TSPDT - Raoul Walsh


	"Raoul Walsh's extraordinary career spanned the history of the American motion picture industry from its emergence, through its glory years in the 1930s and 1940s, and into the television era. Like his colleagues Allan Dwan, King Vidor, John Ford, and Henry King, whose careers also covered 50 years, Walsh continuously turned out popular fare, including several extraordinary hits... Raoul Walsh is now accepted as an example of a master Hollywood craftsman who worked with naive skill and an animal energy, a director who was both frustrated and buoyed by the studio system." - Douglas Gomery (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)

	"It is time to consider Walsh as rather more than a tough guy, a fellow who likes to laugh, a primitive with rough sentiments. This passionate Shakespearean is a physical film-maker only because he depicts a world of spiritual turmoil. His characters are projected on the world by their own energy and committed to a space that only exists for their actions, fury, spirit, craft, ambition and unbridled dreams." - Jean Douchet

	"'Action!', the word that starts the cameras rolling, sums up the career of this American director. Sprawling, brawling, often almost primitive action, teeming across the screen, marks Walsh's stories of comradeship and battles against the odds. He had a talent for making the densest of action sequences seem uncomplicated and uncluttered and his characters, like the scenes they distinguished, often have a raw, unfettered power." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)

	"A supreme action director, Walsh would be regarded as one of the greats of Hollywood's golden era if not for a long period in the 1930s when he languished with mediocre projects. A number of excellent silent films (What Price Glory?) weren't followed by work of similar quality until the director went to Warner Brothers in 1939. Walsh rarely gave in to the psychology of his characters, but directed on a pure narrative level which showed what was important without merely telling it in the dialogue." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

	"The transition from silents to sound pictures didn't hit me in any way. I just kept the thing moving regardless of the sound...Of course, there was a great upheaval amongst the directors when talking pictures came in. They called me a renegade because I was one of the first ones to do an outdoor talking picture. They said that they'd created such a medium with pantomime, you know, and now this talking stuff was going to destroy it all. I said it was going to destroy us if we didn't get along and get with it. So they finally all came in." - Raoul Walsh (Directing the Film, 1976)