Regeneration (1915)

Originally posted to Facebook on 5/12/2016

This week we watched Regeneration, our first film from 1915. It was directed by Raoul Walsh, who had a long career in both the silent and sound eras. He was a protégé of D. W. Griffith, and played John Wilkes Booth in Birth of a Nation. He directed, among many other films, The Thief of Bagdad (1924), The Roaring Twenties (1940), White Heat (1949), and continued directing up through the 1960s. The list of famous actors he worked with is too long to list, but it includes a few who are still alive today -- for example Olivia de Havilland, Sidney Poitier, and Joan Collins.

This particular film was his first, and it shows the continuing evolution of the movies. The type of camera movement that we first saw in Cabiria last week is used in this film as well, although a little less extensively. It also has an increased amount of cutting and cross-cutting. The plot concerns a young boy who is orphaned, and has a rough upbringing, on the streets and in abusive households. He grows up to be a young gang leader (played as an adult by Rockliffe Fellowes), but falls in love with a well-to-do social worker (played by Anna Q. Nilsson), and begins to feel divided loyalties. Some of the plot elements reminded me a bit of The Town, though that was a much more modern and textured film. I’m not sure I could quite say that this is a good movie. It is certainly melodramatic at times, but I enjoyed it more than some of the other films we’ve seen recently. It has a grittiness we haven’t seen before -- though A Child of Paris had a certain grittiness too (and also excepting Traffic in Souls which we had to stop watching after ten minutes.) Certainly seeing a film set in more-or-less contemporary times, as opposed to historical epics, gives it a greater immediacy. I also thought that the matter-of-fact depiction of the brutality of city life for people unfortunate enough to fall between the cracks was well portrayed.

Next week we move onto Carmen, our second film of 1915. It’s directed by Cecil B. DeMille, another director with a long career than spanned the silent and sound era. It will be the first film of his that we’ve seen. The link to our viewing plan is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT