White Heat (1949)

WHO: Raoul Walsh directed this film starring James Cagney as Cody Jarrett.

WHAT: Cody Jarrett's watchful eye is everywhere in this post-war gangster picture. Even when it's not. As played by Cagney, Jarrett holds a grip on his gang of big-time bandits, ensuring their fealty through their need for his leadership and their fear of his determined ruthlessness despite their obvious hatred of him. He's perfectly aware that the only member of his gang with real loyalty to him is his mother (played chillingly by Margaret Wycherly); when he gives himself up to the police on a phony charge in order to protect himself from being nabbed for the real heist he committed in another state on the same day, he's confident that his associates will back him up on this gambit. His words to his wife (Virginia Mayo), "Cry a little. Like you're sad," drip with sarcasm and menace and the knowledge that their marriage is built on the same cocktail of greed and coercion that binds his gang together.

But it's an untenable long-term configuration. Jarrett can handily patch the fraying of his coalition that occurs during his prison stay, but when he tries to replace the one rock-solid devotional relationship he has with another after its dissolution, he picks the wrong man, resulting in the explosive finale of the picture which has gone down in cinema history as perhaps the iconic image of Cagney and of the movie gangster.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 8:30.

WHY: The PFA's Raoul Walsh series ends tonight but cries out for a sequel. I feel lucky that I've been able to see nearly every show in the series, something I'm rarely able to say about the PFA's wonderful director retrospectives. But with only fourteen films shown out of Walsh's approximately hundred completed films (admittedly many of them now considered lost) my desire to see more of the consummate Hollywood director's films has not been sated by the series but stoked. I hope there's soon a chance to see Sadie Thompson, Walsh's famous silent starring Gloria Swanson and himself, and The Naked And The Dead, which Dave Kehr spoke of so tantalizingly in one of his enlightening  conversations with the audience during his appearances last weekend, and Battle Cry, a favorite of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who gets his own PFA retrospective starting in October).

It's not just obscure titles that were missing from this series, either. One of the best-known Walsh films, The Roaring Twenties, was MIA from this selection. It, like A Lion In the Streets and the truly great Strawberry Blonde, is another Walsh-Cagney collaboration, and tonight's showing of White Heat will have to stand in for the other films in this fruitful director-actor pairing.

But I don't mean to complain. I'm truly grateful that this series was mounted by the PFA, as it brought me much closer to understanding the importance (and, yes, the limitations) of one of the least-discussed major directors from the first half of Hollywood history.

HOW: White Heat screens in 35mm, following a (separate admission) showing of Walsh's other famous 1940s gangster picture, They Drive By Night starring Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino.

The Lawless Breed (1953)

WHO: Raoul Walsh directed and was, according to biographer Marilyn Moss, uncredited producer on this film.

WHAT: Walsh's 1941 picture They Died With Their Boots On may have been about George Armstrong Custer, but its title was taken from a 1935 book about three other larger-than-life figures of the Old West: Ben Thompson, Bill Longley, and John Wesley Hardin. Perhaps to make up for this decade-old slight, Walsh eventually did make a film about Hardin based on the outlaw's own memoir, using ascending star Rock Hudson in the role of the well-known gunslinger and gambler (who had been played by John Dehner two years prior as a supporting character in the Phil Karlson-directed The Texas Rangers). That film was The Lawless Breed. It was the first of three films Walsh made with Hudson as lead, all in 1953. It would be followed by the swashbuckler Sea Devils and by another Western Gun Fury, the latter distinguished by having been shot and released in 3-D (although Walsh by this point had lost sight in his right eye, making him, like André De Toth and Herbert L. Strock, a monoscopic director of a stereoscopic picture).

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive at 6:30 PM.

WHY: Being able to attend virtually every screening thus far in the PFA's retrospective A Call to Action: The Films of Raoul Walsh has been a highlight of my cinematic year. Thanks to the lifting of the July BART strike just hours before the series launched, I've been able to attend eight out of nine screenings in the series to this point, all except The Big Trail, the only one of the selections I'd seen before (albeit nearly ten years ago). With another strike looming I'm not sure I'll be able to complete the rest of the series, which includes some of Walsh's most well-known titles (yet still unseen by me) like High Sierra and They Drive By Night. But I definitely plan to be at The Lawless Breed tonight, and probably stay for the noir-ish Western Pursued starring Robert Mitchum.

