Regeneration

Regeneration
1915 - William Fox Pictures
Directed by Raoul Walsh



SYNOPSIS

Owen Conway has had a rough life. His mother died when he was a child. His adoptive parents were abusive, so he took to the streets. By the time he was 25 Owen was a notorious gangster. Conway (Rockcliffe Fellowes) meets the pious Mamie Rose (Anna Q. Nillson) and falls in love. Giving up his gang, Owen devotes his time to Mamie Rose and her efforts to help the poor. But his past comes back to haunt him when the old gang shows up after stabbing a cop.



MY THOUGHTS

I was eager to see this since it was featured prominently in the documentary 'Public Enemies The Golden Age Of The Gangster Film' (featured in Vol. 4 of Warner Brothers excellent Gangsters series.) Although the film is primitive in every respect (due to its era) it remains an interesting view.

The actors give more realistic performances than you'd ever expect in a silent film... but the STAR is director Raoul Walsh. This was the first of his many, many feature films. He would work into the 1960's and work with everybody from John Wayne to James Cagney to Humphrey Bogart to Errol Flynn. It all started here.
His use of dolly shots, point-of-view shots and close-ups are surprising to see in a film of this era and must have been fairly innovative.

Each scene of Regeneration is tinted. Owen's youth is tinted sepia, night scenes are tinted blue, etc. The best use of this is during a scene where there's a fire on a boat. The scene starts out blue, then there's a shot of the fire and the screen turns red and everyone panics. It was very cleverly done.
The big brawl at the end was also well shot. Any western or other action film would die to have a massive melee like that.

The film is far from perfect.
The editing is a bit scattershot, due to the complete lack of editing technology at the time. Editors had to hold the film up to the light to look at it to edit.
The story is rather basic and lacks much depth and its themes have been handled countless times in film and literature before and since.
The film quality is badly deteriorated in some spots, causing it to look like a psychedelic light show at some 60's rock concert. This doesn't detract too much from the film.

As a fan of the gangster genre, I was a bit let down from the lack of doing anything 'gangsterish.' Sure, they drink, brawl and gamble but that's about it. It wasn't until prohibition, still a few years away, when the 'gangsterish' things started in earnest.
The one thing this film had over the 1930's gangster films was that it was shot on the streets of the lower east side of New York City. Many real life thugs and oddities lurk in the backgrounds as they would in any real slums... and this adds real flavor to the scenes, especially one shot in a bar complete with vaudeville show.

Though nowhere near what he would later achieve, Raoul Walsh presents a competent story shot in many creative ways that still holds up 94 years later.