Well, Raoul Walsh has actually been dead for 25 years, but Peter Bogdanovich and Museum of Moving Image film curator David Schwartz will be on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show today during the 1 PM hour — educated guess says probably at 1:20 PM specifically at 1:07 PM — to discuss the late great filmmaker and to publicize the ongoing series currently playing at the museum. If you miss the live broadcast, you can stream it later from the WNYC website, and I think even download it as a podcast.
Walsh is one of the all-time Hollywood greats. His career lasted for over 50 years. He directed films from the earliest days of the silent screen through the early ’60s. The MMI series includes a broad selection from the Walsh oeuvre of (at least according to IMDb) 135 films!. (60 of them between 1912 and 1930.) Walsh worked regularly with star Errol Flynn (they made nine films together during the ’40s), and this weekend MMI will show three of them: Gentleman Jim, featuring Flynn as 19th Century boxing champ “Gentleman Jim” Corbertt (Saturday at 2 PM); Uncertain Glory, a WWII drama with Flynn as a French criminal who offers to help save a group of French prisoners by taking responsibility for sabotaging a German bridge (Saturday at 4:30 PM); and Objective, Burma!, another WWII action film featuring Flynn as the head of a group of paratroopers sent to Burma on a near-suicidal mission to blow-up a radar station (Sunday at 2 PM). They’ll also be showing one of Walsh’s early silents, the 1915 film Regeneration. MMI’s description says it was “the first feature-length crime movie,” and it was shot on location on the Lower East Side. The film will be presented with live piano accompaniment. Now that’s worth a trip to Astoria.
If you want to catch one of Walsh’s most notable films, be sure to go see the great gangster pic, psudo-noir White Heat featuring the famous James Cagney “Top of the world, Ma!” sequence on Aug. 20-21 at 4:15 PM each day.
If you want to actually learn something about Walsh from people for more learned than I, check-out the Lopate broadcast.
Out of Focus 