Raoul Walsh

Raoul Walsh lived the kind of life his films celebrated. Born in New York in 1887, he claimed to have punched cattle in Texas and Mexico before drifting into the young movie business, where he apprenticed under D. W. Griffith. He acted the role of John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation and co-directed early features, then set out on his own with a taste for scale and motion that never left him.

In 1924 he directed the silent spectacle The Thief of Bagdad, a shimmering fantasy built around Douglas Fairbanks's athleticism. The following years brought the boisterous war comedy What Price Glory and Sadie Thompson. Then, in 1928, while scouting locations for the pioneering sound Western In Old Arizona, a jackrabbit crashed through his car windshield and cost him an eye. The black patch became his emblem, and he abandoned acting to direct full time.

Sound suited Walsh's plainspoken, headlong style. At Warner Bros. he became a master of the American action picture: the sprawling frontier romance The Big Trail, which gave a young John Wayne his first lead, the Prohibition saga The Roaring Twenties, and the cavalry epic They Died with Their Boots On. He had a gift for wedding physical spectacle to genuine feeling, and for directing men on the edge of self-destruction.

His two greatest gangster films are studies in doomed ambition. High Sierra turned Humphrey Bogart from a supporting heavy into a star as a weary outlaw making one last stand. White Heat gave James Cagney the most explosive exit in crime cinema, atop a burning gas tank, screaming that he'd made it to the top of the world. It remains one of the most electrifying moments the genre ever produced.

Walsh kept working into the 1960s, turning out Westerns and war films with unpretentious craft. He never courted critics or theorists, and he sometimes dismissed his own artistry with a shrug. But his instinct for movement, landscape and violent masculine drama helped define what an American movie could feel like. He died in 1980, ninety-three years old, having filmed nearly the entire life of the medium.