Raoul Walsh Movies

26 thoughts on “Raoul Walsh Movies”

1. HI STEVE

   Thanks for the feedback and of course quotes from my Greg are always welcome.

   I look forward to Henry Hathaway and it would be great if WH could complement your forthcoming video with a set of stats. Maybe I’m taking a chance by saying that – he always resists being ‘dictated to’ by me and often ignores some first-class advice of mine.

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2. Just added Steve’s Raoul Walsh Movie Ranking You Tube Video To This Page. Our thoughts found on his channel.

   Hey Steve. Good video…and good subject. Somehow he is rarely mentioned with the great directors…but his resume says he should be. Overall I have seen 13 of his movies…no change since our Walsh page came out. Favorites would include #1 White Heat….my favorite James Cagney movie and performance. #6 They Died With Their Boots On….good movie…one of Flynn’s better performances. #24 Battle Cry…seems a little low in the rankings and #4 Gentleman Jim…fun movie…Hale and Flynn had great chemistry together. Voted up and shared

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   1. Hi Bruce, nearly forgot you did a Raoul Walsh page at UMR. Your tally 13, mine 15 and Flora beats us both with 22. Hey come on Battle Cry is even lower on your UMR chart, near the bottom (in 48th place) and my score was higher! 🙂

      Thanks again for the comment, vote and share, always appreciated.

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3. It was Raoul who actually gave Bogie his first ever starring role in a major production: High Sierra in 1941 which came out before Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Bogie got the role when George Raft backed out of the project, claiming the character concerned gangster Roy Earle was too unsympathetic for a major star to play. The previous year Raoul had directed both Raft [in the lead] and Humph [in support] in They Drive by Night.

   High Sierra was remade with Raoul directing as a western in 1949 called Colorado Territory with Joel McCrea in the Bogie role. For me it didn’t work as well as a western though as I have said in a post below it is still one of my fave Walsh movies. It was remade yet again in 1955 in its old gangster format with Jack Palance [still dining out on his Shane success] in the Bogie role and the young Lee Marvin in a supporting role and was called I Died a Thousand Times. This time Stuart Heisler was the director.

   The leading ladies in each of the 3 movies were respectively Ida Lupino, Virginia Mayo, and Shelley Winters. Ida a bigger star at the time than Bogie was billed above him even though his role as Roy Earle was the lead, but Ginny and Shelley had to be content with 2nd billing to McCrea and Palance.

   For his long 52 year career Raoul is listed in 5 separate polls of all time greatest directors in positions 5.17, 18, 20 ,26. That averages out at position 17.2 but maybe Bruce will allow me to round it down to an average 17th ranking. At the time of his death in 1980 Raoul had a net worth equivalent to $8 million today.

   My own favorite Walsh films are World in His Arms, White Heat, Roaring 20s, High Sierra and the Laddie double O’Rourke of the Royal Mounted and Salty O’Rourke, with Alan in the title role of both films. Part two tomorrow

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   1. Hey Bob….excellent thoughts on Steve’s latest and the magical career of Raoul Walsh. I am about to head over to Steve’s video channel right now. Good stuff as always.

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      1. BRUCE: Thanks for the feedback on Part One.

         STEVE. I will digress slightly by saying that feel that the 3 versions of Raoul’s High Sierra prove my point that, within reason***, in Old Hollywood the status of the stars and not the precise sizes of the roles largely determined billing- see the 3rd paragraph of my Part One post. Ginny was years later compensated to some extent though by Bruce giving her credit for*** a walk-on part in Danny Kaye’s Up in Arms. Viewers protested about that when Ginny’s Cogerson page came out but like Pharaoh in The Bible WH “hardened his heart” [Exodus 8:32] and would not be moved.

         If you have seen any of the friendly debate between WH and me about Foster v Winslet[it doesn’t have the same ring to it as Crawford V Davis, does it? despite Bruce’s efforts to hype up a number of albeit very talented starlets into STARS] you will observe that in trying to convince Teach that the fact that the roles were ensemble in Carnage didn’t detract from Jodie getting top billed in that movie, once again I was on the losing side.

         So what?-I’m used to being the underdog, at being permanently consigned to the ‘back of the class’ on Teach’s site. Anyway I’m sure you’ll back The Work Horse you and Kate both being Limeys. Indeed I think it was you who told me that Kate had it in her contracts that she had to be allowed to take off her clothes in all her films.

         Judging by her box office overall returns [post Titanic] though, stripping doesn’t seem to have yielded the commercial dividends that it has done for your Jace [though I do concede that I personally find her physically attractive]. However Kate is usually well- spoken and possibly if Willis would lend her his expansive swear dictionary that would boost her box office in future. Help is maybe on the way from other directions too: she is in James Cameron’s Avatar 2 scheduled for 2021 release, with Vin Diesel and Sigourney Weaver in the cast. I can’t wait to argue with Teach that Sigourney is a bigger star than Kate – I’m a bit of a masochist your know!

