Other Takes on the Stuff That Dreams are Made of

     

The movie version we all remember and treasure.

More than a decade ago ago, I was getting ready for bed.  It was late.  I was idly flipping through channels while finishing a late-night snack.  Then there it was.  On Turner Classic Movies (TCM)—The Maltese Falcon.  And I caught it only minutes after the opening credits rolled.  I was hooked.  John Huston’s 1941 directorial debut is one of those films you can watch over and over and it is fresh every time.  So, I watched.  Who needs sleep?

Then in the wee small hours, after Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade delivers the classic closing line to Ward Bond’s befuddled detective, “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of,” before I can finally pack it in I discover that next up was the odd Warner Bros. 1936 remake of a still earlier version, Satan Met a Lady.  I had never seen it.  Well, I wanted to see the sun rise anyway.

The Maltese Falcon originated as a serial in the pulp pages of a lurid magazine—The Black Mask.  It was penned by their most noted writer, Dashiell Hammett, a hard drinking former Pinkerton agent who had made a name for himself creating a nameless detective known as The Continental Op.  In the process he was re-inventing the mystery story into something much grittier.  Eventually it would be called the hard-boiled detective genre.  Out with the drawing rooms and genteel murders and in with the gritty streets, betrayal, flawed heroes, and brassy dames.

                                       

                                                        The pulp serial was issued as a novel in 1930.

In 1930 the serial was issued as a stand-alone novel.  It immediately elevated Hammett to the topflight of popular novelists, even though he would be moldering in his gin-soaked grave before it would be acknowledged as an American literary classic.

His character, Sam Spade, was a departure from the faceless operative of a giant corporation.  He was, like Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective.  But unlike Holmes his motives were purely pecuniary, his ethics iffy, and his methods by turns trading in betrayal and brutality.  In an uneasy partnership with Miles Archer, he operates a shady agency in a seedy part of town specializing in divorce, scandal, and perhaps a tad of strong-arm enforcement on the side.  His relationship with the police and authorities is  strained at best, although he has allies—most likely drinking buddies or former associates from an implied past.  Despite his general amorality Spade does have a rough personal and professional code which compels him to solve the murder of a feckless partner who he mistrusted and whose wife he was poking on the side despite any risks or temptations

The character and the lurid story, swirling madly around a McGuffin—in this case a fabulous gold and jeweled statuette known as the Maltese Falcon—were a natural for the new sound movies which could make the most out of tough, snappy dialog which Hammett delivered in, you should pardon the expression, spades.  Warner Bros., which was already distinguishing itself from other studios by its willingness to exploit crime and a little sex, gobbled up the rights.

By the way, there really was a Maltese Falcon, as described in the book and ’41 movie.  There really was an annual tribute of “one falcon” paid by the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V for bestowing the fiefdoms of Malta, Tripoli, and Gozo on them.  Known as the Maltese Tribute it was paid annually to Charles and his heirs for centuries—always as an actual bird, however.  No golden, jewel encrusted bird was ever sent and then lost to antiquity.

Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Danniels  as Sam Spade and Ruth Wonderley in in the 1931 Warner Bros. version.  The pre-code film was racy and a scene where Spade strip searches Wonderley made the Production Code Hayes office block a re-release.

Warners’s first stab at a movie looks like a dud when viewed today.  The camera work, dictated by the cumbersome and noisy Vidaphone process camera which had to be encased in a booth, is static.  The pacing drags.  The acting will win no awards.  Bebe Danniels as the temptress Ruth Wonderly gets top billing.  But the action and most of the dialog revolve around Ricardo Cortez as Spade.  Despite the Latin name, Cortez was a handsome, fast-talking New York Jew who was a hold-over silent leading man.  After early success in talkies, his career faded and he was relegated to playing mostly heavies in B movies.  The ubiquitous Una Merkel enlivened the proceedings as Spades loyal secretary and implied plaything.

Whatever its deficiencies to modern viewers, the film was a hit with audiences.  A few years later when Hammet was even a bigger name and rival MGM began producing the Thin Man movies, Warner’s tried to re-release The Maltese Falcon.  But the Motion Picture Code had come into play since the earlier release.  Code authorities refused to allow the release citing several sexually suggestive sequences—including a strip search of Wonderly by Spade and an acknowledgement of a homosexual relationship between villain Casper Gutman and his youthful stooge Wilmer Cook.

