Released 13th September 1915
The Regeneration (1915)
Despite his rugged, hard-nosed persona, Raoul Walsh grew up in a privileged and loving household on New York’s prestigious Riverside Drive. Guests at his parents’ dinner parties included Edwin Booth (brother of President Lincoln’s assassin), boxer John L. Sullivan, and the Barrymores. But Walsh’s fascination with the earthier side of life drew him to the city’s less salubrious haunts: Peck Slip, the bustling seaport, and the Bowery on the Eastern border of the Five Points slum district which he would celebrate in his 1933 film of the same name. New York’s infamous Lower East Side, with its dilapidated tenements teeming with impoverished immigrants, also provided the setting for The Regeneration, the first feature Walsh directed.
A former cowboy, Raoul Walsh debuted in show business as a Ku Klux Klan member, riding a white-sheeted horse on a treadmill in a San Antonio theatre for a stage presentation of The Clansman. Thomas Dixon’s notorious novel and play would later form the basis of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, in which Walsh would play John Wilkes Booth. The show’s leading man, George Center, persuaded the 21-year-old Walsh to accompany him to New York in search of acting work. Center fell into obscurity, while Walsh forged a Hollywood career that would endure for more than half a century.
He started out in movies with Pathé, and claimed his first screen role was in The Banker’s Daughter, in which he played a bank clerk in love with the title character. At Oliver’s Restaurant, an inn near Fort Lee frequented by picture people, he became friendly with the director Christy Cabanne, who offered him a job with Biograph. There, he caught the eye of D. W. Griffith and was among the first members of the director’s new Fine Arts company. Walsh graduated to directing under Griffith’s mentorship and even travelled to Mexico to shoot a picture with the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. He also worked as a second unit director on Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and played the part of President Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
After the release of The Birth of a Nation, William Fox, seeking to augment the success of his new film company, instructed studio executive Winfield Sheehan to lure the promising young director away from Griffith. Over dinner at the Alexandria Hotel, Walsh, believing Fox was a fly-by-night operation, demanded $400 per week – ten times his wages at Fine Arts. To his surprise, Sheehan agreed and offered him a three-picture contract.
Sheehan phoned Walsh as he was about to leave California for New York to say he had two scripts in mind, but had offered first choice to Oscar Apfel, another new Fox director with greater experience. Walsh later told Peter Bogdanovich, “As luck would have it, Oscar Apfel selected the wrong script and I got a thing called Regeneration … a gangster picture which is right up my alley because I knew all these bloody gangster kids.” He moved back to his childhood home on Riverside Drive, living for a time with his father, his sister, Alice, and her husband, William Hoppe, a championship billiard player.
The Regeneration was based on Owen Kildare’s autobiographical novel My Mamie Rose, which recounted his brutal upbringing in the Bowery. Kildare’s Irish immigrant father died three months before his birth, and his French mother soon after he was born. Abused by the foster family that took him in, he left home at seven and survived on the streets by selling newspapers. As a young man, he worked as a bouncer in neighbourhood taverns. Kildare seemed destined for a life of crime until he witnessed an attack by one of his friends on a defenceless woman and saw himself through her eyes. The woman, Marie Deering, was to be a pivotal influence on Kildare’s life. A schoolteacher, she taught the illiterate pugilist how to read and encouraged him to develop his innate talent for writing. The couple fell in love and planned to marry, but in 1900, a month before their wedding, Marie died of pneumonia.
Kildare’s book was a bestseller and spawned a New York stage play that opened in September 1908. Walsh used little from the play when he co-wrote the film’s script with Carl Harbaugh, who also appeared in the film as a District Attorney. How much each man contributed is uncertain. Walsh, in his autobiography, described the plot thus: “Heroine is running a mission in the Bowery for the city’s needy. Hero, doubling as villain (you could do that then), laughs at her for being a do-gooder. Although he is a gangster, she falls in love with him. From there, play it by ear.” His cursory synopsis is typical of the near-dismissive attitude of many early filmmakers, who seemed embarrassed by attempts to label their work as art.
Walsh first shot footage of the Bowery, using local bums for background to save on the cost of extras. One of the first scenes he wanted to film was of a fire on an excursion boat as it sailed down the Hudson. In Hell’s Kitchen, he offered a couple of men ten dollars each to recruit extras for the scene, specifying only that they be able to swim. Their recruits would receive five dollars. The men arrived at the pier, leading a crowd which Walsh described as comprising hookers and “men [who] looked as though they should have been on Death Row for every crime in the book.”
