and he is treated with dignity throughout.
Dolores Moran plays a comic femme fatale. Her character has much in common with Virginia Mayo's dangerous lady to come in White Heat. Mayo's character is also full of comic exaggeration.
The group of young boys out for an outing at the New Jersey park, recalls the kids out for the boat excursion in Regeneration.
This movie is a synthesis of many different film genres. James Cagney's segments revive both the gangster film of the early 1930's, and the prison break movie. The police sections with Edmond O'Brien draw heavily on the semi-documentary tradition of the late 1940's. They have the federal government crime-fighting institution, the many scientific detection devices, the agent going undercover and infiltrating the gang, and finally, the big finale shot on location in a visually spectacular industrial area. This is the whole paradigm of the semi-documentary film! Finally, Virginia Mayo gets to play a full femme fatale in the film noir tradition. These all seem like virtually separate movies. It is not surprising that White Heat takes so much longer than many crime films of its era - almost two hours. It is virtually four or five films rolled into one.
There is a sense of humor to the use of these conventions, almost a tongue in cheek quality. For example, going undercover in Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) was a tragic experience. Here it is played for laughs, with Edmond O'Brien glibly reciting all his undercover roles, and making jokes about them. It has become almost routine. The film is gently poking fun at what was once a radical, daring experience for a protagonist. By the way, the agents in this film are actually called "T-Men" by the bad guys, the only other use of this term in film history, as far as I know.
Similarly, Mayo's femme fatale goes into her routines the way most people go to the grocery store to by a loaf of bread. The film gives a rich treatment to these scenes - they are fully developed and with good acting. But there is also a spoof quality to them. Especially her last attempt, at the refinery with the police, is played for laughs. The audience is thinking, doesn't this woman ever quit with her villainy? People clearly enjoy seeing anyone with such gusto and determination. Mayo really gives it all she's got. However, what was terrifying in Double Indemnity is now standard operating procedure. The film seems to suggest that femme fataling has become industrialized.
Steve Cochran's gangster also has elements of self-parody. He is playing a character who is really dumb. Many actors would be afraid to play a guy this gullible. Not Cochran. His gangster is all brute instinct, easily led around by whatever desires he has. Cochran throws himself in this role with the gusto of all of Walsh's best actors. The audience is probably snickering at this gangster part of the time. They are also probably wishing that they could give such direct vent to their feelings as he does. He is clearly having fun. There are certainly elements of wish fulfillment fantasy here, as there are with nearly all of Walsh's leading men. His clothes are at once spectacular and also ridiculous, with the black shirts that are only worn by gangsters in the movies.
The relationship between undercover O'Brien and gang leader Cagney resembles that in William Keighley's The Street With No Name (1948). However, while Cagney and O'Brien say the dialogue, they do not really express the vulnerable feelings of that work. Both men are far too emotionally resilient and dynamic. They are a couple of forces of nature, out to have an adventure and a really good time. This too slightly burlesques the feelings of the earlier film.
The finale recalls somewhat the factory climax of Street, but it is even closer to the water tower ending of Richard Fleischer's Follow Me Quietly (1948). Both films have good guys chasing bad guys up huge, fluid containing towers in outdoor industrial regions. These industrial finales are traditions in semi-docs. Please see the chart showing the history of the semi-documentary film, and its industrial finales, shot in areas full of machinery and architectural construction. The chase to high places also recalls the climb up the Williamsburg Bridge at the finale of Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948). The film is less close to the storm drain finale of Anthony Mann's He Walked by Night (1948), or to the train yard climax of John Sturges' Mystery Street (1950). White Heat looks as if it set out to have the biggest such climax ever filmed. Its refinery is much bigger in area than any previous finale location - it stretches on for blocks. And its explosive climax sets a new and probably untoppable standard for such scenes. Once again, there is an undercurrent of humor. Walsh is developing everything with his usual gusto.
