Director Raoul Walsh was not particularly known for producing lighter cinematic fare. Though his five decade-long filmography ranges from comedies to dramas to Westerns, Walsh is primarily remembered as the director of a string of successful, heavily male-driven flicks in the 1940s, beginning with a trio of Humphrey Bogart-led movies including The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive by Night (1940),…
Although he was the star of multiple hit films, James Cagney was known as “the thorn in Jack Warner’s side.” He repeatedly went on strikes, demanding higher and higher salaries. In John McCabe’s biography of Cagney, he explains that during the filming of Winner Take All, singer Dick Powell was making $4,000/week, whereas the much more…
Roughly a decade before the Civil War, Reverend Ethan Wilkins (Walter Huston) accepts a position ministering to an isolated, poverty-stricken town in Ohio called Pine Hill. Though the townspeople had promised to pay Ethan an annual salary of $400, he is informed upon his arrival that they cannot afford to pay him that much, and…
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