Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director by Moss, Marilyn Ann (review)

One of the “true adventures” that Marilyn Ann Moss relates in in Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director resulted in the director’s iconic eye patch. What one might assume to be an affectation by a flamboyant Hollywood personage was the consequence of a freak motoring accident that occurred when he was in Utah directing In Old Arizona (1929). He was driving a jeep at night. The jeep hit a rabbit, which was hurled up through the windshield, shattering it, and sending a piece of glass into Walsh’s eye. One suspects, after reading this engrossing and exhaustive biography, that Walsh didn’t much mind having acquired legitimately, and while working, such a visually romantic wound. He made action movies and thought of himself as an adventurer.

His heroes tended to be not particularly reflective, but dashing, bold, adventurous, supremely capable, and gallant. They represented, in Moss’s view, a projection of Walsh’s image of himself or at least of how he wished he were.

Not surprisingly, then, Walsh loved working with Errol Flynn. Walsh made seven movies with Flynn. Moss regards one of them, Gentleman Jim (1942), based on the boxer James J. Corbett, as “Walsh’s great autobiographical tract.” Corbett is brash, “boyish, good-looking, honorable, and sensitive but, above all, a champion” (233). Flynn “is playing Walsh—the Walsh of Walsh’s dreams” (232).

But in a career begun in 1913 and lasting until 1976, Walsh directed over a hundred and thirty films. His significance in film history lies less in the films he made with Flynn than in westerns like The Big Trail (1930) and Pursued (1947), crime films like The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941), and White Heat (1949), and war films such as Battle Cry (1955) and Objective, Burma! (1945). What these films of varied genres have in common is a focus on action. Their stories unfold efficiently, and the action depicted before the camera is often full and rich. Consider, for example, The Big Trail’s endless wagon train filmed in numerous sweeping long shots, and the scene in which wagons are lowered by rope from a high cliff. Or the densely populated marching sequences in Battle Cry. Or White Heat’s climactic scene in an oil refinery, culminating in several stupendous explosions.

Walsh relished directing action scenes. (Moss notes several times that when shooting a dialogue scene, Walsh typically would turn his back to the scene or walk away once the actors started talking. He judged the scene by listening to it.) His love of action is apparent in how hard he worked to achieve it. For The Big Trail, Moss reports, Walsh used 20,000 extras, 1800 head of cattle, 1400 horses, 500 buffalo, 725 Indians, 185 wagons, and 700 barnyard animals—most of them trekked over 4300 miles from location to location. Whereas a director like Hitchcock used editing to imply action, or others, like Ford, would often suggest it off-camera, Walsh put it all up front, often in astonishing wide, deep frames.

Walsh was, ostensibly, happy to be known as an efficient director of action movies. A painful experience with an early film may have contributed to his settling for that reputation. His Evangeline (1919) was a self-conscious attempt at art that failed badly with critics and the public. (Perhaps it was before its time; a DVD copy of the film goes for $99.00 on Amazon as I write.) From then on, Walsh hated to talk about cinematic art. But his skill as an action director and his business-like efficiency on the set got him a lot of work with the studios.

Walsh acquired his commitment to a no-nonsense approach on the set and finishing on time from D.W. Griffith, for whom he worked often early in his career. Walsh regarded Griffith as a genius. According to Moss, Walsh also learned...