Albert Edward Walsh (1887-1980) had a fifty-two-year career as a film director and made around 130 feature films and a dozen or so shorts. His first feature was The Life of General Villa (1914), co-directed with Christy Cabanne, which he also co-wrote and in which he played Pancho Villa as a young man.
Walsh started out as an actor on the stage in 1909, before commencing film work. In 1915, he played John Wilkes Booth in D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Probably his best-known acting role–and his last–was in Sadie Thompson (1928), which he again wrote and directed. He had already directed dozens of pictures by the time sound was introduced, and in 1930 he made The Big Trail, the expensive Fox western that was a commercial failure and launched John Wayne into an unsuccessful first attempt at stardom.
Raoul Walsh played an important part in edging Humphrey Bogart into the top rank, moving him from supporting player in The Roaring Twenties (1939) and They Drive by Night (1940) to a career-defining starring role in High Sierra (1940). He also made multiple films with James Cagney (including the classic White Heat [1949]) and Errol Flynn. He also directed three Clark Gable pictures in the 1950s.
Walsh is rarely listed alongside the acknowledged greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age, such as Ford, Hawks and Wyler. But he was a gifted and versatile director.
In 1933, Walsh directed his sole MGM musical, Going Hollywood.
Leave a Reply