Virginia Mayo is a better actress than her current lack of fame would suggest. She gave two of her best performances in Walsh films: White Heat and Captain Horatio Hornblower. Her character comes across as completely different in both films, so much so that she seems like two different people. She is definitely not playing some version of "herself" in these films. She does not employ a star persona which follows her from film to film, being elaborated into her current character. Instead, she and Walsh construct a new character for her in each film out of whole cloth. She acts these characters with tremendous conviction. Whenever one sees the films, one is convinced that one is seeing the real Virginia Mayo, that she is expressing her natural personality. It is only when one compares the two films that one is startled by how different her performances are.
Both Mayo characters have the high energy and spirit of the typical Walsh heroine. Like other Walsh heroines, both are gutsy people who thrive in a man's world. Her heroine in Captain Horatio Hornblower gives a moral center to the film, however, while her femme fatale in White Heat is utterly lacking in scruples.
This is one of the few Walsh films with a female villain, along with They Drive by Night. Most of Walsh's actresses play good women, not bad ones. Even here, this femme fatale is practicing her wiles not on good, innocent men, as such vamps usually do in film noir, but on a bunch of vicious gangsters. She might not be anywhere as bad morally as they are. She is a full femme fatale, with tremendous allure and determination, but she is not a figure dedicated to the destruction of innocent males. Her character has comic, tongue in cheek qualities.
There is an open quality to Walsh's imagery. This is achieved by a number of means. First, Walsh often has open areas in his outdoor scenes, stretching off to the horizon. A rectangular area on screen will contain a distant background, showing trees, houses, grass. Even when the shot concentrates on people and machines in the foreground, such a region will be available on screen.
Secondly, the objects on screen often continue off screen to the right and left of the frame. For example, we will see part of a long truck. The rest of the truck will extend off screen to the right. This gives the viewer a sense that there is plenty of space to the right and left of the screen. The viewer is not hemmed in or caught by the frame of the screen. Rather, what we are seeing continues a long way in both directions. The viewer could easily walk to the left of the right. They are not enclosed or trapped.
Walsh often explores a set or location with his camera before settling down to a fixed shot or frame in one region of it. This too helps create the feeling that there is a lot of open space on both sides of the frame. The viewer has seen all this before, and knows what is there on both sides of the shot. Walsh's frequent pans help with this.
Finally, Walsh rarely shoots so that his frame boundaries correspond with any natural boundaries in the set or location. There are just free, continuing objects and backgrounds at both the left and right of the shot. There are no boundaries here.
All of this gives the viewer a great sense of freedom and openness in Walsh. It is the exact opposite of the trapped feeling one sometimes gets in Fritz Lang.
Walsh often uses a pair of vertical lines on screen to frame his heroes. I call this "the well". This technique is not limited to Walsh. It is a fairly common practice of staging among Hollywood directors. But Walsh employs it with great consistency in White Heat.
For example, Cagney might be standing between a window and the fireplace. The frame of the window forms on strong vertical line, the fireplace mantel another. There will simply be blank wall behind Cagney, with nothing but empty space behind him. Other parts of the shot will be quite full of detail. But the region that contains Cagney will be a fairly empty region bounded by strong verticals.
Walsh employs some variations on this. Instead of a well, sometimes an actor is tied to a single strong vertical line. The actor can be standing immediately along the line, or somewhat to one side of it, a little bit to the left or right.
In both cases. the actor on screen is linked to the vertical lines in the composition. The background lines and the actor reinforce each other. They make powerful, pleasant lines in the composition.
During the silent days, masking was popular. Vertical masks were often employed. A mask would blot out part of the screen. One popular mask shape was two vertical lines, with a well like band between them. Nothing would be visible to the left or right.
Walsh's employment of wells has formal similarities to the silent era use of masks. In both cases, an actor's vertical body is linked to two vertical boundary lines on either side.
