Raoul Walsh’s 1915 'Regeneration': The Gangster Film that Keeps on Giving
I can’t help but notice that the current slate of theatrical films, limited series and streaming fare celebrates - once again - one of my favorite genres, and (next to the western) the most American of story genres, the gangster yarn! Check out some recent titles: such as Mob Cops, the series with David Arquette; the one-time Bonded Pierce Brosnan starring in the family-gangster series, Guy Ritchie’s Mobland. And, last but not least, the hyped-up curiosity piece, The Alto Knights, which offers something hard to beat: a double dose of none other than his Highness of Gangster culture, Robert De Niro - filling in a dual role as Frank Costello and Vito Genovese!
And when I think about the gangster genre’s continued popularity, I can’t help but contemplate the origins of this most enduring genre - and therefore one of the most beloved directors of classic Hollywood cinema, Raoul Walsh, who put the gangster genre on the map with Regeneration in 1915 and afterward gave us sterling examples of the genre in American film history (The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra and White Heat, to name a few).
Walsh began his career in 1913 as an actor with the Pathe Brothers studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He quickly moved to Biograph Studios, where he began directing alongside the Father of American Cinema, the great D.W. Griffith. Walsh appeared as John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and also assisted Griffith by filming the picture’s battle scenes.
Impressed with Walsh’s work for Griffith, up-and-coming studio mogul William Fox pirated Walsh away from Griffith in 1915 and gave Walsh his first chance to direct on his own. What a feature debut it was: the epic film, Regeneration!
Regeneration, thought to be the first feature-length gangster film produced in American cinema, premiered in the U.S. in 1915. Its reputation flourishes even today. Critics and moviegoers alike agree that with this film, Walsh quickly surpassed the directorial prowess of his mentor, D.W. Griffith.
Walsh could not have found better material for his first solo outing as a director than with this story. The tale of a rough-and-tumble young man who lives in the Bowery mirrored almost uncannily the adventures Raoul Walsh and his brother George dreamed up about that area when they were kids. Born in Manhattan and being privileged as they were, they could not have really understood a life lived in the Bowery, but now Walsh had the opportunity to flesh out the imagined narratives he had cooked up long ago. As a director, as a human being, he needed to demonstrate the extent of his sympathies for strangers so as to tell a compelling story about a world he only half knew.
Regeneration is based on Owen Kildare's popular “autobiography” of that day, My Mamie Rose, which recounts the author's (now the protagonist named Owen) harrowed life in the Bowery. Orphaned in childhood, Owen grows to manhood only to become "a beer slinger and a pugilist in a tough Bowery dive," by necessity a man "whose fighting capacity and brutishness made him a bouncer in one of the most infamous bars New York has ever known." When he meets a young woman, Mamie Rose (who becomes Marie in Walsh’s film), Owen steadily transforms himself into a caring, responsible human being. Eventually he and Mamie Rose are to be married, but, tragically, she dies of pneumonia just before the wedding. Nevertheless, she has changed Owen’s life forever.
Kildare’s characters hungered even more than the aches in their stomachs; despair mapped the days of their lives. The book sold well, even garnering a theatrical adaptation that opened in New York City on September 1, 1908.
Walsh tooled the script with his close friend, Carl Harbaugh. Regeneration is rife with the dramatic elements that pleased audiences of early cinema— violence and redemption, heavy sentiment, romance and tragedy. Walsh knew Kildare from the inside—at least in his storytelling intellect—his camera pointed always on Kildare’s tenement culture, capturing and closing in on men and women so hungry in body and soul, so long living in emotional and physical impoverishment, that to grab a necessity when it came along was everyday fare.
Walsh found a leading man, Rockliffe Fellowes, who had great charisma, taking audiences on a roller-coaster ride of emotions—menacing one minute, heartbreaking the next. Fellowes's boyish good looks provide Walsh's camera with a love object that could carry a feature-length picture. No less affecting is Anna Q. Nilsson, a popular actress of the day, who plays Marie, the woman who abandons her upper-class roots to work in a settlement house and reach out to the needy. Nilsson has the earthiness and the gentleness to appear at once enticing and maternal, a woman Walsh and his camera blatantly adore. Her death is a shocking moment in the film, leaving audiences feeling as if the world has suddenly darkened.
Regeneration was an auspicious moment in young Walsh's career as a director. The film is more artful than he would ever admit, especially with its harrowing close-ups, its painterly mise-en-scènes, and its concise, fast-moving storytelling. If nothing else, the picture displays a great range of technical know-how and storytelling conceits, showing that Walsh had been paying close attention to Griffith. Yet much more than technical brilliance is on display in the film, more than simply the display of a young filmmaker's innate awareness of the camera. The film shows Walsh getting inside the material, finding the interior terror in his characters' lives; his actors, especially Fellowes, have a look of desperation and yearning on their faces, rendering them three-dimensional souls who chip away at any complacency the spectator might bring to the experience.
Yet, at such an early time in Walsh's career, this film initiates a conscious decision on Walsh’s part to invent the persona of an artist claiming he is not an artist at all. While movies were not yet viewed as a serious art form, as they would be later in the twentieth century—Walsh and many of his fellow directors often ignored gathering theoretical and aesthetic discussions of their work—Walsh no doubt had a selfconsciousness about what he was doing, an awareness that there was an artfulness on some level to the way a scene or a shot—or an emotion—played out on film. Later in his career, as he chose material sometimes far inferior to his talents, he could certainly disclaim any artfulness at work in some of his pictures. But, at the time of this picture, his material was stirring, and he merged his finely tuned sensibility to it. Still, he disclaimed it. If he called himself a storyteller, that was fine. But he claimed nothing more. When he took a chance four years later, and adapted Longfellow’s poem, Evangelene, for the screen and called it poetry, he was stunned at the film's public failure. He vowed never to direct an “artistic” film again.
But, for now, when Regeneration opened on September 13, 1915, to critical and box-office success, he never talked about art. He talked about the picture as a project that he needed to complete on schedule. If there was a humorous moment during the shoot, he might talk about that. In talking about the film Walsh always chose to focus on the excitement of the production itself and little more.
Regeneration was the first collaboration between Walsh and the brilliant French cinematographer Georges Benoit, newly arrived from Paris and also making his first Fox picture. The two men worked together over the next few years and between them produced stark yet lyrical images in such pictures as Carmen, Blue Blood and Red and the now tragically lost The Honor System.
William Fox was so taken with the box-office success of Regeneration that he bought Walsh a Simplex automobile and raised his salary to $800 per week. Walsh now entered a period of his career where he produced a virtual feast of riches at Fox, but he was still hard-pressed to concede that he had the artist in him. He was making a noise at the studio and was off to a long, stellar career as a Hollywood director.
Walsh’s film is fresh enough to inspire any generation of filmgoers. Available on DVD and Blu-ray.