Raoul Walsh
3 credits on HibingeTV
American film director, a founding father of the action-adventure picture. Born in 1887, he began as an actor (he played John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation) before turning to directing. His films include The Thief of Bagdad (1924), The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, and White Heat. He lost an eye in a hunting accident and wore an eyepatch for the rest of his career. His direction was fast, muscular, and influential on the development of the gangster and adventure genres.
Directed
Crime, Drama
Directed by Raoul Walsh, Regeneration is a 1915 American silent crime drama and one of the first full-length gangster films. Based on the 1903 memoir My Mamie Rose by Owen Frawley Kildare, the film stars Rockliffe Fellowes as Owen Conway, a poor orphan who rises to become a gang leader on the Lower East Side before a chance encounter with social worker Marie Deering (Anna Q. Nilsson) inspires him to seek redemption. Long feared lost, the film was rediscovered by preservationist David Shepard and selected for the United States National Film Registry in 2000. It was the first full-length feature directed by Walsh, who would go on to become one of Hollywood's most prolific directors.
Crime · Drama · Silent
Regeneration
1915 - Crime
Western, Adventure
A wagon-train epic shot on location across seven states, The Big Trail follows a party of settlers from the Mississippi to the Pacific Northwest, led by the young scout Breck Coleman. Raoul Walsh shot the film in Fox's experimental 70mm Grandeur process, and the wide frame gives the landscapes and the wagon-train set pieces a scale the standard 35mm version could not match. The film is John Wayne's first leading role, at 23; he plays the kind of plainspoken, decent hero he would spend the rest of his career refining. Tyrone Power Sr., in his final film, plays the villain. The film's widescreen version was little-seen at the time and the picture flopped, but it survives as a landmark of early sound spectacle. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.
Western · Adventure
The Big Trail
1930 - Western
Romance, Fantasy
A silent romantic fantasy-adventure on a scale that still startles. Douglas Fairbanks plays a thief of Bagdad who, on a whim, sneaks into the Caliph's palace, steals an apple, and falls in love with the Princess. To win her he must best rival princes in a quest across a world of magic: a flying horse, a six-armed statue, an underwater kingdom, a monstrous spider, an invisibility powder. Raoul Walsh directs from a scenario Fairbanks co-wrote under a pseudonym, and the production design draws on the illustrations of Edmund Dulac to build an Arabian Nights dreamscape out of lumber, paint, and ingenuity. Anna May Wong is a standout as the treacherous Mongol slave. The film's influence on the fantasy genre is hard to overstate. Published in 1924, it is in the public domain in the United States.
Romance · Fantasy · Adventure · Silent
The Thief of Bagdad
1924 - Romance