RAOUL WALSH
July 9 - August 21, 2005


Program Introduction

Saturday, July 9
2:00 p.m.
THE MAN I LOVE
1946, 96 mins. With Ida Lupino, Robert Alda. Lupino is a nightclub singer being wooed by a mobster in this noir-flavored melodrama that inspired Martin Scorsese's New York, New York.

Saturday, July 9
4:00 p.m.
THE BOWERY
1933, 90 mins. With Wallace Beery, Fay Wray. Loosely based on Walsh's memories of growing up in New York, this bawdy, spirited tale of the Gay Nineties centers on two rival saloon owners.

Sunday, July 10
2:00 p.m.
THE BIG TRAIL
1930, 120 mins. With John Wayne. The first epic western of the talkie era, filmed in a 70mm widescreen process called "Grandeur," The Big Trail is a wagon-train saga starring a 22-year-old John Wayne in his first leading role.

Sunday, July 10
4:30 p.m.
ME AND MY GAL
1932, 78 mins. With Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett. A New York cop trades wisecracks with a sassy waitress in this evocative slice of working-class urban life, praised by Manny Farber as Walsh's best film.

Saturday, July 16
1:30 p.m.
THE THIEF OF BAGDAD
1924, 140 mins. Live music by Donald Sosin. With Douglas Fairbanks, Anna May Wong. Walsh moved into Hollywood's top ranks with this extravagant Arabian Nights fantasy, featuring an energetic Fairbanks bounding through William Cameron Menzies's spectacular Art Deco sets.

Saturday, July 16
4:30 p.m.
SADIE THOMPSON
1928, 97 mins. Live music by Donald Sosin. With Gloria Swanson, Lionel Barrymore. A high point of American silent cinema, this provocative drama about a fugitive prostitute on a South Seas island features Swanson at her best, with Walsh himself playing her lover.

Sunday, July 17
4:30 p.m.
GOING HOLLYWOOD
1933, 80 mins. With Marion Davies, Bing Crosby. Walsh's first musical, made as a vehicle for Davies, is a breezy show-biz saga with Crosby in top form as an ambitious crooner who falls in love with a teacher but leaves her behind to make his mark in Hollywood.

Saturday, July 23 and Sunday, July 24
2:00 p.m.
THE ROARING TWENTIES
1939, 104 mins. With James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart. Filmed in a quasi-documentary style, Walsh's gangster classic about a pair of World War I buddies who become underworld kingpins evokes the heyday of the Warner Bros. crime movie.

Saturday, July 23
4:30 p.m.
THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT
1940, 97 mins. With Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, George Raft, Ann Sheridan. Raft and Bogart are hard-boiled truckers committed to a life as "wildcatters," with Lupino excelling as a married woman hooked on Raft in Walsh's gritty melodrama.

Sunday, July 24
4:30 p.m.
THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE
1941, 99 mins. With James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth. A picaresque evocation of turn-of-the-century New York, this is one of Walsh's most charming films. Cagney plays a dentist infatuated with Hayworth's "strawberry blonde" golddigger.

Saturday, July 30 and Sunday, July 31
2:00 p.m.
HIGH SIERRA
1941, 96 mins. With Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino. Walsh and screenwriter John Huston helped Bogart find his tough-guy persona in this role. Lupino gives a milestone performance as the loyal moll who is the wiser to Bogie's self-destructive Mad Dog Earle.

Saturday, July 30
4:00 p.m.
THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON
1941, 140 mins. With Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland. Flynn gives a rousing, multilayered performance as General Custer in this sprawling, lively chronicle that goes from Custer's West Point days to his last stand at Little Big Horn.

Sunday, July 31
4:00 p.m.
DESPERATE JOURNEY
1942, 107 mins. With Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan. Shot down by Nazis over occupied Poland, five pilots band together to make it back to London. With its gung-ho dialogue, the film is a knowing spoof of the war propaganda film.

Saturday, August 6
2:00 p.m.
GENTLEMAN JIM
1942, 104 mins. With Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith. Co-written by hardboiled novelist Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), this loosely structured biopic about nineteenth-century "bare-knuckle" boxing champion James J. Corbett features Flynn—in his favorite performance—as the arrogant but charismatic pugilist.

Saturday, August 6
4:30 p.m.
UNCERTAIN GLORY
1944, 102 mins. With Errol Flynn. A French criminal facing execution seeks to redeem himself by helping to rescue a group of hostages. Walsh invests this wartime adventure saga with vitality and emotion.

Sunday, August 7
2:00 p.m.
OBJECTIVE, BURMA!
1945, 142 mins. With Errol Flynn. A group of paratroopers is sent on a treacherous jungle mission in this quintessential Walsh adventure, which turns a physical journey into an existential one.

Sunday, August 7
4:45 p.m.
REGENERATION
1915, 61 mins. Live music by Donald Sosin. With Anna Q. Nilsson. Walsh's vibrant melodrama about a charismatic gang leader and a society woman running a Bowery mission, filmed on the Lower East Side, was the first feature-length crime movie.

Saturday, August 13
2:00 p.m.
MANPOWER
1941, 104 mins. With Edward G. Robinson, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich. A remake of Howard Hawks's 1932 film Tiger Shark, this love triangle between two power-company linemen and a nightclub hostess is a spirited blue-collar melodrama.

Saturday, August 13 and Sunday, August 14
4:30 p.m.
PURSUED
1947, 101 mins. With Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright. This exemplary psychological western, with expressive landscape photography, stars Mitchum as a rancher who falls in love with his adopted sister.

Sunday, August 14
2:00 p.m.
COLORADO TERRITORY
1949, 94 mins. With Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo. Walsh remade High Sierra as a western, with Mayo as a hardboiled yet softhearted dance-hall singer who helps redeem McCrea's outlaw.

Saturday, August 20
2:00 p.m.
CAPTAIN HORATIO HORNBLOWER
1951, 117 mins. With Gregory Peck, Virginia Mayo. This swashbuckling high-seas drama, set in the early 1800s, finds its hero caught up in the shifting political tensions between Spain and England, and in his own growing romance with a high-society woman.

Saturday, August 20 and Sunday, August 21
4:15 p.m.
WHITE HEAT
1949, 114 mins. With James Cagney, Virginia Mayo. For his first gangster movie in more than a decade, Cagney returned to the genre in style with his most outrageous performance, as the psychotic, mother-obsessed thug who yells, "Top of the world, Ma!"

Sunday, August 21
2:00 p.m.
THE LAWLESS BREED
1952, 83 mins. With Rock Hudson. In his first starring role, Hudson throws himself into the role of notorious Texas gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, who seeks redemption through marriage and fatherhood.

Program Introduction
"Action, action, action…let the screen be filled ceaselessly with events," said Raoul Walsh (1887-1980), the Hollywood director who started his career as an assistant to D.W. Griffith and made more than 100 films, working into the twilight of the studio system in the early 1960s. Because of his many adventure films, gangster movies, and westerns, and because he worked with such icons of masculinity as Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart, Walsh has frequently been stereotyped as a rugged, straightforward action director.

Yet his films are surprisingly lyrical and complex. While they often take the form of journeys, his movies reveal a penchant for episodic storytelling and psychological nuance. The "action" in a Walsh film can be a closely observed behavioral detail or an expressive landscape; Walsh consistently reveals internal drama in physical terms.

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