Walsh cannot employ masks in 1949. They were long since absolutely taboo, and were never employed in the sound era in Hollywood films, as far as I know. (They do show up in Max Ophuls' French film, Lola Montès (1955).) They are still never found in contemporary movies, and I wonder why. But Walsh's use of wells often has a similar effect.
Walsh comes very close to masking in White Heat, in the scene where Edmond O'Brien is seen underneath the truck between two circular truck components. These are big, framing areas on screen. Only a small open area in between them allows us to see open space. We see O'Brien's body in this area. The truck parts form a mask. This sort of mask was legitimate: it is formed from real objects, not black regions employed by the photographer.
The truck "mask" consists of a series of large, circular arcs. Walsh loves circles, and they frequently appear in his compositions. These include the interior of the truck, with its semi-circular top: this is one of the great compositional scenes in the movie. The many exterior shots of the truck, with its circular tank, its rounded front end, and many circular tires. The spherical oil tanks at the finale. Small objects, such as the round side mirror of the truck. The batteries on the radio set reworked by O'Brien. The rotating circular antenna jutting up from the car in the trace scenes - and the circular water towers in the background behind it. These towers look a lot like the ones at the end of Follow Me Quietly (1948): another example of its influence.
Circles frequently pop up in other Walsh films. He seems to just find them, and in the unlikeliest places. They are virtually a signature of his visual style.
In addition to circles, Walsh also loves rounded objects. These especially include car windows, tops of cars, and hoods. These objects are not purely circular, but they have strong rounded components. Walsh often puts such rounded regions at the top of his compositions. They form frames that surround the characters. For example, he likes to shoot people through car windows. The rounded top of the window will be at the top of the screen. It will form an arch through which we see the characters. It makes a very graceful climax to the composition. It will be the most visible and emphasized part of the composition. It adds a note of visual gracefulness and beauty to the proceedings. Walsh always wants everything to look beautiful. There is a sense of elegance and joy, an attempt to give pleasure to the audience.
Walsh employs his own Hollywood version of Constructivism in his shots. Everywhere, there are numerous geometric objects in Walsh's images. These include rectangular regions, circles and rounded objects. Walsh will also include cones and pyramids. For example, at the gas station, we see a conical extension going off the rear portion of the truck cab. It is quite prominent in the composition. So is the truck's circular side mirror. In the background, a building with a pyramidal roof is prominently featured. Such geometric objects are the key building blocks of Walsh's image.
Other geometric objects: the truncated cone used to track radio broadcasts in cars. This is a neat cone, with another circle below it, and an arched arrow going up the side of the cone. It is one of Walsh's most complex geometric features.
Walsh's geometric objects are often jutting out into empty space. At the gas station, both the mirror and the cone simply extend out into otherwise empty regions of the screen. This jutting has a number of purposes. It makes the objects easy to see. It emphasizes the objects. They are the only objects sticking out into vast regions of empty space. It is also a compositional technique. Walsh builds his compositions by including objects jutting into regions of empty space.
At the gas station, the truck objects jut horizontally. But more often, Walsh has his objects jut vertically. They will all be attached to the bottom of the screen, and they will jut vertically into open space at the top of the image. The radio set is a good example of this. It consists of a series of pure geometric shapes: cylinders, rectangular blocks. They jut up towards the top of the image, in open space. They are arranged to make an open, pleasing, and beautiful geometric pattern. The openness of the space into which the object juts, is related in feel to the other kinds of openness in Walsh's images. There is always a sense of freedom in Walsh's images. Even his jutting geometric objects have plenty of room.
Walsh's objects can also jut downwards. For example, the truncated cone of the direction finder extends straight downward from the roof of the car. Once again, it juts into empty space in the car's interior.
Walsh's compositions frequently have horizontal lines in them. These are formed by naturally occurring lines in the background of the image. These lines can consist of the lower edge of car windows, roof edges or telegraph lines. Inside houses, they often are formed by window sills, or by lines in the architecture. Walsh often finds two such lines, and forms a whole band across the screen. These horizontal bands make a pleasing contrast and complement to the vertical lines of his wells and actors. Often, Walsh aligns key parts of the actors' bodies with such lines. An actor's head might exactly align with a horizontal line on the screen. Or an actor's chest will fall naturally within a band.