Instead, the studio settled on a remake.  But they felt that they had to even change the title to avoid a preemptive block by the Code Authority.  Thus, Satan Met a Lady was born.

The plot and much of the dialog remain, but the names of all of the characters are changed and the McGuffin this time is the supposedly jewel filled Horn of Roland based on a reference in the Medieval French epic the Song of Roland.  But for those of us steeped in the Bogart classic this is Bizzaro World.  To begin with, it’s a comedy.  Let that sink in.

Bette Davis got top billing but Warren William did most of the heavy lifting in a thinly veiled re-make.  To cash in on the popularity of MGM's Thin Man series, also based on work by Dashiell Hammet, the oddly cast film was played for comedy.

Warner’s reigning queen Bette Davis gets top billing.  But she has remarkably little to do but bat those famous eyes and play the temptress.  She is on screen for less than a quarter of the film.  This was just the kind of throwaway role that had her at constant odds with Jack Warner.  The real star is Warren William as detective Ted Shane. 

William was another Warner’s pre-code leading man.  Tall, handsome, glib and middle aged, he specialized in playing amoral businessmen and bosses in films like Skyscraper Souls, The Match King, and Employees Entrance.  He played the sort of a cad that women adored anyway.  His most memorable turn for modern audiences was as the prudish older brother of Dick Powell in Golddiggers of 1933.  By the time this movie was made he had carved out a reliable niche as the fast talking, close-to-the-line super-lawyer Perry Mason in a series of Warner’s programmers.  By the way, for those who grew up on Raymond Burr’s sort of stuffy and stodgy TV version, William is a revelation.

William’s Shane is basically Mason on steroids.  Glib and without an apparent ethical bone in his body, William plays it to the hilt while wearing, for some unknown reason, a black Stetson cowboy hat instead of a private eye snap-brim fedora.

But what really gives the film a house of mirrors feeling is the casting of supporting characters.  Villain #1, Joel Cairo as played by diminutive Peter Lorre five years later, here is lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher of all people as Anthony Travers.  Villain #2 vividly remembered for the film debut of Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman is here grandmotherly Alison Skipworth as Madame Barabas.  And the teenage gunsel played by Elijah Cook Jr.  here is an over-sized oaf in a beret played by Maynard Holmes.  A very young Marie Wilson doing her best Gracie Allen cum Jean Harlow ditzy blonde is a delight as Miss Murgatroyd, Shane’s semi-loyal secretary.

Lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher took time off from playing butlers to play a heavy, the film's equivalent of Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo three years later.  William sported a black Stetson for reason's never made clear.

Yes, this remake was an odd film.  It makes nobody’s list of classics and Davis considered it the nadir of her career at Warners.  But I have to admit, it was kind of fun.  I bet if I had watched it with the aid of a little pot, like I used to watch late-late movies on my little black-and-white portable TV years ago, I bet it would have been hilarious.

But it won’t make me forget the delicious perfection of watching Bogie tell Mary Astor that he is “sending her over” because he “won’t play sap for you like those other guys did.”

They are Making Lists Again--Like When J. Edgar Hoover Put Helen Keller on his Commie List

Note--There is no end of lists and the making of enemy lists by various tentacles of the Trump regime. Targets include main-stream media; individual editors, journalists, satirists; Judges, prosecutors, and investigators; leaders and rank and file members of dozens of critical organizations;  folk identified as simply being present and clashes with ICE or demonstrations and marches;  Social media users who share and circulate Anti-Trump material.  If the administration succeeds in obtaining detailed voter data from the States, it can even identify and target voters who are "the enemies of Americanism."

Despite her celebrity and status as a beloved icon Helen Keller ended up on J. Edgar Hoover's list of Communists.  She was never a party member or more than casually connected to groups suspected of being "fronts" but she was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World and of the Socialist Party as well as a long-time advocate for working people and for Civil Rights despite her privileged Southern roots.

On June 9, 1949 J. Edgar Hoover did his part to fuel the growing anti-Communist hysteria sweeping post-World War II America when he released a “confidential” Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) report that named scores of influential Americans, most of them in the movie and entertainment business as members of the Communist Party. 

