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.

Writer Ambrose Bierce Was the Devil Himself

                             Ambrose Bierce in 1892.

Ambrose Bierce was born on June 24, 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, the tenth of fourteen children of a poor, but literary minded couple.  The family relocated to Indiana where Bierce briefly attended high school before dropping out at age 15 to help support his family as a printer’s devil at a local newspaper. 

When the Civil War erupted he joined the first rush of volunteers.  As a private in the 9th Indiana Infantry and soon saw action in the Western Virginia Campaign, the first major land action of the war.  He was singled out and mentioned in newspaper dispatches for bravery in the Battle of Rich Mountain in July 1861 for a daring rescue of a wounded comrade under heavy fire. 

 In February of 1862 Bierce was promoted from the ranks to First Lieutenant and assigned to the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a Topographical Engineer.  His often dangerous job was to scout and map the terrain of campaigns and potential battlefields.  The accuracy of these maps was critical to making command decisions about the disposition of troops and artillery and executing maneuvers on the battlefield.  

The Battle of Shiloh was one of the bloodiest of the Civil War and left a lasting scar on a young Lieutenant of the Topographical Engineers.

Bierce again saw action in the horrific Battle of Shiloh in April of 1862, a battle that had a lifelong effect on him and inspired many of his post war writings including a memoir, What I Saw of Shiloh and several of the short stories that would first make him famous including An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a classic horror tale.

                                       Lt. Bierce.

Bierce continued to see action with the western Union armies until he received a severe head wound at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in June 1864.  Although he returned to active duty in September, he was discharged in January 1865 because of his wounds.

In 1866 his old commander General Hazen induced him to return to the Army to accompany him on an expedition to inspect military outposts in the West and survey supply routes and possible locations for new posts, a key mission as Red Cloud’s War raged in the Northern Plaines.  The expedition traversed the West from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco, California by wagon and horseback with many surveying side trips.  Bierce, although wracked with asthma and suffering from his war wounds, completed his duties.  He resigned from the Army with a rank of brevet major and settled in San Francisco.

He returned to newspaper work and quickly established a reputation as a writer contributing to The San Francisco News Letter where gained fame for grizzly crime reporting, The Argonaut, the Overland Monthly, The Californian and The Wasp. 

He married and began a family.  From 1872 to 1875 he lived and worked in England where his first book, a collection of his journalism pieces, was published. 

He returned to the City by The Bay, where he worked for years, with the exception as a brief fling as a gold mine manager in Deadwood.  By 1887 he was a leading columnist in William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. 

He became a leader of a burgeoning West Coast literary circle that included local color writers like Bret Hart, and poets Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Edwin Markham.  His short stories had been attracting wide-spread admiration since 1871.  His poetry reflected bitterness at the cruelty and cupidity of humanity.  He became popularly identified as a cynic and misanthrope, although much of his bitterness came from the failure of high ideals that he had once treasured.

                                There have been scores of editions of The Devil's Dictionary and it has never gone out of print.

In 1911 Bierce published The Devil’s Dictionary, the work for which he is now best remembered.  The Dictionary was filled with pithy, deeply sardonic definitions like these:

Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be.

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.”

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Two years later, with two of his children and his long estranged wife dead and himself  in poor health, Bierce disappeared into revolutionary Mexico after a final tour his old Civil War battlefields. 

Jimmy Smitts as a Villista officer and Gregory Peck as Bitter (Bierce) in The Old Gringo in 1989.

He reportedly traveled with Pancho Villa’s army.  Some reports say he was executed by Villa, but there is no proof.  He simply disappeared.  His fate itself became the stuff of literary legend and has inspired books, plays, and the popular film The Old Gringo starring Gregory Peck in one of his last roles as the writer.

Black Jack Pershing and the Futile Chase of the Last Cavalry Campaign

 

General John J. "Blackjack" Pershing leads his Punitive Expeditionary Force across the Rio Grande and into Mexico.

A fool’s errand.  That’s what General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing was sent on by President Woodrow Wilson.  On March 15, 1916 the General rode off at the head of about 12,000 troops of the Punitive Expeditionary Force on a mission to find and destroy Pancho Villa and his rebel army in Mexico. 

Doroteo Arango, alias Francisco “Pancho” Villa, was born in 1877 in San Juan del Rio, the State of Durango in Northern Mexico.  He was an outlaw by 16 and the head of his own gang of banditos shortly after.  Because he frequently clashed with the forces of the hated dictator Porforio Díaz, he began to be regarded as a folk hero by the dispossessed and landless peons of his home state. 