         However unlike WH and his mentor Hirsch I always try to “Give onto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s” so I must add that Kate does a lot of highly valuable charity work [see my post today on her own Cogerson page] and to me that is much more important in the bigger scheme of things than Jodie Foster’s billing – or even Spencer Tracy’s! Anyway the ‘business end’ of my comments on your Raoul video is in Part 3.

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         1. Your video on this director is one of the very best that I have seen from you and well worth 99%. Fly in the ointment: whilst WH gives Laddie’s Salty O’Rourke a reasonable 65% and ranks it 33rd for Review, you don’t cover it at all according to my notes. I see it as vintage heyday Ladd. The following selections of mine are just the tip of a very great iceberg. As usual FL = foreign language and LC = lobby card.

            Best POSTERS in my estimation 1/Myrna and the King 2/ Montana 3/two for Distant Drums – so popular over here on release that a comic cut magazine did its own serialization of the movie 4/two for Gun Fury – I saw that one in 1953 on a holiday in the Channel Islands 5/O’Rourke of the Royal Mounted – ah those Ladd queues back in the early 1950s 6/two for Band of Angels 7/two for The Bowery 8/FL for Battle Cry – considered very raunchy back in its day 9/FL for Dark Command – Wayne wrongly billed first on poster, but who’s complaining! 10/two for Loves of Carmen.

            11/FL Desperate Journey 12/1st one for Sadie Thompson 13/1st for What Price Glory 14/two for The World in His Arms 15/Strawberry Blonde [“Biff Grimes would waltz with the Strawberry Blonde and the band played on.”] 16/Regeneration 17/FL for Objective Burma 18/FL for Capt Horatio 19/FL for Died with Boots On 20/1st one for Gentleman Joel 21/The Thief of Bagdad – stunning 22/ two for High Sierra.

            My pick of the STILLS 1/fine LC of Archie Leach’s “owner” 2/LC for Lawless Breed – sadly Julia Adams died in Feb this year aged 92. I vividly recall queueing to see her for the first time back in 1952 in my Jimmy’s Bend of the River. That cinema too is gone now. 3/raunchy one for Band of Angels 4/Raft and Dietrich – he and Robinson got into a real fist fight when making that one – big Russell Crowe type scandal at the time 5/Tracy and Bennett 6/Colorado Territory 7/Gable and Russell, the latter another of Hirsch’s talented victims

            8/The “Dirty Rat” 9/Gregg & Ginny 10/Flynn & Mr President 11/LC for Pursued – stunning 12/World in His Arms 13/Bogie & Raft 14/Roy “Mad Dog” Earle15/Thief of Bagdad 16/Roaring 20s – possibly my own fave gangster movie alongside Godpop 17/White Heat.

            SPECIAL MENTIOINS (1) the closing stunning FL poster for White Heat (2) the two stills of a very boyish Duke in The Big Trail – collector’s items (3) great poster for A Distant Trumpet. I liked that one when WH first reproduced it on his Walsh page. That movie has a very nostalgic memory for me as I saw in at an open air cinema in 1964 out in a Middle East desert when I was serving with the British Royal Air Force. As the film was about the military it went down very well with our audience of course who particularly liked the closing command in the movie to the assembled soldiers “Three cheers for the officer commanding and his lady!”

            You and WH agree on 4 of Raoul’s Top 6 best reviewed movies.

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            1. Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating (ooer). info and trivia, always appreciated. Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.

               Sorry one of your favorites didn’t make the final 40, some films fall thru the net, happens to Flora’s favorites too. But there are plenty of other goodies here to cheer you up.

               Salty O’Rourke should be included in my expanded Alan Ladd video, if it isn’t than I do deserve a slap on the wrist. 🙂

               Nice to see Bruce has a page on Raoul Walsh, maybe my latest wave of videos might give him an incentive to create more classic director pages.

               I have an epic Henry Hathaway video in the vault which will be let loose next friday, if Bruce can create a page on Hathaway by then we can post our comments on the relevant page. I think Bruce has all the stats, Hathaway worked with many of the greats.

               Back to Walsh, one film scored 10 out of 10 from my sources and that was White Heat. Three more scored 9 – Objective Burma, Gentleman Jim and The Thief of Baghdad. I count 25 films scoring 8 out of 10 – wow that’s impressive.

               Just to clarify, a film scoring 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 5 from reviewers, counts as 8 out of 10 in my files.

               Gregory Peck on Raoul Walsh – “One time I took pioneer film director Raoul Walsh to the American Film Institute for a seminar and a Q&A session. He was about ninety-one at the time. He was a great character, wearing his eye patch. He still rolled his own cigarettes and he was a very colorful, profane, outspoken character from an earlier time. He was tougher, more independent, and had more self-confidence about his way of life and his code of behaviour, without compromise.”

               “So the students were asking him many of the usual questions about the old times, and then one of them asked, ‘Mr. Walsh, I understand that you were once an actor, is that true?’ And he said, ‘Sonny Boy, I played John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Lincoln, in “The Birth of a Nation” [1915]!’ And there he was, sitting before them. There was a moment of silence, and then they stood and applauded. About fifty or sixty young people. It was like seeing a ghost [laughs], but there he was. So in spite of the fact that the film industry is commercial, competitive and rather cold-hearted these days, through the Academy and such meetings at the American Film Institute, we do try to keep some of that tradition alive.”

4. HI BOB COX

   Thanks for your feedback on my Raoul Walsh post.

   I too am influenced by the “ones to watch” recommendations of others on this site and find them very helpful.

   However maybe we shouldn’t publicise that fact too much as Bruce is liable to get jealous on Joel Hirschhorn’s behalf .!!

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5. Raoul Walsh had a great career as a director which included apart from making many Errol Flynn movies the distinction of directing John Wayne in his first lead role, 1930s The Big Trail, and Humphrey Bogart’s emergence as a STAR in High Sierra in 1941.

   Bogie had been in Walsh’s They Drive by Night the year before but in that one George Raft had the main role. When Raft turned down the lead in High Sierra Bogart was signed.

   The rare on-set off-screen photo that Bruce has provided of Raoul and Humph chatting suggest they got on well together and certainly I feel that Raoul’s High Sierra must be given some credit along with Maltese Falcon and Casablanca for ushering in the great Humphrey Bogart era which ultimately saw Bogie recognized by AFI as the number one greatest screen Legend of all time. Bogie’s pal Huston who directed Maltese Falcon co-wrote High Sierra.

   The Walsh movies that I have most liked are Salty O’Rourke and O’Rourke of the Royal Mounted because Alan Ladd had the title roles in those two, the World in his Arms as Greg Peck was its star, Roaring Twenties [possibly my own all time fave gangster film along with Godpop] Pursued, White Heat, High Sierra itself and Colorado Territory.

   The latter was in effect a western reworking of Raoul’s High Sierra with McCrea in the Bogie role and Virginia Mayo as the leading lady. High Sierra was remade again as a straight gangster movie in 1955 called I Died a Thousand Times starring Jack Palance and Shelley Winters. It was directed by Stuart Hiesler who copied scene by scene Walsh’s masterpiece.

   I have stated above my own preferences among Raoul’s movies but whatever their personal favourites all movie buffs who like the work of great directors should study this Cogerson new page so I “Vote Up” [though I see Steve has already beaten me to the punch there.

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   1. Bob Roy, great share. I personally appreciate very much your most liked list. it helps guide me in my movie to be watched list. thanks.

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      1. I agree with your 100% bob cox.

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   2. Hey Bob
      1. Great feedback as always.
      2. I fixed your AFI error….so your other comment was deleted.
      3. I agree with your 100%…High Sierra was indeed one of the movies that helped launch Bogie into the superstar stratosphere.
      4. I think Walsh got around well with the Warner Brothers stars….Bogart, Flynn, Robinson.
      5. He and Flynn had a huge falling out….but they were able to get over that….and would eventually make 7 movies together.
      6. After making 3 movies together….Clark Gable blamed the “blah” respond to Band of Angels on Walsh…and never made another movie together.
      7. Interesting to know that The Roaring Twenties is your favorite gangster movie.
      8. Good point about Colorado Territory being another version of High Sierra…..that reminds me of the High Noon reboot……with Sean Connery playing the Cooper role….only this time it took place in space…..that one was called Outland.
      Thanks for the kind words and for the “vote up”….it is greatly appreciated.

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      1. HI BRUCE Thanks for the feedback on my Raoul Walsh post and for the new information.

         I was unaware of the Gable/Flynn agro with Raoul and never knew that Outland was a remake of High noon. Thank you for sharing thaose facts.

         When a classic is reworked under a different genre it is often difficult to immediately spot the likeness.

         For example it took me some time to realise that Ladd’s 1958 The Badlanders was a remake of Huston’s 1950 Asphalt Jungle.

         Clarity wasn’t helped by the fact that Huston’s classic was 112 minutes long and the Ladd remake was marketed as a routine western which was pared down to 83 minutes.

         I liked Godpop largely for the acting of its stars some of whom like Pacino, Brando and Duvall were propably among America’s best actors at that time.

         Otherwise I tended to prefer the fast-paced gangster flicks that Warners used to churn out such as apart from Roaring 20s itself Angels with Dirty faces and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

         The latter was produce by William Cagney lookalike brother of the film’s star.

         Indeed many of my fave gangster movies are A- or B programmers such as the 1956 Slightly Scarlet starring John Payne, Arlene Dahl and Rhonda Fleming which you give a reasonable 66% rating on Arlene’s page.

         Slightly Scarlet was one of those minor movies that RKO used to effortlessly produce in the 1950s and fed the smallerr out-of-town cinemas over here

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