The Regeneration

By the standards of its time, this is a better than average film, and it is still watchable, even though the social and cinematic conventions of 1915 may make it rather quaint to some viewers. Still, the theme about a good woman regenerating a rascal is not unusual today, and here it is told with coherence and simplicity.

One may find the acting style quaint, too, but some of the worst excesses of the silent days are avoided for the most part. Perhaps we can thank young Raoul for that. The editing is choppy, but that may be due to losses over the years, and it may vary depending on the print or tape translation one sees.

In cinema, 1915 is best known as the year of DW Griffith's epic Birth of a Nation. While I won't play down the talents and achievements of Griffith, his debut feature was merely a culmination of his prior achievements, a milestone in cinema culture but adding nothing to cinematic language. Regeneration however, a largely overlooked film (although it has its champions), was perhaps truly the most important picture of that year.

Raoul Walsh, previously an assistant to Griffith, and already having a handful of short features to his name, made his full-length debut with this romantic gangster fable. The picture opens fairly conventionally for the time, Walsh displaying an incredibly firm grasp of film form for such a young director. The opening shot establishes the mood - the recently bereaved protagonist sitting alone in a bare room, a curtain billowing forlornly behind him, after which we cut away to the hearse bearing his mother in the street outside. However, we then see the lad go to the window and look down. In the very next shot, the camera is looking down at the hearse, exactly as he would see it. Bam! The point-of-view shot is born.

The point-of-view shot is not merely a convenient alternative angle for storytelling. It places the audience into the position of the character. It's something unique to cinema – you can't recreate that in the theatre. The only real equivalent is in novels, when the narrative is told from a character's perspective. Walsh here gives cinema that ability, and moves the audience from the position of spectator to that of participant. It's particularly apt too for Regeneration, as it was adapted from an autobiography. Walsh remains consistent to the story's roots by primarily showing the points of view of the protagonist, Owen.

Another great thing about Regeneration is its use of dolly shots – that is, moving the camera in or out, towards or away from the action. This wasn't an innovation as such, the dolly having been invented by Giovanni Pastrone for his 1914 epic Cabiria, but the dolly shots in that picture are largely uninspired, at best creating smooth transitions between different length shots. Walsh however really explores the possibilities of the technique. First he uses it to home in on the young Owen in the scene where his adoptive parents argue over the dinner table. Again this is a move which draws us into the character's world, as if we are being pulled forward and forced to look. Much later, in the scene where Anna Q. Nilsson bursts into the gangster's den, the camera itself rushes forward, reaching the centre of the shot at the same pace she does. In effect, the camera movement mimics hers and gives the audience a little taste of her sense of urgency.

Needless to say, there is a lot more to Regeneration than these pioneering camera techniques. Walsh's handling of the dynamic moments is particularly adept, with a climactic ride-to-the-rescue worthy of Griffith, and some particularly realistic fight scenes. But he was just as capable of great tenderness as he was of great action, and the picture is shot through with the sense of melancholy romanticism that is typical of Walsh. And let's not forget the fine naturalistic acting on display, although stars Rockliffe Fellowes and Anna Q. Nilsson would soon fade into obscurity.

By way of a disclaimer, I should point out that Regeneration may not literally be the first motion picture to use point-of-view shots. There was, after all, a wealth of experimentation in the early days of cinema, and many films are obscure or lost. It is shortly after this though that the technique seems to enter mainstream usage. For example, Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat, made several months after Regeneration, features point-of-view shots, whereas DeMille's Carmen, made about the same time as Regeneration, does not. Tag Gallagher, in his superb essay on Walsh for Senses of Cinema, makes similar claims. Whatever the case, Walsh certainly excelled in a new kind of cinema, one which placed the audience inside the story, and this principle would shape much of Walsh's work throughout his fifty-year career.

Raoul Walsh had been an actor and an understudy assistant director under D. W. Griffith when Fox Films hired him to direct his first feature film, September 1915's "Regeneration." Many cite Walsh's full-length directorial debut as cinema's first gangster feature film.

Walsh had run away from home at 15 and worked a series of laborious, dangerous jobs, including a cow hand and a seafarer. His hands at that time were so calloused he refused to shake hands. Because of his horse-riding skills, D. W. Griffith hired him as an actor, with one of his first roles as a young version of Mexican revolutionist Pancho Villa.

