“You can’t let the audience get ahead of you”: Raoul Walsh interviewed in 1972

How did you actually get the opportunity to direct? You were an assistant to D.W. Griffith, but did he just tell you to get behind a camera and start shooting?

Well, the studio manager, Mr Woods… he kind of liked me because I was there early in the morning and I would stay till late at night, and was always around with Griffith. He called me and said they were going to give me a chance to direct. So and so of a picture, a nice tight little story. So he gave me a job. They were then making a five-reeler – I think it was an Ibsen play – and the director was on it for about a week. It was one of the first five-reelers Biograph ever made, but the director, poor devil, had hit the laughing water and he was thrown out. Griffith asked me to take over directing Henry Walthall and the others. He had me come in to see him with the actors. I had rehearsed them, and he said, “Very good,” or “Change this a little,” or “Do this here.” He was a great man.

Looking over your films of the 1930s, I noticed that you liked to work with Victor McLaglen. Was he a personal friend?

I gave him his big start, you know, in What Price Glory [1926], and we became close friends after that. 
He had a naturalness that I liked. The actors we used for their faces and physiques in the early days were much better in pictures than actors who came from Broadway and gave you an overblown, stagey performance, yelling their lungs out because they were still talking to the gallery. In the days of the silents you could hear those bastards a mile away. “OUT OF MY HOUSE!” one might say. I’d then say, “Turn it down, we’ve neighbours asleep here…” [Laughs] One of them would ask, “What is the procedure now, Mr Walsh?” “You come in, kick him in the ass, and then go out,” I’d answer. “He doesn’t believe in rehearsing, this man,” they’d say. “He rushes you in and rushes you out.”

What kind of storyline did you have for The Thief of Bagdad [1924]?

Doug [Fairbanks] was a pretty good writer himself, you know. We would have meetings and he had a very valuable woman there, a Mrs Woods, a former schoolteacher. We’d meet before we started the picture. Doug would say, “Well, Irish, what do you think? Should I do it this way ?” I’d get some wild idea and Doug would say, “Jesus! That’s good. Keep thinking, keep thinking.” Then Mrs Woods would work on it and Doug and I would go and exercise or he’d start rehearsing the stunts he had to do. We used to run around a track, too. We were always exercising. And we got along well, Doug and I. It was a great departure for me, away from the rough stuff I’d been doing to this dreamy kind of epic.

Did you always edit your films? 

Oh, yes, yes.

What about in the 1940s? 

By then the producers had become powerful, but the way I shot a picture allowed them to cut it only one way. They couldn’t fool around with it.

What was your most successful picture?

Grossing? I guess What Price Glory. It grossed $170,000 in one week, at sixty cents top admission. The crowd was so big in New York that for a while Fox had it running twenty-four hours a day. The sequel, The Cock-Eyed World [1929] was a hit, but the third one was a dog. I told them they shouldn’t go to bat three times with a thing called Women of All Nations [1931], but they knew it all, so I said, “It’s your money, boys; it isn’t going to go.” Those two fellers [Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe] were such a drawing card after What Price Glory, but then the public got a bit tired of them. The producers should have given them a rest from that story. Cock-Eyed World was the first film in which McLaglen talked. He had a very broad English accent… “All right, blighties, get out of my way here.” I hired a couple of gorillas to go round and correct him: “Sit between these two bums and talk like they do.” During the shooting he learned to talk with more of an American accent, but at night he’d visit with his English pals, then the next day come on the set with his accent and we’d have to change it all over again.

What kind of scripts did you prefer working on?

Outdoor stuff, adventure, things that would keep the picture moving. I didn’t like indoor films. I never did a picture with guys in tuxedos or evening clothes.

Did you write many of your scripts? 

We’d add things to a script, take things out, tinker with them. The writers would fill up with laughing water and write: “There’s a cat that appears in a doorway, and it slowly walks across…” There’s nobody who can take a scene with a cat. It’s one animal you can’t work with. One time somebody insisted that a cat appear in a picture I made. I told the lady who owned the cat to put it in a doorway and then make it move across a room. The lights went up on the shot and that cat took off and hasn’t been found yet. We’d always change scenes like that and impossible shots that would take two hours to get with all the technical problems involved. Some of those writers would fill up on the laughing water and write half a page on a shot in Grand Central Station. Well, you couldn’t go down to Grand Central Station and line up for just half a page. If you had four or five pages, that was all right. So we’d cut it out and play it in front of an outhouse somewhere… See, we had to work so damned fast. You’d be working on a picture in June and it had to be in a theatre in September. It was pre-sold, and you got money from the exhibitors for the production, so you felt you really had to bear down on it. In the early days, I’d finish something at two in the morning and start a new one at eight the same morning. 

What do you think was your best script?

