Raoul Walsh: Adventures in Filmaking
Programmed by: Jack Miller
In Raoul Walsh’s 1955 CinemaScope Western The Tall Men, Jane Russell describes her male counterparts in the film as “fighting and loving everything in sight,” a line which might just as well be used to describe the ethos of most of Walsh’s heroes, for whom, as the critic Tag Gallagher once put it, “living is an adventure.” Walsh himself, the great one-eyed pioneer of American cinema, seemed to live his own life in much the same way: a restless innovator who created 140 films in a career that extended from 1913 to 1964. Here was a man for whom making pictures seemed to be as natural and essential as breathing or riding a horse, and the mountain of great cinema that he left behind embodies the highest and most noble virtues of classical filmmaking. In honor of his cinema’s miraculous vitality and deep respect for human life; its love of the world and the people who populate it; its primal energy and robust physicality; and its inventive handling of the myriad ways in which a human figure can move through a landscape, this is a small but loving tribute to a master director — an introduction of sorts to a crucial body of work.
The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
Raoul Walsh · 149m · DCP
Few films retain the power to conjure a genuine sense of awe and a feeling of pleasurable excitement like this monumental, Orientalist silent fantasia — a Douglas Fairbanks vehicle which became Walsh’s first big-budget A-picture. Fairbanks’s impressive athleticism proves a great match for the robust physicality of Walsh’s directorial style, and the results of their collaboration still look stunning 100 years on.
Monday, January 6th 7:00 PM
CANCELED : The Big Trail (1930)
Raoul Walsh · 125m · 35mm
A bold early experiment in widescreen 70mm filmmaking, this epic Western resembles no other American film of the period in its astonishing spatial unity and depth of perspectives. Shot on location in Wyoming, with a large cast headed by a young John Wayne, this visionary work remains one of American cinema’s great paeans to the natural world and one of the few Walsh films to focus on a collective rather than an individual.
Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
Due to the fires in LA this screening will be rescheduled to a later date.
Pursued (1947)
Raoul Walsh · 101m · DCP
This Freudian post-war Western has often been regarded as a noirish genre hybrid, though it arguably comes closer to Greek tragedy in its anguished intensity and classical fury. Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, and Judith Anderson all give career-best performances as feuding family members trying to decipher their dreams and desires within a harsh and violent landscape. One of Walsh’s gravest films, there’s nothing else in his filmography quite like it.
Monday, January 27th 7:00 PM
Desperate Journey (1942)
Raoul Walsh · 107m · 35mm
This white-hot wartime propaganda piece is, like the later Objective, Burma! and Distant Drums, one of Walsh’s great “map movies,” films in which two diametrically opposed groups of men engage in frenzied chase across a stretch of geographically delineated coordinates. Relentlessly paced, full of flaming action and constant motion, the film showcases Walsh’s masterful handling of the movement of figures through particular spatial landscapes.
Preserved by the Library of Congress.
Monday, February 3 7:00 PM · Sunday, February 9th 4:00 PM
Me and My Gal (1932)
Raoul Walsh · 79m · DCP
This joyous pre-Code comedy about a romance between a swaggering big city cop (Spencer Tracy) and a tough-talking waterfront waitress (Joan Bennett) retains a vibrant sense of life like few other films of the period. The real “star” of the film is the wonderful details on the margins of its universe: drunks, cops and robbers, charming mobsters, the speed of life, and Walsh’s recreation of Depression-era New York, captured in deep-focus evocations of space.
Monday, February 10th 7:00 PM
The Man I Love (1946)
Raoul Walsh · 96m · 16mm
Walsh may not be the first director one would think of for a great melodrama, but he achieved just that with this moving work about the romantic entanglements of a tough torch singer, exquisitely played by the immortal Ida Lupino. This neglected heartbreaker, which showcases Walsh’s strength as a director of musical performances, was aptly described by critic Michel Marmin as “One of the most beautiful monuments of tenderness and compassion in existence.”
Monday, February 17th 7:00 PM
The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956)
Raoul Walsh · 92m · DCP
Few directors of the ‘50s mastered the widescreen CinemaScope image as Raoul Walsh. His second collaboration with Jane Russell follows a former prostitute who relocates to Hawaii to become a nightclub entertainer and real estate mogul who profits off Pearl Harbor. The Revolt of Mamie Stover is one of the richest and most complex political texts in Walsh’s cinema, and a colorful counterpart to themes developed in the earlier Sadie Thompson.
Monday, February 24th 7:00 PM
Sadie Thompson (1928)
Raoul Walsh · 97m · 35mm
This silent melodrama presents an opportunity to see the legendary Gloria Swanson in her ‘20s heyday, over two decades before she played the waning film star of Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The charming promiscuity of Swanson’s titular Sadie represents one of the great expressions of Walsh’s anti-Puritan theme, his cinema\’s perennial celebration of physicality and its deep respect for human life.