Hoover developed his list after Attorney General Tom Clark in 1946 asked for the names of potentially “disloyal Americans” who might be detained in event of a “national emergency.”  The names on the list were included a year later in 1950 after the Korean War broke out in a report to President Harry Truman with the names of more than 12,000 who should be rounded up and detained after the formal suspension of the right of habeas corpus.  Truman had the good sense to thank his powerful FBI boss and promptly put the report and recommendation in the bottom drawer never to be acted upon.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testifying before Congress about the "Communist Fifth Column."

But there were plenty, many of the in Congress and including some of the country’s most powerful media barons like the Chicago Tribune’s Col. Robert R. McCormack and Time’s Henry Luce were already clamoring for just such draconian measures.

Hollywood where the major studios were run by Jews and where many actors, writers, and creative people were politically active liberals and leftists and where there was a powerful labor union movement with sometimes radical leadership, were singled out as a virtual Commie fifth column. 

A protest rally to demand a pardon for the Hollywood Ten, film figures most of them screen writers, convicted for failing to "name names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC.)

In 1946 and ’47 the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched high profile hearings on Communist infiltration of the film industry and subpoenaed hundreds to testify and name names.  Nineteen of those refused to do so and were named as unfriendly witnesses.  Eleven of those were called before the committee and 10 refused to answer questions.  Only German émigré Berthold Brecht relented and testified.  The others including screen writers Dalton Trumbo, Howard Koch, and Ring Larder, Jr. were indicted for contempt of Congress and eventually sent to prison and blacklisted from the industry.

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart lead a delegation at the Capitol of the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights to protest the persecution of the Hollywood 10.  Easily identifiable are Danny Kaye behind Bogart, June Haver behind Bacall, William Holden and Richard Conti. Studio executive forced the committee to back down and some participants were themselves blacklisted.

Some of Hollywood royalty including John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, Danny Kaye, and Billy Wilder attempted to rally support for the Hollywood Ten by organizing a Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and traveling to Washington to protest.  They came under intense attack by the Committee, the press, and by the terrified studio owners.  Bogart, spearhead and principal spokesman for the group, was forced to back track and issue a statement that the trip had been ill advised.  The group broke up acrimoniously between those who thought they should have toughed it out and those like Wilder who advised it was time “to fold our tents.”

Two years later Garfield and Kaye were among those named in the new FBI report, which was based on unnamed confidential informants and the Bureau’s own “analysis” which concluded that the Communists claimed “to have been successful in using well-known Hollywood personalities to further Communist Party aims.”  Analysis was often based on no more than the recollection of an informant seeing an individual at a meeting years earlier, attendance at public functions, donations to certain charities, or signatures on some petitions.  It included pre-war support for anti-Fascist causes and war-time support of the Soviet Union—including activities undertaken at the request of the government.

Some people on the list were or had been Party Members.  Others were sympathetic.  Some were non-Communist leftists—members of the Socialist Party or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  Many were unionists or sympathizers with the early Civil Rights Movement.  And many were simply liberals.  It made no difference.  To Hoover all were not just the “willing dupes” of the HUAAC hearings, but active, card-carrying Communists.

Among those listed was acknowledged Socialist and IWW member Helen Keller, even then widely regarded as a sort of secular saint.  The report centered on the activities of Fredric March, a well-known liberal and an active Democrat who recently won his second Academy Award for the brilliant film about the return of World War II GIs, The Best Years of Our Lives.  March was no Communist, but he organized a group concerned about atomic weapons and critical of America’s growing arsenal.  Any one even tangentially connected to that effort, or to people connected to the effort were caught up in rippling waves of innuendo.

John Garfield testifying before HUAC.  Unlike many others in Hollywood, Garfield was exceptionally defiant and flatly refused to sacrifice his friends to "Red baiters."  He became the most famous star blacklisted.  Like many others caught up in the hysteria he was also Jewish.

John Garfield, once the brightest new star at Warner Bros. came under especially severe scrutiny and his career immediately suffered.  Already plagued with heart problems, the stress of the accusations was widely believed to be a direct contributing factor to his death of a heart attack in May of 1952. 

Other prominent people named in the report, along with hundreds of non-celebrities included writer and wit Dorothy Parker, Paul Muni, and Edward G. Robinson.  Like Garfield and Kaye they were all Jewish.  In fact, the reek of Anti-Semitism hung over the whole report.