Another common technique: a two part composition. One region of the screen will have a high rising component, such as the truck cab. Other parts of the screen will all be bounded above by a lower, horizontal line, such as the truck bed. This gives a graceful sense of variety to the image.
Walsh frequently pans in White Heat. These pans are very fast. They tend to come at the beginning and end of scenes, and often show the characters in motion. Walsh's pans are graceful. But they do not seem to have the elaborate qualities of "compositions in motion" that one sometimes finds in other directors. Walsh's pans are fast, fast, fast. They tend to be designed to add a sense of motion and dynamism to a scene. They also are good at explaining the layout of a room or outdoor location to the viewer. The viewer comes to know what the whole scene looks like. Then, when Walsh cuts to a static, long held shot, the shot has the quality of "openness" we have discussed. The viewer knows all about what lies to the left and the right of the screen. The previous pan has made everything clear.
Colorado Territory (1949) shows Walsh's fondness for circles. The ghost town is full of arched doorways, with circular tops: a Walsh tradition, echoing Sadie Thompson (1928). The hearth in the ghost town also has a circular, arched upper edge. Joel McCrea's cowboy hat has a cylindrical top, and two semicircular wings on the sides, visible when Walsh shoots McCrea from below. No matter what the camera angle, McCrea is framed by circular regions on his hat. There are circular pictures framed on the walls of houses. Walsh includes still lifes of objects on tables; these tend to include circular dishes and bottles. There are also the cylindrical metal cups the outlaws use while hiding in the ghost town.
The train robbery here echoes the one that opens White Heat. It takes place in an abstract world, full of complex, moving machinery: a Walsh tradition. The geometric forms of the trains and tracks embody Walsh's love for such geometric, mechanical worlds. McCrea winds up on top of the train: part of Walsh's fondness for having his performers climb up onto machinery and buildings.
The train robbery also shows inventiveness with camera movement. There are scenes in which men ride up to the train on horseback, and then jump aboard. Walsh's camera moves with them here. A dynamic sense of movement is created.
The Enforcer (1951) is credited to director Bretaigne Windust, but Walsh reportedly directed some of it. I did not find the film especially Walsh like. Only the finale, which uses sound equipment to broadcast police warnings on the downtown streets of a typical city, seems especially personal. This fits in with Walsh's interest in high tech sound devices. The opening, involving dangerous heights on exteriors of buildings, also relates a little to Walsh traditions.
Mainly, The Enforcer is sick, sick, sick. The hit men shown in the film are severely psychologically disturbed. And looking at the gut wrenching fear they inspire in their victims is also a distressing experience. This repulsive film is thoroughly unpleasant to watch, and a real disappointment.
Gun Fury (1953) is a little Western film that was originally shown in 3-D. I have only seen the flat, non 3-D version of the film. Occasionally, Walsh has characters throw objects directly at the camera, and the viewer, in a manner that one associates with the later 3-D spaghetti Western Comin at Ya! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1981), a film that has excellent 3-D technology, but which otherwise is awfully cornball. The TV ad campaign for Comin at Ya! was a comic gem, showing people exiting into the theater lobby full of flaming arrows stuck into them, echoing the scene where the film seems to shoot these at the audience. Another ad showed an avalanche of rocks pouring out of the theater into the lobby. One hopes these TV ads survive somewhere.
The title Gun Fury seems to have little connection with the actual events of the film. This Western is neither more nor less gun battle oriented than other 1950's Westerns. One suspects that someone just came up with what they hoped was a commercial title for the Western, and slapped it on the movie.