Everything in the series so far has been well worth watching, but certain films and scenes can be singled out as highlights. They Died With Their Boots On and Objective Burma are rah-rah patriotic action films made on the eve of and the near the end of American involvement in World War II, but at least for me, in 2013 they played as compassionate inquiries into the senselessness of martial sacrifice. Objective Burma in particular was overwhelming in 35mm, as light from the projector bombarded my eyes in the climactic night battle sequence, like luminous shrapnel being cast from a flicker-form grenade. Silent films Regeneration and What Price Glory benefited from crack piano accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg, and made me hope that more Walsh silents like The Red Dance or (although it is considered a lost film) The Honor System might make it onto a screen in my vicinity in my lifetime. Of the four pre-code era films in the series, it was hard to beat the series openers Sailor's Luck and Me And My Gal for their exuberant humor and earnest sentiment, but I also very much appreciated seeing Wild Girl the other night, one of the few early-1930s Westerns I've seen that's recognizable to modern audiences as a "pre-code" film, with Joan Bennett starring as a woman with the kind of sexual energy generally stamped out of Hollywood pictures after 1934, and some wonderfully risque dialogue by supporting cast players such as Eugene Pallette and Minna Gombell.

New York Times DVD reviewer Dave Kehr was in town to present Wild Girl and to discuss "the future of classic films" (to latch onto a phrase Kehr sheepishly coined on the spot) and other topics with local critic Michael Fox and a highly-engaged audience. Though I very much related to one audience member's comment that the discussion didn't go very far in exploring the challenges of using the written word to encourage audiences to congregate to watch films made to be seen collectively, I was nonetheless stimulated by the conversation that did take place, mostly centering on the lamentably increasing unavailability of all but the most solidly canonized classic film titles without resorting to bootlegs of questionable quality.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of information Kehr related regarded a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (I think it's section 108-h) that should allow libraries and archives to distribute at least certain films (from my understanding, those made in the 1920s and 30s at any rate) that copyright owners refuse to circulate "at a reasonable price". Could the intentional studio withering of their repertory, DVD and streaming distribution channels put thousands of unavailable titles into a legal zone in which they could be distributed by a place like the PFA in lieu of commercial distribution? A lawyer would be the only one to be able to hazard an informed guess, but the prospect is surely tantalizing.  With copyright extension likely to become a major policy battle in Washington in the next five years as the 1998 extension's expiration looms in 2018, the landscape could shift dramatically relatively soon- or it might not change at all. But in the meantime, I hope to take advantage of rare opportunities to see films like The Lawless Breed when I can.

HOW: The Lawless Breed screens via a new 35mm print, following a 6:00 book-signing event with Kehr on hand with copies of his recent anthology When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade.

Regeneration (1915)

WHO: Raoul Walsh directed and co-wrote the scenario for this.

WHAT: I haven't seen Regeneration except in a few clips such as those included in the short biographical documentary on Walsh found on the Fox DVD for The Big Trail. In that doc, critic and historian Tag Gallagher calls Regeneration "still a dazzling film today," and compares Walsh's direction to the Ford's Theatre scene from the most famous film by his mentor D.W. Griffith, in which Walsh portrayed John Wilkes Booth:

He makes you part of the movie. If you see The Thief of Bagdad and there's Douglas Fairbanks flying over Bagdad on a flying carpet, you're on a flying carpet. In A Birth Of A Nation, for example, Griffith keeps the camera in the orchestra. Now six months later comes Walsh's first feature Regeneration. There you see Anna Q. Nilsson looking at some boys an a wharf, and she beckons at the boys. She does it directly into the camera, looking at you. So the camera is now with the actors, part of the actors, and it brings you into the movie.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, at 7:00 PM.