Walsh showed enough of a curiosity of filmmaking that Griffith took him on as an assistant director, most notably helping him out in "The Birth of a Nation." In the 1915 film, Walsh also plays John Wilkes Booth, who kills Abraham Lincoln. Newly formed Fox Films Corporation heard and saw so many good things from Walsh that William Fox hired him to do one of his studio's first feature films.

"Regeneration," adapted from a 1908 play based on Owen Kildare's autobiography, was a redemption tale of a boy who grew up to become a criminal, but eventually realizing the wrongs he had committed through the guiding influence of a female social worker. Walsh decided to film in New York City's poor Lower East Side using actual criminals and prostitutes to heighten his movie's authenticity.

Elements of Griffith, who Walsh labeled as his teacher, is clearly visible in "Regeneration:" the masking of the lens, the parallel editing and camera positioning, numerous close ups and implementing newly devised cinematic techniques such as a handful of dolly movements. Certain scenes Walsh filmed contained chiaroscuro lighting, anticipating Germanic Expressionism film aesthetics by a few years.

Walsh would become one of Hollywood's auteurs noted for his hard-hitting, macho crime movies such as 1939's "The Roaring Twenties," 1941 "High Sierra," and 1949's "White Heat." He would direct until his final film in 1964, and have a script of his produced as a movie in 1970.

I'm not a lover of silent cinema for a host of reasons, The Regeneration manages to avoid a couple but walks headlong into others.

It tells the tale of a young boy who loses his mother at a tender age, he's raised into violence and poverty and finds himself as an adult engaging in criminal activity. But when a kind hearted lady enters his life he finds himself questing for change, but can he escape his past?

The first thing that struck me about The Regeneration was how stunning it looks, there are movies made decades after this that don't look this good. The camera work is oddly crisp, the cinematography excellent and the performances are considerably less hammy than you'd expect from this era.

I feel like the movie would have been best served as a short, maybe at a 30-40 minute length. As a feature it dragged and the soundtrack though superior to most of it's ilk really does begin to grind on you.

The Regeneration is a wonderful attempt and one of the best of its type that I've seen, alas certain tropes of the genre that I despise meant it could only go so far.

The Good:

Looks incredible for its time

Great finale

The Bad:

Music gets old

Drags around the middle

Rather than repeat what others have written, I'd like to comment on how this film managed to get into circulation.

The only known print of the film was found in the basement of a building in Montana in 1976. Preserved (and not too soon given the deterioration seen in the middle of the film), it was part of a series of films shown during the New York Film Festival representing titles which had recently (1978) been saved. I remember seeing all of them; they included Lillom (recently issued on DVD in the Murnau/Borzage box and worth seeing), and The Letter (with Jeanne Eagles, which blew everyone away).

It is a miracle that films still turn up in such a manner even this late in the game. Most films from this time period have long ago turned into flammable dust (they started to deteriorate as early as the thirties), and it is particularly fortunate that "Regeneration" is now among the living. Despite its crudities, it feels like a documentary of the seedier elements of New York, and it still works its magic; it has matured very well. Given that we can see how the streets of New York really looked almost 100 years ago, the film may play better than it did back then. Most of the people in this film are not actors, they are real people, and that is what we reacted to when we saw this back in the seventies.

Additionally, the film is a real window into the transitional period when the one-reeler had turned into a longer, more ambitious feature. As a first feature for Walsh, this film is really extraordinary when we consider that the tools of film-making were still crude (the comments on the editing of the film are correct. However, the abruptness plays better on the big screen). Even more, the film also reminds us that the numerous features made between 1914 and 1920 included some real gems that are gone forever, and cannot be re-evaluated. How many really good actors and directors are known in name only because their work has disappeared?

I consider this one of the finest examples of an early silent feature, and one of the landmark films of the silent era. It is an illustration of how the director of that time found his or her way, made mistakes and had chances to improve. It shows how filmmakers were taking the vocabulary used by Griffith and some European filmmakers to expand the techniques of storytelling to hold an audience's interest for an hour's worth of entertainment.

A must-see if you are interested in silent films.