IMDBcinephile Walsh had much more spotlight subsequently. Can we ever forget "White Heat", "High Sierra", "The Roaring Twenties"? He's the reason John Wayne is on the map and he has worked in a vocation where he has given many actors their magnum opus, and moreover, he's one of the directors that inherited story before methodology.The role that he left an indelible impression on me, was his portrayal of John Wilkes Booths. He was a harrowing figure in it, and aptly it worked as he had just started off acting, and was probably the right age to give the portrait a verisimilitude. The time, place and cause and effect were balanced by a brooding canvas in historicity; a momentum of perfection.The same year, he graced his own project to the screen. It's 96 years old and has barely withered its original acetate (despite being heavily smudged on blue tints of the negative especially near the beginning when Owen goes and gets a bucket for his dipsomaniac adopted Father. But a lot of it is fairly pristine.The film is based on a book about a young boy Owen. As we go through the pervasively impressive film there's one thing for certain - it's a commentary on the civilisation of susceptible parents and their malicious effect to this young adopted boy. It reflects later on when Owen saves a boy, who Marie Deering (a girl who works in Grogan's and then is drawn to his joint). The period periodically changes and we're then lead to believe that he has ran down to the lowest status in a derelict area. Potent in the way it's looked at, we watch a society without poise, were fighting is ample in mustering entertainment.The character of Owen and the regeneration of his clique is hellbent on the omnipresence of Marie Deering; she aids Owen in his studies, influence and loving compassion. She's the thing that also destroys him; he never reconciles in the gang he originally lead and they're causing a havoc with their abuse of Police and their brutal comeuppance. One bit that's sort of disjointed from the narrative, is when Marie Deering during the second act, invites him and his Friends into a party and throughout it Owen leers at another woman, who's docile and unfazed. He then throws his cigarette on the boat, unbeknownst that it burns. I guess the scene was used as a visual provocation, yet it still does leave a grand and lyrical impact inherent. It's also perhaps a way of uniting them all and separating it later.It's a deep film. The seminal Gangster film has a lot of heart, and you can even sense its seminal films on such films as Howard Hawks' "Scarface", "The Public Enemy" and his own film "Roaring Twenties". The manipulation of lighting to emphasise by masking the gun or dissolving is not dissimilar to how it's done today. Though the way it's used here is a bit more vivid, looking at the way the officious guy is introduced to the scene, where Marie is working, to entice us with important plot points. The most impressive of these sequences is an abrupt scene where a Gang Member is harassed by an Officer and takes out a knife to go in for the coup de grace. Most films would chiefly employ blood to give it the verisimilitude - the realism to set it apart - here though, to keep its gritty and taut realism, Walsh uses off screen cutting to let the Audience comprehend the outcome.It's probably fundamentally great to understand, like Fleming with his primitive films, that Walsh was just a disciple of Griffith, who he was influenced by (watch "The Muskateers of Pig Alley") and his literary influences (this film was adapted from Owen Kildare Frawley's "My Mamie Rose" autobiography, which hitherto I was startled to find out that the film was reciting a time of an actual boys life and memoirs to accompany it, making it, of even more valuable commodity).The thing is, the character is visceral and not intellectual. The story grows in a cerebral way, and does not descend to ruthless violence, probably because it would have been harder to sell. But in a way, it's adscititious; it would be faltered in its tone and focus.Another thing that will definitely jolt audiences today is the fact that the film relies on visuals. If when looking at the narrative through the camera, you actually notice that in fact, your mind gives the character their contours. You have to understand the struggle - with other films to justify it all seems pretty well grounded in the genre of its tradition - and it will not leave you with disappointment.While not epic, the film is a character study, a utopian and dystopian story - truly taut, hard, stylised, with little bits of emotions and a veracity.

Jeff Sultanof Rather than repeat what others have written, I'd like to comment on how this film managed to get into circulation.The only known print of the film was found in the basement of a building in Montana in 1976. Preserved (and not too soon given the deterioration seen in the middle of the film), it was part of a series of films shown during the New York Film Festival representing titles which had recently (1978) been saved. I remember seeing all of them; they included Lillom (recently issued on DVD in the Murnau/Borzage box and worth seeing), and The Letter (with Jeanne Eagles, which blew everyone away). It is a miracle that films still turn up in such a manner even this late in the game. Most films from this time period have long ago turned into flammable dust (they started to deteriorate as early as the thirties), and it is particularly fortunate that "Regeneration" is now among the living. Despite its crudities, it feels like a documentary of the seedier elements of New York, and it still works its magic; it has matured very well. Given that we can see how the streets of New York really looked almost 100 years ago, the film may play better than it did back then. Most of the people in this film are not actors, they are real people, and that is what we reacted to when we saw this back in the seventies. Additionally, the film is a real window into the transitional period when the one-reeler had turned into a longer, more ambitious feature. As a first feature for Walsh, this film is really extraordinary when we consider that the tools of film-making were still crude (the comments on the editing of the film are correct. However, the abruptness plays better on the big screen). Even more, the film also reminds us that the numerous features made between 1914 and 1920 included some real gems that are gone forever, and cannot be re-evaluated. How many really good actors and directors are known in name only because their work has disappeared?I consider this one of the finest examples of an early silent feature, and one of the landmark films of the silent era. It is an illustration of how the director of that time found his or her way, made mistakes and had chances to improve. It shows how filmmakers were taking the vocabulary used by Griffith and some European filmmakers to expand the techniques of storytelling to hold an audience's interest for an hour's worth of entertainment.A must-see if you are interested in silent films.

FISHCAKE 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.

jbragin 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.