Gun Fury is full of relatively long shots, that show the action as a whole. The film emphasizes outdoor scenes, set against spectacular Arizona scenery, and this scenery is in full focus in the background of much of the film. In the foreground, Walsh tends to show the characters full figure, or nearly so, along with their horses, stagecoach, Western camps, towns and buildings. The effect is often of "figures in a landscape", a Walsh tradition. Walsh's camera is relatively stable. He tends to find a beautiful, clear, vivid composition for his characters, then stick with it as they play out their action. When the story moves onto a new action, Walsh moves on to a new shot, and begins the cycle again. The film has a lyrical quality, in part due to the beautiful landscapes which are everywhere. Walsh's compositions always seem to be clean and well organized. They show all the action with great clarity. They also tend to have a poetic feel.
Walsh occasionally pans within a shot. These pans are often through a fairly small angle, say 30 degrees. They tend to reveal a new area for the action, immediately to the left or right of the locale of the first half of the shot. The camera movement seems to be designed to develop the complexity of the story, adding a new locale to the plot. It does not seem to be present for its kinetic effect, although this is a side benefit.
Several scenes feature huge clouds of dust stirred up by horses. These have the same poetic effect as mists in non-Western films. They often fill up and take over the screen.
Rock Hudson is a mild mannered, good guy hero, who comes up against a band of really vicious bad guys. This is a non-comic treatment of the same theme Walsh would explore in his Western comedy, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958). The heroes of both films are extremely courageous and gutsy, but they are clearly normal people from a non-action oriented world. Hudson's character is better at making friends, than shooting people or committing violence. This alliance building skill will help him, especially after he makes friends with a Native American who has also been wronged by the bad guys. This Indian character is completely non-stereotyped, and is part of the Civil Rights era attempt by filmmakers to make a sympathetic treatment of Native Americans. By contrast, the Mexican woman here who joins the fight against the bad guys is a cliché Mexican spitfire type. She is a sympathetic character, and definitely not part of the villains, but she is a pretty broad cliché none the less. Still, the fact the Mexican character is on the right side of the struggle here is clearly a sign of good intentions from the director.
Hudson repeatedly asks sheriffs and townspeople to help him fight the gang of villains; they all repeatedly refuse him. These scenes echo High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), which was one of the most celebrated Westerns of its day. Later, at the finale Hudson will have a change of heart speech about how important it is for him to get involved, even after he has rescued his girl friend, and take responsibility for capturing crooks and improving society. None of this ever seems like a very important part of the film; it is all done quietly, and without much emphasis. It is all just treated as another plot incident in the movie, another bit of action for the story. At this level, it works fine, but it hardly converts Gun Fury into a major message movie. Walsh had a tendency to incorporate ideas and conventions from other films into his own work, under playing them and toning them down in the process.
The bad guys here are a gang of robbers. This is a traditional Walsh choice of villains. As is typical of Walsh, the members of the gang often scheme against each other, and frequently are at loggerheads.
This film is less purely about its hero, than are many Westerns. Walsh films often seem to be about a diverse group of characters, each of which gets plenty of screen time. Nor does a group form a collective hero, as it does in many Howard Hawks films.
The Naked and the Dead (1958) is a war movie, one of several made by Walsh throughout his career. Walsh's films show a consistent anti-war message. As far back as What Price Glory? (1926), Walsh had adapted the anti-war play by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson. The Naked and the Dead is one of the fiercest anti-war works in Walsh's canon. It offers a thorough look inside the mechanism of war, and what it does to the ordinary soldiers trapped in its juggernaut.
The Naked and the Dead does not stress horrors, or the misery of combat. Instead, it looks at the way generals deliberately exploit the death of their men to gain military "objectives". The heartless general here has each fight calculated down to how many men it should kill, and keeps score as if he were a salesman making a target. It is hard to imagine anyone watching this film, and not get a new and sinister insight into the way war is conducted. The experience is designed to make the viewer think, and give them ideas about war that they have never had before.
