Regeneration
Dir.: Raoul Walsh
USA 1915
72 mins
To be honest I was rather unsure about writing an entry for Regeneration on this site. Raoul Walsh’s early feature about New York street hoodlums is certainly historically interesting for a number of reasons, but it remains a silent movie of lesser merit than many others that came after it. In fact, watching it almost a hundred years on only emphasises the huge leaps of cinematic sophistication that were developed over the five or ten years immediately following it: visual techniques and narrative depth that Regeneration lacks. But ultimately I decided to include it here for numerous reasons; it is still very serviceable for a 1915 movie thanks to a few excellent scenes, and the director is hugely significant to American cinema – Raoul Walsh is the man who made The Thief of Bagdad (1924), The Roaring Twenties (1939), White Heat (1949) and High Sierra (1941) among a great many others. Mostly, though, it’s included because I have to take the DVD back to the library on Friday, and I highly doubt I’ll ever end up seeing it again.
All of this disclaimer-ing doesn’t bode too well in light of my promise to use Unsequence Cinema for recommending movies to people. However, I do indeed recommend Regeneration, but with some caveats: if you like American social-issue movies about crime and poverty, or just where they cross over with American gangster movies, and you want to trace these genres right back to their roots, then you are heading towards this movie whether you know it or not. Having said that, it doesn’t much resemble its celebrated descendents. There’s a perfectly good historical reason for this: consider that the classic movie-gangster archetype is basically a wiseguy anti-hero derived from the three lead characters in Little Caesar, The Public Enemy or the original Scarface (all released between 1930 and 1932) – movies that referred specifically to the desperate poverty of returning war veterans and illegal alcohol networks in cities like Chicago. Well, the era of alcohol prohibition in America didn’t begin until 1920, and the country didn’t opt into the First World War until 1917. So there’s no war veteran disaffection in Regeneration, and no bootlegging.
The film refers to its protagonist, Owen Conway (above centre, played by Rockliffe Fellowes), as a “gangster”, but in practice his crimes aren’t exactly of the ‘organised’ variety: he and his gang essentially just harangue people for their cash on the streets and in bars, not too far different from Max and Noodles’ childhood gang tactics in Once Upon a Time in America (1984) but without the forays into blackmail. Fellowes is a strong and sullen presence as Conway, and his ascension to the head of the street gang is shown to result more from his ability to fight for his own pride and survival, as well as for those less physically less capable than himself, than any ruthlessness or cruelty. His eventual rehabilitation (or regeneration into a do-gooder) is inspired by a beautiful young woman, an upper-class angel who founds a charity to look after the downtrodden of the neighbourhood Owen is apparently the scourge of.
We’re obviously way back into elementary film storytelling days here, so it’s unfair to criticise the threadbare plot arc. But some of the crucial scenes illustrating Owen’s growing love for the benevolent Marie Deering (Anna Q. Nilsson) are among the film’s high points, especially the one from which I’ve nabbed this screenshot:
Owen’s friend and ex-gang member, now working with Miss Dearing at the Settlement House, has persuaded him to help rescue an infant from the neglect of its violent father. Owen is reluctant but helps out, returns the child to its worried mother, and heads back to his hoodlum friends in the bar. Marie drops by briefly to thank him, and after she leaves he stares off into space while the other hoods pick up their (presumably unsavoury) conversation without him. He is clearly touched and coming to a profound realisation, and the combination of Walsh’s framing and the unfolding pace of the scene invests Owen’s character with real depth for perhaps the first time.
Most of Regeneration’s formal achievements are now so ingrained into film language that it would hardly seem like an endorsement if I listed them, but permit me a short lapse into terminology. I noticed a couple of nice dolly shots (one dolly in, one dolly out if you’re interested) and a symbolic dissolve that’s nice if rather out of place, but the framing is largely quite unremarkable: flat stagey ‘boxed’ rooms cutting to iris-in close-ups. The sheer antiquity and formativeness of Regeneration probably precludes any non-scholarly recommendation of it to others, beyond any special interest in early ‘social’ pictures, as I said before.
However, it is now remembered primarily not for its artistry but for its setting – Walsh filmed much of it on location in New York, with extras made up of real-life hoodlums, prostitutes and street urchins. An early scene on the dockside brought to my mind the New Jersey docks of On the Waterfront (1954), except fifty years before: a snapshot of an even more bygone era. (Rockliffe Fellowes even looks a bit like Brando in that film I think, and certainly has the stature.) The final sequence shows the city in a fascinating panorama. In fact it is this climax, during Owen’s pursuit of his thoroughly nasty ex-gang-mate Skinny (William Sheer) after the attempted rape of Marie, that outclasses the rest of the movie with its fine, suspenseful cross-cut editing between three different characters engaged in varying degrees of chase, tussle and escape through a grimy and towering New York tenement building. One emerges from the upper window and hangs from the washing lines – another bursts out into the street from the cellar, wielding a pistol – the third is frozen in moral turmoil somewhere inside. It’s a very well-staged ending.
There’s plenty more than can be said about Regeneration, especially in comparison with Raoul Walsh’s later films, but as I’ve only seen The Roaring Twenties I’m not really in a position to go much further down that route. That the director supposedly came into this movie straight from working on the huge and groundbreaking D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915) is notable: Regeneration can be seen to link two celebrated directors, each peaking artistically at very different moments in film history.
I think I’ll wrap this up with a screenshot-dump of interesting shots, beginning with this brilliant one of Skinny anxiously hiding out after stabbing a policeman.