I don’t know. I like the old What Price Glory. I like Thief of Bagdad; it was a change of pace. But with all the one- and two-reelers, all the pictures I made – over two hundred, you know – it’s pretty hard to go back over them. They all differ so, and the silent script was a lot different from the talkies script. When talkies first came in, they brought a lot of people from Broadway and long speeches were written that half of those bums couldn’t remember. You’d have to keep cutting them. Of course, in the beginning there was no outdoor sound. Everything had to be indoors.

Did making films ever become not fun for you?

Only when we’d go out on location and the clouds would come up. We had no lights in the early days. Gradually we started to get some lights, though, Klieg lights. Lots of times the actors got what we called Klieg eyes. Pretty tough: their eyes would be badly burned and they had to put castor oil in them for two or three days before they could see again. 
A lot of times we’d use reflectors and forget the lights. The sun would hit the reflectors and shoot the sun in.

Did it perhaps become less fun when the producers came in?

Yes, it became a big problem then – a big problem. Directors lost a certain control, and there were lots of arguments about scenes.

Did you strive for realism in your films? In White Heat [1949], for instance, before [Virginia] Mayo and [Steve] Cochran kiss, they spit out their gum. Did you introduce a touch like that?

Sometimes you had time – the clouds would come up or something would have to be changed on the set – 
and you’d start thinking about little pieces of business for the actors. But otherwise you had to go so damn fast you didn’t stop for a gum-chewing scene. That’s the difference between a stage director and the motion picture director. The stage director has got a month in which he can put all that stuff in. But on a picture sometimes you have so much trouble getting a cast that you can’t do much with the script before you start. Sometimes you never saw a bloody actor until he was down there on the set at eight o’clock in the morning.

White Heat is one of my favourites among your post-war films.

That’s a big hit all over. I just got back from Japan. I’d go to a restaurant and the waiter would say, “White Heat! White Heat!” It played well there all the time. The Japanese love everything that ends tragically: they remember that last scene with Cagney and think it’s one of the greatest of scenes. I made another picture, Colorado Territory [1949], in which Joel McCrea and Virginia Mayo were killed at the end. That’s a terrific hit in Japan. They play that and White Heat all the time. Every Saturday night the damn things are playing.

Your heroes, especially in gangster films, always seem to die at the end. You once said that one reason you were happy to have Bogart in High Sierra [1941] was that you could kill him off, but you didn’t feel you could kill off George Raft.

He turned it down, you know, Raft. [Jack] Warner told me. Warner always referred to actors as “those bums”, and he said, “Raoul, this bum turned the script down. Why don’t you talk to him?” So I went to George’s house and had lunch with him. We talked it over, but George was adamant. He said, “No, I don’t want to die in the end.” I said, “Georgie, you’ll have to, the censors will demand it.” He said, “To hell with the censors, then.” So I went back to Warner and said, “Jack, no going. Talked to him for two or three hours. He doesn’t want any part of it.” Warner says, “Well, who the hell are we gonna get? Goddamn it, we gotta get going!” He hated to hold anything up. I said, “Well, you’ve got a fellow under contract – Humphrey Bogart.” Warner said, “Do you want to take a chance with him?” I said, “Of course I will.” “All right, go and see the bum.” I went over to Bogart and he read the script and called me up about midnight: “Christ! This is good. When do we start ?” So that was that.

Who are some of your favourite directors? 

I like old Henry King, and John Ford.

Do you think you and John Ford share some affinity?

Probably. We’re both of Irish descent. He came into the business pretty early. I was the first one in. Another fellow named Allan Dwan was also a good director. I think Allan came in the year after I did. And Charlie Chaplin and I were great pals in the early days. I remember when Charlie worked for Mack Sennett [at Keystone Studios] for five bucks a day.

Were there any foreign film-makers you especially liked?

I liked [Ernst] Lubitsch. He and I were pretty good pals. He once said, “Raoul, I would like to make vat you make: is box office. You make vat I make, sometimes box office, sometimes no box office.” Fritz Murnau, he was a good one. You see, when Lubitsch and Murnau first came over, they got in touch with me, and I sort of steered them about the different approaches to things. Gave them a pretty good schooling in how to handle themselves. They appreciated that, and we became good friends. [Casablanca director] Mike Curtiz and I knocked around in the same studio. Mike was a nice old guy.

One critic, Andrew Sarris, has said, “The Walshian hero is less interested in the why or the how than in the what. He is always plunging into the unknown, and he is never too sure what he will find there.” Do you feel that’s too precious a criticism, or that it’s on the nail?

I guess it’s so. Everyone has his own impression of things. Maybe the guy was drunk.

What do you see in your films that makes them Walshian?

Maybe the continuous action. That’s probably it. You see, sometimes the stories are so trite, and you can’t let the audience get ahead of you. “Jeez, he’s going to get shot.” So you carry them along to get them away from that thought.

Was there a single most satisfying moment in your career?

Having been in the business so damn long, that’s hard to answer. My greatest disappointment was censorship, which until recently was very strict. I could remake some of the pictures I made way back: it would be great. All the stuff that was cut out.