Fredric March, Paulette Goddard, Edward G. Robinson, and Audie Murphy, America's most decorated World War II soldier, stood up to Hoover and HUAC.

The effect on careers varied.  Many of the more obscure found themselves on blacklists.  Parker lost the radio panel show jobs that provided most of her income.  Muni’s film career was essentially finished.  March and Kaye were able to keep working and had some of their best work ahead of them.  Robinson’s career was hurt, but not over.  And he was the most outspokenly defiant befitting his tough guy image.

These rantings, ravings, accusations, smearing, and character assassinations can only emanate from sick, diseased minds of people who rush to the press with indictments of good American citizens. I have played many parts in my life, but no part have I played better or been more proud of than that of being an American citizen. 

When Helen Keller Ended Up on J. Edgar Hoover’s Commie List

  

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testifying before Congress about the "Communist Fifth Column."

Note—Attacks on “enemies of the people” and suggestions that folks should be thrown in jail for protests or simply overt opposition to the Cheeto-in-Charge as well as suggestions that reporters, activist actors, and even members of Congress be physically attacked by “patriots” bring to mind an earlier dark era for American liberties.  So do suggestions to declare a National Emergency and suspend habeas corpus. May we learn from the past.

On June 9, 1949 J. Edgar Hoover did his part to fuel the growing anti-Communist hysteria sweeping post-World War II America when he released a “confidential” FBI report that named scores of influential Americans, most of them in the movie and entertainment business as members of the Communist Party. 

Hoover had developed his list after Attorney General Tom Clark in 1946 asked for the names of potentially “disloyal Americans” who might be detained in event of a “national emergency.”  The names on the list were included a year later in 1950 after the Korean War broke  out in a report to President Harry Truman with more than 12,000 who should be rounded up and detained after the formal suspension of the right of habeas corpus.  Truman had the good sense to thank his powerful FBI boss and promptly put the report and recommendation in the bottom drawer never to be acted upon.

But there were plenty, many of the in Congress and including some of the country’s most powerful media barons like the Chicago Tribune’s Col. Robert R. McCormack and Time’s Henry Luce were already clamoring for just such draconian measures.

Hollywood where the major studios were run by Jews and where many actors, writers, and creative people were politically active liberals and leftists and where there was a powerful labor union movement with sometimes radical leadership, had already been singled out as a virtual Commie fifth column. 

In 1946 and ’47 the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee launched high profile hearings on Communist infiltration of the film industry and subpoenaed hundreds to testify and name names.  Nineteen of those refused to do so and were named as unfriendly witnesses.  Eleven of those were called before the committee and 10 refused to answer questions.  Only German émigré Berthold Brecht relented and testified.  The others including screen writers Dalton Trumbo, Howard Koch, and Ring Larder, Jr. were indicted for contempt of Congress and eventually sent to prison and blacklisted from the industry.

 

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart lead a delegation at the Capitol of the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights to protest the persecution of the Hollywood 10.  Easily identifiable are Danny Kaye behind Bogart, June Haver behind Bacall, William Holden and Richard Conti. Studio executive forced the committee to back down and some participants were themselves black listed.

Some of Hollywood royalty including John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, Danny Kaye, and Billy Wilder attempted to rally support for the Hollywood Ten by organizing a Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and traveling to Washington to protest.  They came under intense attack by the Committee, the press, and by the terrified studio owners.  Bogart, spearhead and principle spokesman for the group, was forced to back track and issue a statement that the trip had been ill advised.  The group broke up acrimoniously between those who thought they should have toughed it out and those like Wilder who advised it was time “to fold our tents.”

Two years later Garfield and Kaye were among those named in the new FBI report, which was based on unnamed confidential informants and the Bureau’s own “analysis” which concluded that the Communists claimed, “to have been successful in using well-known Hollywood personalities to further Communist Party aims.”  Analysis was often based on no more than the recollection of an informant seeing an individual at a meeting years earlier, attendance at public functions, donations to certain charities, or signatures on some petitions.  It included pre-war support for anti-Fascist causes and war time support of the Soviet Union—including activities undertaken at the request of the government.

Some people on the list were or had been Party Members.  Others were sympathetic.  Some were non-Communist leftists—members of the Socialist Party or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  Many were unionists or sympathizers with the early Civil Rights Movement.  And very many were simply liberals.  It made no difference.  To Hoover all were not just the “willing dupes” of the HUAC hearings, but active, card carrying Communists.

 

Among those listed were acknowledged Socialist and IWW member Helen Keller, even then widely regarded as a sort of secular saint.  The report centered on the activities of Fredric March, a well-known liberal and an active Democrat who had recently won his second Academy Award for the brilliant film about the return of World War II GIs, The Best Years of Our Lives.  March was no Communist, but he had organized a group concerned about atomic weapons and critical of America’s growing arsenal.  Any one even tangentially connected to that effort, or to people connected to the effort were caught up in rippling waves of innuendo.

John Garfield, once the brightest new star at Warner Bros. came under especially severe scrutiny and his career immediately suffered.  Already plagued with heart problems, the stress of the accusations was widely believed to be a direct contributing factor to his death of a heart attack in May of 1952. 

Other prominent people named in the report, along with hundreds of non-celebrities included writer and wit Dorothy Parker, Paul Muni, and Edward G. Robinson.  Like Garfield and Kaye they were all Jewish.  In fact the reek of Anti-Semitism hung over the whole report.

 

 Fredric March, Paulette Goddard, Edward G. Robinson, and Audie Murphy, America's most decorated World War II soldier, stood up to Hoover.

The effect on careers varied.  Many of the more obscure found themselves on blacklists.  Parker lost the radio panel show jobs that had provided most of her income.  Muni’s film career was essentially finished.  March and Kaye were able to keep working and had some of their best work ahead of them.  Robinson’s career was hurt, but not over.  And he was the most outspokenly defiant befitting his tough guy image.

These rantings, ravings, accusations, smearing, and character assassinations can only emanate from sick, diseased minds of people who rush to the press with indictments of good American citizens. I have played many parts in my life, but no part have I played better or been more proud of than that of being an American citizen.

 

Raoul Walsh Was a Movie Maker With an Eye Patch and Attitude

 

                            Raoul Walsh behind the camera as young director.

Raoul Walsh, the director in an eye patch long before John Ford or Nicholas Ray, had a long career in films spanning the pioneering years of D. W. Griffith in the silents to wide screen Technicolor epics of the mid-‘60s. He specialized in action pictures—gritty crime dramas, westerns, war movies. Meaty parts for women—with a few notable exceptions—were rare and his friend Jack Pickford (elder brother of Mary) told him that “Your idea of light comedy is to burn down a whorehouse.” In the process he made some of the most memorable films in Hollywood history never to win Oscars. 

Walsh was born on March 11, 1887 in New York City to a comfortably middle class lace curtain Irish family with connections to show business. Young John Barrymore was a childhood friend. He got a good education in public high schools and at Seton Hall College before dropping out to join his brother George on the stage in 1909. Darkly handsome, he found work on the stage but was quickly drawn to the infant motion picture industry. 

As second unit director of The Life of General Villa shot on location in Mexico with Pancho Villa and his Army of Northern Mexico, Walsh filmed actual battle scenes.

In 1914 he signed on to be second unit director on The Life of General Villa, shot on location in revolutionary Mexico with Pancho Villa himself in the lead. The film contained actual battle scenes as well as realistic re-constructions. On Villa’s orders Walsh was even ordered to film the firing squad executions of prisoners—footage that was edited out of the finished film. Walsh also got time in front of the camera playing Villa as a young man.  The film was a sensation, but prints have been lost although unedited footage of some of the battle scenes have been preserved. The entire episode itself inspired a movie in 2003, And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself with Kyle Chandler playing the young Walsh. 

On his return from Mexico Walsh was hired as an assistant to Griffith and quickly put to work on his Birth of a Nation. Besides behind the camera duties, he appeared in the film as Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. It would be his last acting job for more than a decade as he developed as a film maker. Griffith became a mentor, role model, and father figure to Walsh. 

                                    Walsh as John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation.
     

In addition to his continuing work with Griffith, in 1915 Walsh made 15 films, most of theme one or two real shorts. But he also made his first feature film as a director and screenwriter. Regeneration starring Anna Q. Nilsson as a social worker out to reform a young gang leader was shot on location in the Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen featuring a cast made up largely of actual street toughs and prostitutes. It is famous for its street scenes and is considered by many the first gangster movie. 

