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Pre-Code Walsh 98 Walsh became increasingly disenchanted with Fox after he directed What Price Glory? When he first arrived at Fox in 1915, the studio seemed a much better oiled machine. Back then, William Fox spent good money for good directors and the best material he could get so as to build up his enterprise. As a result, good scripts were much more likely to come down the pike. Now, Walsh thought those days were waning. The year before, Sheehan had bought What Price Glory? for him; this year, he bought Seventh Heaven for Frank Borzage. “[These were] two good silent stories,” Walsh told Kevin Brownlow in 1967. “And they were both terrific hits. I think [What Price Glory] grossed $169,000 in one week at the little Roxy when the top was sixty cents. So you can tell how they lined up for that. Then, for some unknown reason, Sheehan, who had been a newspaper man, . . . brought quite a few writers and reporters and stuff out and gave them the job of writing scenarios, and they never bought any more big properties.”1 Fox directors now had to make the best of it. It made no sense to Walsh that the studio would hire writers and reporters to pen original (and inferior) scripts when, in the “old days,” they could just adapt a good novel or short story and “put it on” for less money.2 In these years at Fox, Walsh still got fired up over good scripts; he’d had some good ones. They weren’t as personal to him as they were just good stories. Later in his career, as he felt more comfortable at Warner Bros., his need for good material tapered off. He never wanted for good writers at Warners. He became, in a way, complacent —there was no need to be anything else, in his eyes. When he ended his contract years later at Warners, he cared less about the material than about simply being on the set making a picture. For now, however, Walsh was looking at two pictures he knew he’d 5 The Big Camera Pre-Code Walsh 99 aim directly at “Main Street,” the term he still used for pictures he sent out to the masses strictly for entertainment’s sake, not for the sake of “art,” as he put it: he still hadn’t recovered from the box-office failure of Evangeline in 1919. Despite the haunting, even poetic imagery he’d found in himself for What Price Glory?—a soldier caught in the midst of flames of war surrounding the edges of the frame, another dying soldier pleading for the blood to stop—Walsh committed to directing for the adventure of it, the challenge of building a story, but not for art, and not ever for personal expression. This attitude strengthened over the years. The Monkey Talks, released February 20, 1927—one of those pictures headed straight for Main Street—is an absurd tale about a physically undersized man in a circus who after impersonating a monkey is literally taken for one—with tragic results. The critics didn’t buy it but warmed a little more to Walsh’s next picture, The Loves of Carmen, released in September of that year. Walsh had liked working with Dolores del Rio in What Price Glory? so much that he cast her in this Carmen. A humorous remake of Walsh’s 1915 Theda Bara vehicle, Carmen borders on making fun of its title character, a feature that earned it good box-office figures even if the critics were not so enthusiastic. Herbert Cruikshank later said of Walsh in Motion Picture Classic, “We’ll forgive him his Carmen, if for no other reason than in translating the ancient story into cinematic terms, he disclosed an independence of spirit, a willingness to blaze new trails, a disregard for precedent, which are much needed and seldom found in the celluloid industry.”3 What Cruikshank might have meant in calling Walsh an independent spirit “willing to blaze new trails” was Walsh’s fearlessness in flying in the face of censorship. As Kevin Brownlow has said of The Loves of Carmen: “The degree of sexual innuendo was surprising for a film of its time. Walsh established a reputation [in What Price Glory?] of being able to smuggle more exposure of a female thigh than any other director. He pulls this off (literally) once again in The Loves of Carmen.”4 Walsh...

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