La rigenerazione

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.

People who think that all silents are sticky with Victorian melodrama will be surprised by the sustained pace, the bracing realism, and the soft-pedaling of the sentimental elements of this startlingly fresh film. The 28-year old Raoul Walsh had already written and produced a dozen films when he directed this. Although the narrative rambles a bit, Walsh's dynamic use of film grammar - closeups, dollies in and out, cross-cutting between scenes, sharp editing - makes REGENERATION look more modern than many silent films made ten years later. Walsh shows his creativity when he uses the circling movements of dancers to foreshadow public panic in an impressively staged sequence of a fire [although it has little plot function]. Titles are used sparingly throughout, and even they are terse and direct. The performances are also surprisingly natural, from square-jawed Rockcliffe Fellowes [who looks something like Robert Stack] to Anna Q. Nilsson, who gives a delicate, sympathetic performance as the good girl/settlement worker. Within the outline of a traditional melodrama, Walsh forthrightly portrays the underside of contemporary society, keeps the sentiment light, and provides an ending that is not without surprises either.

Directed by Raoul Walsh, this is an exciting and poetic film, using all the elements at play in his greatest movies. Those signatures really stand out, even all the way back at the beginning of his career.

It's the story of a tenement street kid who loses his kindly mother at age 10. (The scene that starts the film is quite moving. This is not to be a comic adventure film, but a very serious drama). The boy is taken in by a neighbor woman, a harridan, but a kind hearted one whose husband is a drunkard who beats her and the boy every chance he gets. The boy starts to lose whatever humanity he had, due to the influence of this battling couple.

He rises to a position of 'prominence' in the tenement community over the years, since he has all the things that the denizens of the street find attractive - a devil may care attitude, a sense of daring, a lot of strength and good looks. He's never lost his inner gentle nature, but it's hidden under a mask of bravado and cynicism that he needs to survive. The actor, Rockcliffe Fellowes, looks like a cross between Marlon Brando, Jimmy Cagney and Jason Segal. He's quite good... in fact he totally reminds me of Brando in THE WILD ONE. The camera loves him. As Owen, he's able to play both sensitive and tough, which is a magic combination for Walsh.

He falls for Marie whom he calls Mamie Rose (Anna Q.Nilsson), a wealthy girl who is being groomed by her parents for marriage to the city's new District Attorney. The DA has just been appointed and tells all the newspapers that he is cracking down on crime. One night, the girl tells the DA that she wants to see what the street toughs are like for herself. The DA tells her and her friends that he knows a dive where they can see all the lowlifes they want to. Of course, after having his picture in the papers all over town, the DA is immediately recognized and the crowd starts to heckle him showing him how tough they really are. The girl cries out for someone to help the foolish DA, and our Owen breaks up the crowd and leads them to safety. Owen is smitten, and Mamie is struck hard with the need to help the poor and destitute.

She immediately starts work in the neighborhood, doing good deeds and handing out medicine and money to the needy. The rest is just about what you would think a Walsh film would be, with Owen trying to make good out of unrequited love for Marie, who doesn't really realize his feelings. He finds inspiration to become better educated and make something of himself through her ministrations. She turns to him as a pillar of strength when things go wrong.

His loyal pal, a street kid who has a deformity who Owen once saved from being made fun of, is a splendid actor. All of the street toughs really look like street toughs, which is refreshing and a bit scary. Walsh builds up the action in a very similar way to The Roaring Twenties, with a really evil gang leader who takes over when Owen tries to goes straight. There was a surprise ending, for me anyway.This film was very well done for the time it was made and I can see how it made Walsh famous. It made me love him all the more for his sensitivity and realism.

Raoul Walsh had just come off _The Birth of a Nation_ both as one of Griffith's assistant directors and as an actor (most prominently as John Wilkes Booth), when he made this film. In his autobiography, Walsh credits Griffith with "teaching" him not only about much of the art of fiction filmmaking, but also about production management technics that aided him in taking full advantage of many of New York City's most pictorial exterior locations.

The locations play an important role in adding to the naturalism of an otherwise highly melodramatic plot with the high society young woman turned heroine social worker (much overplayed by a major star of the 1910s, Anna Q Nilsson) and the regeneration of the one-time Lower Manhatan gang leader.