The general (played by Raymond Massey) is one of the upper crust villains that recur throughout Walsh's work. He bears a strong physical and emotional resemblance to the DA in Regeneration, for instance. Both men are clearly members of the upper classes, and both men regard people from lower classes as human garbage, insects beneath contempt. Here this attitude enables the general to exploit the deaths of soldiers to advance his war objectives - and his own career. Both performers move with a similar carriage and posture; both have similar sour, icy looks on their faces.
The general is not the only authority figure being targeted. The sinister sergeant (played by Aldo Ray) also comes in for plenty of criticism. His conduct is despicable throughout.
In the scripts of many Walsh movies, each character has his or her own world view. This view contains their values, what they believe to be true about reality, their views on society, their attitudes about relating to other people, how they see their profession, their strategies for dealing with life and work, and often times, their religious values and beliefs. Much of the dialogue of the characters is designed to set forth this world view, and express it clearly and vividly to the audience. The characters often carry on debates with each other, in which dueling world views clash, to the audience illumination of both characters' mind sets.
Much of the action of the characters is directly caused by, and expressive of, that character's mind set and world view. What the character does, heroic or evil, silly or profound, directly stems from the world view. In this way, the plot makes the views of the character even clearer. Every twist of the plot, every new action a character takes, allows the audience to see deeper in the character's mind and spirit.
Conversely, the plot forms a commentary on the correctness of the character's views. What happens when the characters act on their beliefs shows us the value, or lack thereof, of the character's attitudes. If the results are admirable, Walsh and the script are endorsing the character's views, at least in part. If the results are deplorable or evil, a condemnation of the views is taking place. The plot also shows us how closely the world view is to actual reality. Are this person's beliefs in accord with the real world? Or are they full of delusions and half truths? The views are constantly being compared to the actual structure and events of the real world.
The plot is many Walsh films is thus always operating on two levels, which constantly interact in complex ways. On one level, the plot is what happens in the story: the real world of cause and effect. On another level, the plot is both constantly being driven by the characters' mind sets, and offering a commentary and reality check on these mind sets. Both of the levels are important to Walsh and the writers; both are richly and very fully developed.
It is hard to know how much of this to attribute to Walsh, and how much to attribute to the writers of the films. But there is a clear, long range pattern here in Walsh's films: for example, as far back as Regeneration (1915), each of the main characters has a strong world view that impinges on the plot. The content of the world views change, however, with different films and different writers. In The Roaring Twenties (1939), we learn a lot about the characters' attitudes to gang life, crime, and also relating to other people, including romance. In The Naked and the Dead, by contrast, the characters' world views involve serious thoughts about war, social structure, morality and religion, as well as how their war-time jobs should be carried out, and their relationships to other people. The structural approach in both films is similar, with the characters' mind sets and the plots constantly interacting with each other, but the content and subject matter of the world views is quite different.
Much of the extraordinary vividness of Walsh's characters comes from this structural approach. The film is always doing everything it can to illuminate their inner worlds. The inner ideas and feelings of the characters are constantly exploding into the action. Walsh's characters tend to be very dynamic people, constantly striving to turn their inner mind set into action.
The structure of Walsh's films is designed to make us think about the characters and their world views. It is opposed to passive viewing. Instead, it encourages the viewer to be constantly thinking about the characters and their ideas, and whether or not they are moral, intelligent and realistic.
One can see a few circles in this film: the cylindrical components of the still, a mirror-like circular object hanging from the pole of the general's tent, the cylindrical top of the general's refrigerator, the circular hole the men dig to cover up their refuse while on platoon.
But mainly this film deals with landscape, the other great half of Walsh's visual style. The story of the film takes place in a tropical Pacific island; the film was actually shot in Panama, and features rich and spectacular landscapes, most of which are unfamiliar to North American viewers. As in other Walsh films, a mountain plays a key role in the climax of the story. Rocky regions show up here, just as in other Walsh works. The trip to the mountain and back takes up most of the second half of the film.
