raoul walsh

His father, the Irishman Thomas Walsh , escaped with three of his brothers from jail where they were serving time for subversive activities against the British government. The four emigrated to New York where Albert Edward Walsh was born on March 11, 1887 , the real name of the future filmmaker.

As a child he was crazy about adventure novels, especially if they were set in exotic landscapes. Before finishing school he boarded a ship that was leaving for Cuba. He held various trades, as a horse tamer in Mexico or a cowboy along the Texas border. He also worked in a circus. But his brother, George Walsh ( My girl and I ) was beginning his career as a film actor, and he proposed that she go with him to also try his luck in the world of acting.

Thus, the young Raoul Walsh made his film debut playing a mafia driver in The Detective’s Stratagem , from 1913. During the following two years he lavished himself on secondary characters, until the great David W. Griffith recruited him as an assistant direction for the legendary film The Birth of a Nation , where Walsh also played John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot President Lincoln.

Raoul Walsh married in 1916, with Miriam Cooper , Griffith’s regular actress in titles such as Intolerance , with whom he adopted two children, before divorcing ten years later. Later he would be together with Lorraine Miller and Mary Simpson, outside the world of cinema.

He made his directorial debut in 1913 with The Pseudo Prodigal , and later shot The Life of General Villa with William Christy Cabanne , for which he even went to Mexico to film Pancho Villa’s own material. One of his early hits was the drama Lost and Found . During the silent film era, Raoul Walsh already stood out in the adventure film field with titles such as The New York Musketeer . His mentor, Griffith, signed him to the production company he had co-created, United Artist, where Walsh directed Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad (1924).. Although he had to shoot it on short notice for commercial reasons, Walsh demonstrated his ability to shoot a fast-paced, action-packed film on large sets.

His first sound film was Upside Down , a musical comedy with Victor McLaglen . He was also responsible for one of the most innovative titles of the time, In Old Arizona , the first sound western, which used the new technique outdoors. Unfortunately, while driving through California, looking for locations, a hare crossed his path, and the filmmaker suffered a spectacular accident. As a consequence of it, he lost his right eye, so from that moment on he always appeared in public with an eyepatch. The film had to be finished by Irving Cummings .

He returned to the movies with the Fox blockbuster The Big Journey , in which pioneers travel west in a caravan. She offered her first starring role to a then totally unknown young man, one Marion Morrison. But she didn’t quite like her name, so it occurred to her to change it to John Wayne , with which the interpreter would make history.

Raoul Walsh was also one of the 36 screen professionals who founded the Hollywood Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, along with colleagues like Cecil B. DeMile, actors like Harold Lloyd and Mary Pickford , and producers like Jack Warner and Irving Thalberg.

He entered gangster cinema with El arrabal , although he would soon repeat the theme with The violent 20s , starring one of the mainstays of the genre, James Cagney , and the then promising Humphrey Bogart . Walsh would once again turn to Cagney, again as a mobster in the legendary Red Hot , and to Bogart, as an injured trucker in The Blind Passion , and as a smitten robber in the memorable The Last Refuge , which established the emblematic actor.

One of his biggest hits was They Died With Their Boots On , where Errol Flynn played the legendary General Custer. Despite the friction with the actor, they would collaborate together again on titles like Gentleman Jim .

During World War II, Walsh shoots war films that are as entertaining as they are full of propaganda elements, in search of young recruits. From this period are Action in the North Atlantic – again with Bogart – and a series of films again with Errol Flynn, which are Desperate Journey , Pursuit in the North , Three Days of Glory and above all Objective: Burma , one of the great classics of war adventures.

Walsh loved to experiment with changing genres in some of his films. Thus, he transferred to the western the aforementioned The Last Refuge , in Together Until Death . For his part, he turned his comedy The Redhead into the musical One Sunday Afternoon .

One of the greatest actors of all time, Gregory Peck , starred in two of Walsh’s great adventure stories, The Gentleman of the Seas , where he was a Napoleonic-era captain, and the unforgettable The World in His Hands (1952) . , a gem with Peck as Jonathan Clark, captain of a fur-trading schooner, in love with a Russian countess. The great Gary Cooper tried to resist the onslaught of the Seminoles in Distant Drums . And ‘the King’, Clark Gable , was a fugitive at his command in A King for Four Queens –whose title played with the protagonist’s nickname–, a gentleman who buys Yvonne de Carlo , inThe free slave , and a Confederate soldier recycled into a cowboy, in The Relentless .

Apparently Walsh was about to die with his boots on, still active, because according to Norman Mailer , he was taken from his deathbed so that he could direct the adaptation of his emblematic novel The Naked and the Dead . But Walsh made a full recovery, no matter how badly Mailer saw him, he survived for 22 more years, and said goodbye to the cinema in style with A Faraway Trumpet , an exemplary autumnal western shot when the genre was giving its last throes.

Retired from the cinema, Raoul Walsh died at the age of 93, on December 31, 1980, in Simi Valley (California).