                                     Walsh's first wife, actress Miriam Cooper. 

In 1916 Walsh married Miriam Cooper, a rising star and one of Griffith’s favorites. She often gave Walsh advice on his career and sometimes acted as an intermediary with producers. Their marriage was interrupted while Walsh served as an Army officer in World War I. When he returned he pressed her to continue her acting career and to work in his films including Evangeline in 1919 despite her desire to retire to family life. Together they adopted a boy who had been orphaned in the 1917 Halifax dock explosion. Walsh never showed much interest in the boy, or another son adopted later and the marriage was troubled by his philandering, gambling, and by his bouts of heavy drinking. The couple quarreled, separated, and reunited multiple times before Cooper filed for divorce in 1926 because Walsh had a suspected affair with Ethel Barrymore and a confirmed one with her close friend Lorraine Miller. 

In 1928 he married Miller and the stayed together until 1947. Walsh’s final wife was Mary Simpson with whom he was conducting an affair. They married immediately following the divorce and she remained his spouse until his death. All the marriages were tempestuous. 

In the post-war years and well into the 1920s Walsh was a busy director making sometimes a dozen films a year. Many have been lost. Most were programmers but by the mid ‘20s he was getting some plum A list assignments notably The Thief of Baghdad with Douglas Fairbanks in 1924 and Sadie Tompson, a version of W. ’Somerset Maugham's Rain with Gloria Swanson in 1928. In that film Walsh returned to acting for the first time since Birth of a Nation as the young soldier who falls in love with the prostitute and offers her one last, tantalizing chance at redemption.

Later the same year Fox tagged him to direct In Old Arizona based on a story by O. Henry in which he was also supposed to play the Cisco Kid. In one of the strangest accidents in film history, while on location in Arizona a frightened jackrabbit jumped up and smashed through the window of the roadster Walsh was driving. Glass shards cost him the use of his right eye. He wore an eye patch ever after and never acted again. He continued as director of the film with Warner Baxter replacing him in the lead. Baxter won an Academy Award for his efforts. It was one of Walsh’s remarkably few brushes with Academy glory despite having been one of 36 founding members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1927. 

The Big Trail in 1930 for Fox was an expensive epic that could not recoup its massive costs.  The failure was a set back for director Walsh and his star discovery, a very young ex-USC football player he renamed John Wayne.  Shown with Tyrone Power, Sr. as one of the villains.

In 1930 Fox handed Walsh his biggest assignment yet—an epic western with a literal cast of thousands about an early wagon train on the Oregon Trail. The Big Trail was shot simultaneously in a new, experimental 70 mm wide screen process and standard 35mm plus versions in French, Spanish, and German with alternative casts. When Paramount pictures would not release Gary Cooper to play the lead of the young guide, Walsh picked a USC football player named Marion Morrison who he spotted unloading prop trucks on the lot to star. Fox objected to Morrison’s name and Walsh, who happened to be reading a biography of Revolutionary War hero Mad Anthony Wayne, came up with a new moniker—John Wayne. 

 Despite stunning action sequences, the movie cost a fortune to make and could not re-coup its cost in Depression era theaters. And despite his photogenic good looks, Wayne’s wooden acting didn’t help either. The careers of both the star and director were set back. Wayne had to toil for years in cheap poverty row two-reelers before John Ford would make him a real star in 1939’s Stagecoach. 

1933’s The Bowery lovingly recreated the title neighborhood in the 1890’s and told the highly fictionalized tale of Steve Brodie, the guy who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. The film starred George Raft as Brodie, Wallace Beery, and Fay Wray. 

Walsh made a few films at MGM and then was under contract to Paramount. Both studios misused him on B list pictures including musicals and comedies for which he was manifestly unsuited. He considered the nadir of his career an assignment to direct Klondike Annie, a late, post-Production Code Mae West vehicle. Mae notoriously was used to essentially directing herself and calling all of the shots on her films. The two of them clashed on the set and Mae, with studio backing, usually won unless it was a censorship issue. The film was a flop. 