When the Mexican Revolution installed democratic hero Francisco Madero as President, Villa offered his services to battle a turncoat Revolutionary commander Pascual Orozco.  He led his División del Norte in the defense of the President he actually deeply admired.  He fought alongside another general, the ambitious Victoriano Huerta.  Huerta, however betrayed him and almost succeeded in having him executed.  

Pancho Villa and his Division del Norte from a 1914 Monarch newsreel.

Madero commuted Villa’s from his death sentence, but allowed him to be put in prison, from which he soon escaped.  Huerta went on to betray Madero as well, seizing power with the connivance of the nephew of Porforio Díaz and the U.S. Ambassador. Madero was executed. 

Villa in the North, Emiliano Zapata in the South and other generals rallied to Venustiano Carranza’s plan to restore the revolution. 

The colorful Villa invited American film crews to cover his battles.  He invented new tactics, particularly the use of the armored train and specialized in lightening cavalry assaults. He secured the State of Chihuahua and was appointed Provisional Governor. 

Better times--Revolutionary generals Obregon and Villa and their staffs with Pershing at Fort Bliss, Texas.  The tall young officer behind Pershing is Lt. George Patton in what may have been an early photo bomb.

His campaigns were admired by U.S. Army officers who studied them closely and he was even invited to visit Ft. Bliss to meet with Pershing and his staff. 

Villa turned his army south in a drive to the capital.  After victories against Federal forces at Gómez Palacio and Torreón, Carranza ordered Villa to divert his division from the drive on Mexico City to allow rival generals to enter the capital first.  Despite the snub Villa attacked the last major Federal stronghold in the north, Zacatecas finally forcing Huerta to leave for exile in July 1914. 

After Carranza defied Villa, Zapata and other revolutionary generals who had hoped for a democracy by assuming dictatorial power, Villa went back into rebellion. 

At first he believed that the United States would back him.  Instead, the Wilson administration threw its support behind Carranza.  Outraged, Villa began plotting ways to force the Americans to enter the war on the side of Carranza, which he believed would lead to an even wider popular uprising. 

He attacked and killed 16 American mining engineers hired by the Carranza government to reopen the vast silver mines of the north.  When that failed to get Wilson to act, he launched an audacious attack on a small cavalry garrison at Columbus, New Mexico.  He also burned and looted the town killing several civilians then rode east attacking isolated targets in Texas before re-crossing the Río Grande. 

That left Wilson no choice but to order Pershing’s intervention at the reluctant “invitation” of the Carranza regime.  By the time Pershing crossed the border Villa was several days ahead and melted his forces into the rugged mountains.  Pershing’s forces were primarily cavalry.  In fact, this would be the last great campaign of the U.S. Cavalry, but it also included motorized units and a Signal Corps air arm, both for the first time in American military history. 

The fragile Jenny biplanes actually dropped some bombs by hand on Villista stragglers, but harsh conditions and inexperienced pilots put the air arm out of commission within weeks. 

Despite dividing into two columns, Pershing could never make contact with Villa’s main force.  They simply melted away.  There were several small skirmishes, including a little engagement that made a popular hero out of young Lt. George S. Patton.  

The charge of the 11th Cavalry at Ojos Azules.

When Villa tricked Pershing’s troops into an attack on Carranza forces, the President was compelled by popular outrage to demand the withdrawal of American troops.  There was even talk about full war between the countries and the Georgia National Guard had to be mobilized to take up defensive positions along the Río Grande in Texas. 

Wilson had enough and he needed his Army back for the looming war in Europe.  He ordered Pershing’s recall in January 1917.  Despite never capturing or engaging Villa, Pershing declared victory. 

The Mexican people, delighted to see the Yankees gone, proclaimed Villa the victor and hero.  But his military power was broken.  After a few years of fruitless campaigning, he finally negotiated his retirement and was rewarded with a hacienda in Chihuahua.  But the government feared he might return to his old ways.  

The body of Pancho Villa in his bullet ridden Dodge touring car.  As he was dying his last words were "Tell them I said something important."

On July 20, 1923 Villa was cut down with his bodyguards in a fusillade of rifle fire while riding in his Dodge touring car.  His Mexican enemies finally accomplished by Black Jack Pershing could not.