Unfortunately, they supplied more men than women. With no time to equal the numbers, Walsh despatched an assistant to buy twenty-five dresses, which he ordered the “less sinister” men to put on. With all extras in costume, the hired boat set sail. Walsh and his camera crew followed alongside in a tug, sailing close enough for those onboard to hear the instructions he bellowed through a megaphone. On his instruction, crew members ignited strategically positioned smoke pots. Then, with the billowing smoke substituting for actual fire, Walsh ordered the extras to jump into the river’s cold, unsanitary water. Behind him, a pair of launches picked up the drenched, bedraggled extras when they passed out of camera shot. Moments after the director had shouted “Cut!”, he noticed a police launch and three fire launches speeding towards them, their whistles screeching.
While Walsh’s launches plucked people from the river and the fire launches sprayed the excursion boat with jets of water, the police arrested the director and delivered him to the 53rd Street station. There, they booked him for arson, indecent exposure (many of the hookers weren’t wearing undergarments) and malicious mischief. A hurried call to Sheehan, who until recently had been secretary to the city’s Police Commissioner, quickly resolved the situation.
Fox was delighted with the publicity Walsh’s antics created. The New York Times of 12th August 1915 reported how crowds, fearing a repeat of the General Slocum disaster of 1904 in which an estimated 1,300 people perished, rushed to the shore to watch canoes and row boats set out from the Jersey side to helpthose in distress. It reported that William Sheer, who played Skinny in the picture, rescued one man in difficulties by throwing him a life preserver. A fourteen-year-old girl also needed rescuing after growing too weak to stay afloat.
However, Fox was less ecstatic about the day’s rushes. According to Walsh, the billowing skirts of the women leaping into the Hudson revealed that many were naked underneath. Disaster loomed for the novice director. Cutting those shots would ruin the entire sequence, and yet the footage he had captured would never pass the censors. Then Walsh remembered a man from his time at Pathé; he couldn’t recall the man’s name, but remembered he was a master at doctoring pictures. Fortunately, the unknown fixer of films hadn’t lost his touch and managed to salvage Walsh’s picture. Fox was so pleased he doubled his new director’s salary and gifted him a new Simplex car.
It seems from Walsh’s brief synopsis of the plot in his autobiography that his memory was flawed. The heroine, played by the beautiful Swedish actress Anna Q. Nilsson, didn’t run a mission, but volunteers to work in one after she is shocked by the conditions she sees while on a slum tour of a bar with her District Attorney suitor (Harbaugh) and friends. Owen Conway, played as an adult by Rockliffe Fellowes, rescues them when the patrons grow abusive. He then helps rescue passengers on the stricken excursion boat, earning Nilsson’s gratitude and, eventually, love. Under her influence, Conway forsakes his old way of life but finds himself sucked back in when one of his old friends kills a policeman in a skirmish.
The most striking aspect of Walsh’s feature debut as a director is the way he captures the dangerous, decrepit atmosphere of the Bowery, and the shots of the locals: a grotesquely fat man standing on his doorstep; another with a deformed nose. These images create a realism that Griffith, Walsh’s former mentor, never came close to capturing in his earlier gangster movie, The Musketeers of Pig Alley. Where Griffith brought to his film the measured eye and calm professionalism of a seasoned veteran, Walsh’s youthful passion for his subject fills every scene with vivid, authentic detail and creates an underlying tension and threat of imminent violence from characters both unpredictable and dangerous. Rockliffe Fellowes excels in the lead role. There is something of Brando in the way he observes his surroundings, a brooding menace in his dark unsmiling eyes, but also a soulful intelligence.
Critics shared William Fox’s enthusiasm for the film. The Moving Picture World reviewer noted, “The production is most accurate in presenting the depressing squalor of tenement life on the East Side. It is strong and true in its characterisations, and as a spectacle there is a wonderfully realistic depiction of a fire aboard a crowded excursion boat. Director Walsh was fortunate in his selection of types that are in no way an exaggeration of those to be found on the streets of the East Side. There is a grim sort of humour in many of the scenes; there is an abundance of excitement in others, and throughout the picture carries a genuine heart interest.”
The Regeneration was believed lost until a print was found in a building in Montana marked for demolition in 1976. Its survival against the odds has allowed a critical reassessment that his seen it hailed as a classic of early cinema. Its fate is far happier than that which befell its subject and creator. Owen Kildare, dubbed ‘the Kipling of the Bowery,’ adapted his story for the stage with Walter Hackett, but found actor Arnold Daly’s depiction of his character frustrating. Following a fall on the subway, Kildare suffered a mental breakdown. He ended his life at the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in 1911.
Sources: Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director, Marilyn Ann Moss; Who the Devil Made It, Peter Bogdanovich; Action, Action, Action: The Early Cinema of Raoul Walsh, Tom Conway; Bullets Over Hollywood, John McCarty; Each Man in His Time, Raoul Walsh; The Hollywood Professionals, Kingsley Canham; New York Times, 12th August 1915.