When his Paramount contract expired, Walsh gleefully jumped to Warner Bros.—a studio perfectly tailored to his talents as a film maker. Beginning in 1939 working consistently with the studio’s three biggest male stars—James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Errol Flynn he made a slew of classic films that would cement his reputation as one of the greatest Hollywood directors of all time. 

His association with Warner started off with a bang, literally, in 1939. The Roaring Twenties with Cagney and Bogart as a rising bootlegger and his brutal right hand man is on everyone’s short list of essential gangster films. Walsh was then lent out to Republic for one of their few “A” pictures where he was re-united with John Wayne for Dark Command. Wayne uncovered the evil plot of schoolteacher William Cantrell played by Walter Pidgeon to turn Kansas bloody. Costarring Claire Trevor and a young Roy Rogers, the film was thrilling romp and box office smash. 

Back at Warner, Walsh helmed the truck driving melodrama They Drive By Night with Raft and Bogie, in his last film as a supporting player, as two brothers. Good girl Ann Sheridan and scheming temptress Ida Lupino rounded out the solid cast. The next year, 1940, Walsh was re-teamed with Bogart and Lupino.  Bogart, after making the Maltese Falcon with John Huston, was a name-above-the-title star. But in High Sierra he played a tired, aging gangster on the run who met and won the affection of an innocent small town girl. The taught final thirty minutes of the film as Bogart was trapped and tracked into the title mountains and the distraught Lupino watched in horror as he was brought down, in one of the greatest extended sequences in film. 

Walsh listening to a screen writer with Rita Hayworth and Olivia de Havilland on the set of The Strawberry Blonde.

In his next film, he finally put Jack Pickford’s old jibe to rest. The Strawberry Blonde was a sweet, gentle, nostalgic comedy starring Cagney against type as the naïve cat’s paw of a conniving buddy. Cagney enjoyed himself immensely, as he did when he was able to convince Warner to let him stray from typecasting, and it showed. Jack Carter played the pal who was a rival for the neighborhood hottie, Rita Hayworth as the title redhead who used and betrays Cagney. Olivia de Havilland was the sweet girl who was right for Cagney all along. Hayworth was at her best, and a refutation of the idea that Walsh could not get great performances out of women. 

Next came a string of movies with Warner’s biggest male star, the swashbuckling Errol Flynn usually with de Havilland as his love interest. Flynn so admired Walsh’s work that he became his virtual personal director in film classics including the fanciful Custer bio-pic They Died With their Boots On; Dangerous Journey, the first of several World War II flicks; Gentleman Jim, a bio-pic of boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett that returned Walsh to one of his favorite periods, the Gay ‘90s, and was an Irish-American hymn with Ward Bond as John L. Sullivan; and Objective: Burma the last of five war themed films he made with Flynn.

Pal James Cagney visiting Errol Flynn and Walsh on the set of They Died With Their Boots On.

Flynn and Walsh became fast friends and with mutual friend the aging John Barrymore often caroused late into the night and on all-weekend benders. Hollywood legend has it that when Barrymore died in 1942 Walsh stole the corpse from the funeral home and propped it up with a drink in his hand in Flynn’s home. Already drinking heavily after the wake, Flynn returned home and was horrified and shaken. Later both retold the story, although some doubt it actually happened. 

The two had a falling out after the last of the war films and Walsh was relegated to a string of undistinguished films, mostly westerns, with second tier casts, but also including an astoundingly awful fantasy comedy The Horn Blows at Midnight with Jack Benny and even a musical re-make of The Strawberry Blonde, One Sunday Afternoon, with a lack-luster Dennis Morgan subbing for Cagney. Pictures like that were evidence that Walsh was being punished. 

In 1949 Walsh got the call to do Cagney’s long awaited return to the gangster film as the psychopathic momma’s boy in White Heat. He showed he had lost nothing. The movie is a terrifying classic best remembered for the climax on top of a blazing oil refinery. Walsh would finish his years at Warner with two more outstanding films, Captain Horatio Hornblower with Gregory Peck—a film that would open the door to more sea yarns—and a fine, taught western, Along the Great Divide with Kirk Douglas.

Pal James Cagney visiting Errol Flynn and Walsh on the set of They Died With Their Boots On.