WHY: The PFA's Raoul Walsh series got off to a roaring start last Friday with a perfectly-matched double bill of Sailor's Luck and Me And My Gal that had me in equal measure thankful that this series is happening at all, and ruing that it's only fourteen titles long. While introducing the series, PFA video curator Steve Seid made mention of the Italian Walsh retrospective I mentioned in my first article on this series, and talked of how attendees swooned over his 1951 movie with Gary Cooper Distant Drums even though it had to be shown in a French-subtitled print, the only known available. The undercurrent of his comments seemed to be that PFA audiences deserve to see only the best-quality prints of the films programmed there. I'm not so sure I'd be so distracted by the presence of foreign-language subtitles on a Hollywood film (I used to see prints like that all the time when I was living abroad), but I understand the reluctance to have the PFA spring for the cost of shipping a less-than-ideal print, especially if, as Seid indicated, he was personally less than enthusiastic about Distant Drums. But his tantalizing words just made me eager to see it for myself somehow.

As Seid noted in a recent article posted to the PFA blog the institution has been "scrimping and saving" to purchase a new 4K digital projector capable of showing DCP, the now-industry-standard replacement for film reels. The device was installed a couple months ago, and I have yet to sample it. I have mixed feelings about it. Though it will allow the PFA to screen more of the new artist-made video works which are increasingly made available by their makers through DCP (perhaps David Gatten's The Extravagant Shadows might finally make its Frisco Bay premiere?), the use of such projectors to show digital versions of films made using photochemical processes seems to me to be a triumph of convenience over integrity. As Seid notes,

Films transferred to digital acquire a new kind of received illumination—it’s no longer simply light passing through a plastic strip but endless bits of information shuttled through a light array. These files are also output with perfect stability whereas film moves through the projector with a perceptible shudder, a fragile physical object making its way through a tolerant pathway.

Luckily the entire Walsh series is to be shown on 35mm film, the way it was intended by everyone involved in its creation. Or would be luckier to have a DCP version of Distant Drums as part of the series, were such a thing available? It's a conundrum, and not one likely to be solved in a way that satisfied my format-purist instincts. At any rate Walsh's Regeneration and What Price Glory? are two of the six silent films planned to screen on 35mm at the PFA this summer. The other four are the Gainsborough-produced films in the Alfred Hitchcock silent series coming to the venue in August- the same four shown on 35mm at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Castro Theatre presentation last month, which I discussed at the time. As for Hitchcock's British International Pictures-produced silents, they would have to be left out of the PFA's Hitchcock 9 series if the 4K projector had not been installed.

The truth is, more and more new so-called "restorations" of silent films are being made available only digitally. In the previous four years the SFSFF had only screened one to three programs of digitally-presented work per festival. This year there will be as many as five essentially-DCP programs, matching the number of DCP shows in the Hitchcock weekend. The opening night presentation of Prix de Beauté starring Louise Brooks and Sunday afternoon's showing of The Weavers both exhibit new "restorations" from European archives, unavailable on formats other than DCP. In addition, the Sunday morning shorts program featuring Chaplin, Keaton, etc. and the closing film Safety Last! are both currently-touring thanks to US distributors, and also unavailable through these middlemen except via DCP. I'm as yet unclear on the format of the Winsor McCay animation program presented by scholar and animator John Canemaker. When he came to the PFA to showcase these films several years ago, he used 35mm prints, but there is no indication one way or the other on the SFSFF website.

Still, these 4-5 programs make up less than a third of the total programming at the SFSFF this year. I'm excited to revisit favorites like Tokyo Chorus and The Patsy on 35mm with new (to me, at any rate) musical scores, to finally see long-sought titles such as The Half-Breed, Legong: Dance of the Virgins, The House on Trubnaya Square and The Joyless Street, and to discover titles I was (at best) only dimly aware of before the festival announcement, like The First Born, the Golden Clown, Gribiche and The Last Edition. And I'll probably stick around to check out some of the digital versions as well- how else am I going to see rarities like Prix de Beauté or The Weavers these days?

HOW: Regeneration will screen via an archival 35mm from the Museum of Modern Art, with live musical accompaniment from pianist Judith Rosenberg.

Me And My Gal (1932)

WHO: Raoul Walsh directed this.