The wonder of this film is the performance of the male "star", Rockliffe Fellowes, who played in over a dozen nearly unremembered films until he died in 1950. His performance is so subtly varied and electrically alive that one is reminded of Brando in his early 1950s films. An interesting sidenote about his performance: The movieola film editing machine -- that magnified the small 35mm frame to about 4 inches by 6 inches as it ran the film stock through the viewer at the proper projection speed -- was not invented until much later. In 1915, editors had to hold the footage up to the light to see each frame and/or use a magnifying glass; but they could not also run the film at speed at the same time. Hence, many of the subtlest nuances that cross the hero's face could not be clearly seen and judged in editing: _Regeneration's_ editor often cuts away before the movement has settled, or cuts into a close or medium shot of the hero after the nuance has already begun.

Watching the film on a large screen today, one is aware how powerful present-day editing technics are at capturing all such movements in the hands of a skilled editor. In _Regeneration_ there is a distinct feeling of rough editing at the moments we leave or cut to the hero at the "wrong" instant. By the way, the original title was NOT _The Regeneration_, but _Regeneration_ alone. From which we can surmise that Walsh was looking to create a work with universal meaning.

Raoul Walsh, aged 28, has already done it all : he's been a Cow-boy, an actor, and Griffith's assistant for BIRTH OF A NATION, in witch he also played Lincoln's murderer. That's certainly why his very first movies, as this "Regeneration", are already so mastered and so mature. The story of the movie is quite simple : it tells us the life of a gang leader : Owen, from his unhappy childhood to his "regeneration", thanks to Mary, a young lady, who believed in his kindness, and allows him a second chance. But beyond this classical story, this movie is both a brilliant example of Griffith's omnipotent influence on early American cinema and also a totally original and new form of cinema, for it invents the codes of the Gangster's movie and of the "Film Noir" for the years to come.

As in a Griffith's feature, the ideas of the movie are developed thanks to an original use of the editing. For instance, at the beginning of the movie, Walsh superposes a frame of Owen adult, drinking a beer, with one of the same character as a child, eating an ice cream in the exact same position. This editing has of course a narrative function – it reminds us that Owen is the same character of the beginning of the movie, only few years after – but it also presents him, whereas he could appears as a dangerous criminal, as the same innocent victim that he was younger. This king of narrative and yet symbolist use of the editing is both a homage to Griffith and an introduction to Walsh'own style and thematic.

Griffith's influence is also very strong in the movie's will to be spectacular. When Walsh wants to show how Owen tries to change in the contact of Mary, he creates for instance a gigantic fire on a boat, where Owen risks his life saving children. Of course, we're not really in the bigger than life world of INTOLERANCE or of BIRTH OF A NATION, but still, it's the same spectacular idea of the cinema that Walsh and Griffith share. In 1915, Raoul Walsh is certainly still in the shadow of Griffith, but "Regeneration" is a lot more than a copy of Griffith's cinema, and can be fully appreciates without its relation to its style.

The movie is particularly realistic and has nothing to see with Griffith traditional romanticism. It's the adaptation of an ex-criminal autobiography, and Walsh is really good in showing sordid and realistic details, especially in the description of Owen's terrible childhood. The movie is surprisingly strong, violent and realistic for its age. But Walsh also adds to this realistically point of view, a sort or mythification of his Gangster's character, who almost become an icon, witch we'll find again in the all American Cinema to come, from Hawks 's SCARFACE, to Scorsese's movies. Fiction is already torn between realism and myth, and a large part of Walsh's Cinema will develops this thematic, as in his absolute masterpiece : THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON.

The realism of the movie even goes with the myth, for it's mostly in the realistically description of a gangster's everyday life that the "Film Noir" will takes its future codes. Owen and his gang spend most of their time doing nothing : they walk on the docks, in the streets or drinks in clubs, but we almost never see them in action. Or when we do, we see them doing good things, for action time is in the movie regeneration time. Morality is in Walsh'Cinema a rhythm question. Inaction and immobility stuck to the Gangster's life, whereas action and movements is associated to honesty and to the opportunity to grab a good life.

That's how « Regeneration » always seems to be torn between external (Griffith/Walsh) and internal (realism/myth) conflicts, that are the extension of Owen's inner fights between a honest's life and a gangster's one, between the soft world of Mary, and the harsh and masculine one of the Gang. The end of the movie literally destroys this psychological conflict, when the two characters that symbolized each side both died. After having destroyed the two conflicted sides of his personality, Owen's life can really begins, as well as Walsh's cinema.