After his contract with Warner’s lapsed, Walsh became a free agent and worked at all of the major studios. And he was in demand. The early ‘50s saw him directing more sea yarns—Blackbeard the Pirate with Robert Newton, The World in His Arms again with Peck, and Sea Devils with Rock Hudson. Cagney tapped Walsh for A Lion Is in the Streets from his own production company and distribution by Warner. Cagney played a scrappy Louisiana peddler who rises in the world as a populist politician in a film loosely based on Huey Long and often compared to Broderick Crawford’s Oscar winning turn In All the King’s Men. Less well remembered than the other film, it stands on its own as a gripping morality play about a man un-done by his own ambition. Then came a strong trio of films with Clark Gable. In one of his best westerns, Gable was paired with Robert Ryan for The Tall Men also starring Jane Russell. The King and Four Queens was a comedy western with Gable juggling the widows of four outlaws and the outlaw queen mother of the dead boys t

 But in A Band of Angels—a bitter and controversial portrait of a Louisiana slave trader turned plantation owner with the woman passing for white who he loved—Yvonne De Carlo—and Sydney Poitier as the boy orphaned in a slaving raid who Gabled raised as a virtual son and who went on to hunt him down as a Union soldier was the masterpiece of the trio. 

Walsh on the set of A Band of Angels with Yvonne De Carlo and Clark Gable.

Sandwiching the Gable films were two movies based on important novels about World War II. 1955’s Battle Cry was based on Leon Uris’s novel of young Marines and the women who loved them set against the war in the Pacific. Starring Aldo Rey, Van Heflin, James Whitmore, Tab Hunter, Anne Francis, Dorothy Malone, Raymond Massey, and Mona Freeman the film had epic sweep and outstanding on location cinematography. It was also a big hit and one of the most admired films of that year. 

Walsh brought Leon Uris's novel Battle Ground to the big screen with Aldo Rey. Tab Hunter, and James Whitmore and had a big hit.  His follow-up, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was not.

The second film, The Naked and the Dead, based on Norman Mailer’s much darker novel, did not fare so well. After the box office failure of the quirky Night of the Hunter directed by Charles Lawton and starring Robert Mitcham failing RKO Studios, pulled them from the project. Mailer personally sought out and recruited Walsh to take over. In his memoirs Mailer claimed that Walsh was “on his death bed but rallied to make the film. Not quite, now 70 years old Walsh was frail and not in good health but still an active filmmaker. The cast included Aldo Rey and Massey from Battle Cry, this time as a crusty, mission driven Sergeant and a vainglorious martinet General respectively. Cliff Robinson was cast as the idealistic young officer used and abused by both as his men were sacrificed. Despite high expectations, the film was a failure and marked the beginning of the end of Walsh’s career behind the camera. 

He had to go to England for The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw a comedy western starring Kenneth Moore and Jayne Mansfield and largely filmed in Spain to find work. 1960’s A Private Affair was a low rent service comedy with then teen heart throbs Sal Mineo and Gary Crosby going through the motions. The same year he went to Italy and co-directed a minor sand and sandal Biblical epic, Esther and the King with Mario Brava. Sultry Joan Collins played the Jewish heroine and Richard Egan led with his cleft chin as the King. In a year of really big epics, it did not make much splash in the US, although it performed well in Europe, which was probably the intended audience anyway. 

1961 brought another service comedy, Marines, Let’s Go with then relatively unknowns Tom Tryon and David Hedison in the leads. This time Walsh also got screenwriting credit. It sank without leaving a ripple. It took three years to get behind the cameras for what turned out to be his swan song. 

Tough, crusty, and unapologetic--Walsh in old age.

A Distant Trumpet was just the kind of cavalry western that had been Walsh’s forte. But this time instead of Errol Flynn, the young officer sent on a dangerous mission into Mexico, was Troy Donahue. Despite trademark action scenes and location cinematography, no film could recover from that. Walsh hung up his spurs, or at least his director’s megaphone. 

He spent his final years in retirement in declining health but was often visited in his Simi Valley home by old friends from the business who affectionately called him Uncle. Peter Bogdonovich interviewed him for his book Who Made It: Conversations With…the Great Directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Film of those interviews can be seen in documentary footage shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) which frequently showcases many of his films. 

When he died on December 31, 1980 at the age of 93 Walsh was remembered for a long and legendary body of work.