WHAT: I haven't seen this pre-code romance starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, but none less than Manny Farber called it Walsh's best film. Here's an excerpt on the film from his 1971 article on the director:

It is only fleetingly a gangster film, not quite outrightly comic: it is really a portrait of a neighborhood, the feeling of human bonds in a guileless community, a lyrical approximation of Lower East Side and its uneducated, spirited stevedore-clerk-shopkeeper cast. There is psychological rightness in the scale relationships of actors to locale, and this, coupled by liberated acting, make an exhilarating poetry about a brash-cocky-exuberant provincial. Walsh, in this lunatically original, festive dance, is nothing less than a poet of the American immigrant.

WHERE/WHEN: 8:40 tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Every July I feel a significant amount of envy for friends fortunate enough to find themselves in Bologna Italy for the Il Cinema Ritrovato, probably the archival, film historian, and cinephile-critical communities' most essential screening event of the year. Right now Meredith Brody is filing dispatches for Indiewire that are turning me rather green. I'm consoled that the festival will end tomorrow, and that some portion of the restorations and retrospectives premiering there this year will turn up next year at the Pacific Film Archive.

Every edition of the Bologna festival features big retrospectives of the early works of major Hollywood auteurs whose careers began in the silent era; in 2007 it was Chaplin, for instance. Following this it was Von Sternberg, then Capra, Ford, and Hawks in 2011. Each of these directors (except, for some reason, Ford) was then given a sizeable series at the PFA within six or seven months. Last year it was Raoul Walsh's turn in Bologna, and though it's taken a bit longer for it to come around this time, it's with much rejoicing that the PFA is bringing a fourteen-film set of Walsh films starting tonight with a pair of pre-codes, Sailor's Luck and Me and My Gal.

Though the fourteen films chosen represent just a fraction of the nearly one hundred films made by the director who began as as assistant to D.W. Griffith, it's evenly divided between two phases of his career. Seven films (including tonight's two) are silents or early talkies that for the most part are not frequently shown in cinemas, on television, or in home-mediatheques. Of these seven I believe only the silent gangster saga Regeneration and the terrific early-widescreen Western starring John Wayne The Big Trail have been put out on commercial DVDs in this country. I'm most excited to see the silent war movie What Price Glory, which was a huge sensation in 1926, in part thanks to the salty dialogue mouthed by actors Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. Audiences who hadn't been avid lip-readers before, started paying more attention, and so did the Hays office, which soon issued an edict against profanity in movies "by either title or lip" as a response.

The other seven films in the program come from the 1940s and early fifties, and represent most of Walsh's most famous films: Objective Burma, They Died With Their Boots On, High Sierra, They Drive By Night, White Heat... But believe it or not I haven't seen a one of these I just mentioned. There was a time when Errol Flynn, Jimmy Cagney, and especially Humphrey Bogart retrospectives were staples of repertory programming at places like the Castro, but none of these pictures have gotten much theatrical play in the 21st Century. So I'm excited to fill some crucial gaps. I have seen Pursued at the Castro as part of a James Wong Howe series, and will be pleased to get a chance for a 35mm re-viewing on August 3rd, when it screens after another Western, The Lawless Breed; the latter film will be introduced by esteemed critic Dave Kehr, who will also be on hand for the August 1st showing of Wild Girl, a pre-code remake of the 1914 Marin-shot Bret Harte adaptation Salomy Jane.

Westerns and war pictures are not the most fashionable classic genres for modern Frisco Bay moviegoers, so I hope that not only the pre-codes and contemporary crime pictures are well-attended. Both as an endorsement of Walsh, and a vote to keep these Italian-tributed auteur retros coming to the PFA. This year Bologna focuses on Allan Dwan, another, even-more-prolific director who began in the silent era (he directed eleven Douglas Fairbanks films to Walsh's one) and whose filmography I've barely scratched the surface of. We'll be able to scratch a little more in a couple weeks when the San Francisco Silent Film Festival debuts its restoration of The Half-Breed, which we get the privilege of seeing before audiences in Bologna or New York (whose MOMA is winding down an even-larger Dwan series than the one in Italy). I'm crossing my fingers that we'll soon get a chance to see more- especially after the recent publication of a tantalizing and free dossier on the director.

HOW: 35mm vault print.