Cast:
Rockliffe Fellowes (Owen Conway), James A. Marcus (Jim Conway), Anna Q. Nilsson (Marie "Mamie Rose" Deering), Maggie Weston (Maggie Conway), Willam Sheer (Skinny), Carl Harbaugh (District Attorney Ames), John McCann (Owen Conway - 10 years old), and Harry McCoy (Owen Conway - 17 years old) Directed by Raoul Walsh (#399 - The Thief of Bagdad (1924), #907 - White Heat, #1333 - The Big Trail)
Review:
The funny thing about the gangster film is that there really can't just be any one "first" of the genre. But you can still find curious examples in the days of the 1910s and the directors who were assigned to make them. In 1915, Fox Film Corporation was created with the merger of the Greater New York Film Rental Company and Box Office Attraction Company. Regeneration was one of a handful of films released in that year with the Fox moniker (as named for William Fox), but more importantly, it is the first film directed by Raoul Walsh. He had been an actor since 1909 and eventually found himself in the company of D.W. Griffith as an assistant. He would appear in various films as an actor, such as the now-lost The Life of General Villa (made in 1914, which actually featured the real Pancho Villa) along with the infamous The Birth of a Nation (1915) as actor/assistant director. He directed a handful of one-reel and two-reel films for the Biograph studio. In 1915, Walsh was 28 but asked to serve as director for this film, which would be filmed in Manhattan's Bowery district with real gangsters and prostitutes as extras. For the next couple of decades, Walsh would serve as a director in both silent and sound features. Walsh and Carl Harbaugh wrote the film based on the 1903 memoir My Mamie Rose by Owen Frawley Kildare (once called the "Kipling of the Bowery"), which had in turn been adapted into a 1908 play The Regeneration by Kildare and Walter C. Hackett (tragically, when Kildare saw the interpretation of the lead character, he became angry, and he later suffered a mental breakdown after a fall in the subway before he later died in a psychiatric center in 1911).
So yes, to get to the road to films such as Underworld (1927), you have to consider films like this first. It probably isn't the most surprising thing that Walsh became the most enduring aspect of the film when compared to the cast (one of them in Sheer wears an eyepatch), because there is obviously promise within him as a director of cutting-edge drama. Granted, it isn't the most solid piece of social dramas when you think about the various films of the 1910s and 1920s, but Walsh makes a gritty feature of conscious atmosphere with promise of action to come. Fellowes actually was making his debut here in features (at the age of 31), and it ranks as his most noted of his appearances in dozens of films. He plays it okay, with a little bit of camera bulging but he does just fine in keeping this lingering tale of would-be redemption from falling off the rails. His desperation matters to us when it comes to a life learned of using fists to claw out of the bottom. Nilsson had moved from Sweden to the States just a couple of years prior in the early 1900s, and her silent film works are what she is most known for. This works out to probably the most noted performance of this film, which involves warm presence and curiosity for all that comes with willingly looking at both sides of the city. The path to beating out those bad habits of hard life in the streets (which just happens to involve finding love with a woman who is on her own journey in the street) is a gradual one, but it is an interesting one presented with useful curiosity, whether that involves a ship fire (one that evidently resembles the one that happened in 1904 on the General Slocum that saw many people die) or the lurid details of city life or the inevitable conclusion that comes in sacrifice. It is the curiosity of what could come from gangster films in later years that prove a key aspect in watchability for 72 minutes, since the key to getting people more curious about narrative drama is to give them a nice first taste of what could be done further. The drama comes out with enough conviction to make for a useful recommendation now, one that shows the potential of its director in dependability that would be accomplished in more ways than once.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