The lower region of the screen is often filled with the element through which the characters are moving, such as the tall grasses. Walsh often gives this element as much screen space as possible, to emphasize it, and to convey the feeling of moving through it. For example, in the scenes with the pool below the waterfall, Walsh shoots so that the water in the pool (at the bottom of the frame) gets a large proportion of screen space. The water fills up at least the lower half of the image. This underscores the size of the pool, and the fact that the men are moving through the water.
The image is sometimes organized into horizontal zones. At the pool, a lower zone shows the pool, an upper zone the many waterfalls leading into the pool. Such horizontal band organization is perhaps an artifact of reality itself: shooting relatively "face on" to an outdoor region might tend to produce an image filled with horizontal regions, running from the left to the right of the screen. Still, it helps give a systematic, easy to understand patterning to the image.
Walsh's landscape shots frequently contain pans. On the way to the mountain, the pans tend to move from right to left, following similar right-to-left movements of the men. These establish a continuous sense of direction within the screen space, through many different landscapes.
The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958) is a little spoof of Westerns, with Kenneth More playing a very proper Briton who inadvertently becomes the sheriff of a feuding Western town. Akira Kurosawa would soon include such a two ranch town conducting an all out war against each other in his Samurai spoof, Yojimbo (1961).
This film is full of personal Walsh traditions. The rowdy saloon and dance hall has appeared many times in Walsh's work, going all the back to Regeneration (1915). This saloon, with all its comic fighting and comically exaggerated characters, is part of a forty year tradition in Walsh. In many ways, the two-bit town here is the Western equivalent of the Bowery setting that has recurred so many times in Walsh's work. The tacky hotel run by the heroine (Jayne Mansfield) recalls the equally raffish South Seas hotel in Sadie Thompson (1928). The heroine is a sexy woman who relates well in a man's world, also a Walsh tradition. Like many of Walsh's heroines, she is a good natured pal to men, but also a woman of great respectability, one who knows how to draw the line against offensive behavior. The hero's background as an inventor is also a Walsh tradition, echoing the love of complex machinery in his films. The hero's elaborate horseless carriage even blows up at the start of the film, echoing in a comic way the explosive finale of White Heat.
The exceptional decency and good nature of Walsh's hero and heroine is in Walsh's best tradition. The heroine is a kindly person who tries to help others, especially those weaker than herself. This is how Walsh views ideal human beings. The heroine is idolized by the town folks, just like the hero of Regeneration. Walsh's heroes get this sort of public acclaim. Similarly, Kenneth More decides to keep his job as Sheriff when he realizes how much the town's people like and respect him for it.
In some ways, this film is a role reversal of Regeneration. The heroine here has the man's role from the earlier film, that of a kind hearted, much admired leader of the lower classes, a protector of the weak. Like the hero of Regeneration, she is an expert at dealing with the denizens of this lower class milieu. Kenneth More resembles the heroine of Regeneration, being an upper middle class, very refined visitor to this world.
Walsh was good with his supporting actors, as well as his leads. William Campbell here has fun with his bit part as Keeno, the sinister hired gun of one of the warring ranches. He is clearly enjoying being dressed up in his all-black desperado's outfit, the typical symbol of a Western villain. While his character regards himself as evil incarnate, he is actually just a two-bit guy in a small town, trying to be a bigger villain than he is. There is something a bit pathetic about this guy and his dreams of villainy. One suspects that he is just an ordinary Joe, and not such a really bad guy at all. This side of his character is comic, and also has its quality of pathos. Andrew Sarris has noted such pathos in many of Walsh's men. Keeno recalls Steve Cochran's would-be gangster in White Heat. Both are young guys who are attempting to be big time villains, both swagger around in sharp clothes that proclaim their villain's role, and both are comically in over their head. Neither one can live up to his advertising. Both wind up similarly run over by the events of the movie around them. Both of these mock-serious turns are irresistible, with hidden humor. In a subtle way, Walsh feels sorry for these guys. They represent all the difficulties young people have in establishing themselves in the world. The audience can clearly identify with them and their problems: just about everybody has experienced similar difficulties growing up and joining society themselves. It is the quintessential adolescent dilemma. Both guys resemble in their comic way the hero of Walsh's Regeneration, who is also a young man attempting to maintain a position as leader of a gang.
