1941 -THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE, charming comedy

Looking for a change of pace from all the action films that he had been making.  Raoul Walsh was able to get Jack Warner the head of Warner Brother's studios to let him make this lightweight but very charming comedy with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland.  The plot has Cagney playing a man taking a dental correspondent course by mail all the while pining for Rita Hayworth who is the titular character, a neighborhood beauty.

Cagney gets involved with perennial character actor Jack Carlson who also has a thing for Hayworth, but ends up being the fall guy for Carlson's construction business which has been using inferior materials to build homes.  One thing leads to another and Carlson manages to marry Hayworth much to Cagney's disappointment.  However Cagney finally sees the light and ends up marrying the charming de Havilland.   Finally realizing he got the better deal when it came to a spouse. 

The film is really a nostalgia wallow.  The entire film score seems to be made up of old songs from the 1900's. The photography by the legendary James Wong Howe helps set the mood of the story and Raoul Walsh probably the last guy in the world you would think of when it came to directing a romantic comedy does his usual excellent job staging the scenes.

 

The film clearly appealed to an audience that was looking to romanticize a simpler time.  All of the performances are good and Warner Brothers didn't cheapen out on the production.  This is the kind of film that the "Hollywood Dream" factory could turn out when it was firing on all cylinders.

The screenplay was by Julius J. Epstein and Philip Epstein a couple of real pros.  They wrote Casablanca, the movie versions of Arsenic and Old Lace and The Man Who Came to Dinner.  The running time is 97 minutes.

1951 - CAPTAIN HORATIO HORNBLOWER, pretty good seafaring flick

This is a film version of C. S. Forrester's Hornblower, series about a man who starts out as a teenager and joins the British Navy circa the 1800's.  The books follow Horatio Hornblower through his navel career which ends up with him becoming an admiral.

 Warner Brothers Studios chose to film a Hornblower story with him as a captain taking on the French and a Latin American dictator who calls himself "El Supremo." There are several exciting navel battles recreated with some impressive models and the director Raoul Walsh does his usual good job moving the story along.

Frankly I had my doubts about this film.  For the most part the cast was made almost entirely of British actors.  The film was shot on location in England and France which gave it a reasonable look of authenticity.  My chief worry about this filming was the casting of the leads  Gregory Peck and even more so Virginia Mayo.  Peck is obviously an American playing a British officer but this is Peck at his best.  He could bring a lot of authority to a performance and he actually pulls off his part acting like a British Navel Captain.

 

Virginia Mayo was kind of another story.  A stunning looking actor particularly in color with her flaming red hair, she is American through and through and was very good as the gangster girlfriend of James Cagney in White Heat.  Here she is supposed to play the sister of the Duke of Wellington.  Mayo doesn't even attempt a British accent. However for whatever odd reason she's reasonably effective as a British aristocrat.

 

The selling point for this film are the action scenes.  Walsh and his special effects and production team do an excellent job of staging battles between two ships which when you think about it are essentially just a couple of boats shooting cannons at each other.  Walsh is primarily though of as a director good with westerns and gangster movies but apparently he was also something of an Anglophile. 

The film was written by  C. S. Forester, Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts and Aeneas MacKenzie all seasoned Hollywood professionals. The running time is 117 minutes.

1943 - NORTHERN PURSUIT, ridiculous World War II thriller

Apparently Nazi agents were running all over northern Canada during World War II. Fortunately Erroll Flynn is on the job as an undercover member of the RCMP.  It's hard to know what to make of this film.  During the war the studios were good at putting out films that were essentially propaganda pieces for the country.  Some were even decent like Air Force, The Mortal Storm or The Great Dictator .  But Northern Pursuit needs to be put in the same category as Flynn's other silly propaganda film Desperate Journey, which had Flynn and Ronald Reagan as Allied pilots trapped behind Nazi lines battling their way back to England.  Flynn is the star in this film so he gets no help from Reagan this time.

The plot involves the Nazi's sneaking bomber parts into Canada so they can assemble a bomber and blow up a canal between Canada and the United States, that's determination for you.  Somehow the Nazi's capture Flynn's fiancee played by an actor named Julie Bishop who was one of those second tier performers who never hit the big time.  Since the film is set in snowy Canada we have lots of studio footage of fake snowy sets mixed with actual 2nd unit footage shot in some winter locations.  I can only assume that the actors were roasting under the bright soundstage lights in their winter fur outfits. 