Esther and the King (1960) is a cast-of-thousands epic spectacle set in the Ancient World, of the kind popular in its era. The film is visually gorgeous, with rich color design in its elaborate costumes and sets. Such an immersion in a world of spectacle was typical of such 1960-era films, including Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) and Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). All of these films have huge sets that represent royal palaces. The sets are brilliantly colored, and remote from anything in modern life. They give a dream like feeling to the works, a sense of total escapism from contemporary reality, at least in visual appearance.
Esther and the King has thematic links with previous Walsh works. Like The Yellow Ticket and The Naked and the Dead, it deals with and condemns anti-Semitism. Like the Biblical story of Esther on which it is based, it is impossible to see today without thinking about the Holocaust. One strongly suspects that Walsh consciously intended such parallels. The film is Walsh's commentary on the tragedy of the Holocaust, and a very firm stand towards ending bigotry against Jews.
Esther and the King was made the year after Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959), the smash epic, and probably owes its financing to that film's success. Both films deal with oppressed Jews in an ancient empire: Rome in Ben-Hur, Persia in Esther and the King. Walsh's film has a deeper treatment of anti-Semitism than Wyler's however, and more to say about the importance of fighting intolerance.
Once again, each character in this film has a world view, which drives their actions. Esther is the biggest force for positive social change. Mordecai is dignity itself, but he is more a defender of core social principles than an agent of the new.
The eunuch, Hegai, is treated most sympathetically by Walsh. This recalls Walsh's earlier respectful treatment of Franklin Pangborn in The Horn Blows at Midnight. Walsh seems very comfortable with sexually ambiguous men. One might also note that in some ways Hegai is a director-figure. He is in charge of entertainments at the court, including music and dance shows. And he is seen coaching and training the women in the harem just like a 30's director of Broadway musicals - he resembles Ned Sparks' director in Going Hollywood! This whole characterization in unique.
A scene in which the King wrestles happily with his soldiers in the palace barracks is pure Walsh. Walsh's men crave camaraderie. As the dialogue points out, "the King has the world at his feet, but he finds happiness only with his men." This recalls Walsh himself, and his screen incarnation as a Sergeant in Sadie Thompson. The King also has much male bonding with his friend Simon.
The King here is something of a roughneck, who has risen to the top of the Ancient world. He is more a man of action that a courtier, and is played by the macho Richard Egan. He recalls all the other roughneck males in Walsh. He is easily led around, either for good, by Esther, or evil, by Haman - a weakness in his character, perhaps. But also an engine that drives the story. Esther is somewhat like the refined social worker of Regeneration, being dignified and not at all rowdy, as well as being an outsider at the world of the court. However, it is Esther who tries to improve this world, and protect the weak within it - the role of the male hero in Regeneration. And Esther is also a poor woman, a simple villager, and hardly a representative of the upper classes, also unlike the heroine of Regeneration. In some ways, she takes on in one person both the man and female roles in previous Walsh films. Although she is seemingly the most frail person in this world of powerful people, she turns out to be the most creative and most successful in improving it.
One anachronism: Ancient Persia is depicted as full of fields of what is known as maize by scientists, and as corn (or corn-on-the-cob) in the United States. This plant, whose scientific name is Zea mays, is native to Mexico. It was unknown in the Old World before Columbus. It is impossible to have it growing in Ancient Persia. It is a very beautiful plant, and grown everywhere today in the Northeastern USA, where Walsh is from. According to the Mayan holy book, the Popul Vuh, humans were made out of maize by the gods.