The film was directed by Raoul Walsh who apparently thought the film was nothing more than a "potboiler."  Walsh was a good director and the best thing you can say about this film is that he paced the film so well that the damn thing does move along quickly.  The rumor mill said that William Faulkner worked on uncredited on the screenplay but you'll find no traces of Faulkener's "The Sound and the Fury."  The film also makes a joke about Flynn's real life rape trial.  Flynn was to put it as mildly as possible a real lady killer in his personal life.

The screenplay is credited to  Frank Gruber and Alvah Bessie.  The running time is a quick 93 minutes.

1951 - DISTANT DRUMS, a western set in Florida

With the exception of the rather novel setting of Florida this is very much a Gary Cooper western which could just as easily have been set in California.  Cooper plays an army captain sent on a mission to stop guns from being sent to the in this case to some very nasty Seminole Indians.  After fulfilling his mission of blowing up the fort with the guns that had been supplying the Seminoles, Cooper and his troops are pursued by the Seminoles through the Florida Everglades.  This is basically the same plot as the director Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma.  But if the story worked once it will work again I guess.

 Along the way Cooper picks up a sexy gal who you know will end up falling in love with him played in this case by a performer named Mari Aldon.  Also along is veteran character actor Arthur Hunnicutt who as usual is playing Arthur Hunnicutt.

The film was written and not very well,  by a couple of decent writers, Niven Busch and Martin Rackin.  The director was old action pro Raoul Walsh.  If the film has any interest at all it's the extensive on location filming in Florida and Walsh's skill with staging action scenes.  Otherwise this film just seems completely out of it even for a 1950's film.

 

The running time is 101 minutes.

1940 - THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, typical Warner studios movie

This film about independent truck drivers is actually half of a really good action drama and half a ridiculously turgid soap opera plot towards the end.  George Raft and fourth billed Humphrey Bogart are brothers who are trying to establish themselves as independent trucks.

The first half of the movie has all of the good stuff, lots of snappy dialog as Raft flirts with Ann Sheridan and some good driving stuff courtesy of director Raoul Walsh.  Unfortunately things come to a grinding halt when Raft gets involved with Ida Lupino the wife of The trucking line they eventually end up working for.

Lupino has the hots for Raft and she is so in love with him that it drives her to insanity in an incredibly improbable but entertaining way.  In fact Lupino is so nuts that it almost redeems the last half of the film.

Since this is a Warner Brother's film the production values are good and the film does move along at a fast clip  the film is a brisk hour and a half.

95 minutes, written by Jerry Wald and  Richard Macaulay.

1956 - THE KING AND FOUR QUEENS, boring Western.

All this western has going for it is the star power of Clark Gable because this is a fairly drab film.
Gable is a con man who shows up at a ranch run by 4 women and their battle axe of a mother in law.  He's in search of some buried gold.  Gable charms each of the woman and that's about it for a story.

I suppose the idea was to base the film around Gable's star power but this  approach probably called for a director who could bring out the personalities of the actors a little stronger.  Action director Raoul Walsh was probably not the ideal choice in this case.

The film was shot in CinemaScope which was probably not the best choice for an intimate chamber piece of a story.

86 minutes, written by Margaret Fitts and Richard Alan Simmons.

1943 - BACKGROUND TO DANGER, typical World War II movie stuff

There's just not much to say about this piece of World War II propaganda from Warner Brothers studio.  George Raft is a salesman doing business in Turkey during the war.  He gets mixed up with a bunch of Nazis led by British actor Sydney Greenstreet.

 

 When you needed an actor to play a cultivated German bastard studios always hired British actors. Anyway, Raft gets mixed up with the Nazis and a Russian spy played by German actor Peter Lorre and American actor Brenda Marshall playing Lorre's sister of all things.

This is the kind of stuff that Hollywood could pump out during World War II and generally it made money even if the picture itself really wasn't that good.  One of Warner Brothers best directors Raoul Walsh put this film together probably in his sleep in this case.

 

The film has the required amount of shootings, fistfights, car chases and double crossing spy stuff.  Even for a 1940's film it's all kind of tired and boring this time.

The screenplay was by W. R. Burnett, the running time is 80 minutes.