Raoul Walsh’s Gun Fury

It is hard to believe that Raoul Walsh, the man who directed The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), Objective, Burma! (1945), White Heat (1949) and other classic genre films for Warner Brothers, never received an Oscar nomination. Film historian David Thomson pondered this in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, writing, “Was it just that he was so reliable, so direct and “simple” an entertainer? Or was it a matter of not making the proper “big” pictures?” Even after his peak years at Warners, Walsh continued to make audience pleasing hits such as Battle Cry (1955), the fourth biggest box office success of its year. Even some of the B-pictures Walsh made during his final years in Hollywood look like A-pictures now such as the 1953 western, Gun Fury.

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Edward G. Robinson is Wolf Larsen

Edward G. Robinson on the set of THE SEA WOLF (1941), in which he plays the maniacal captain Wolf Larsen from the Jack London novel.

Among the many tales about ill-fated ocean voyages, obsessive and tyrannical sea captains are usually at the root of the trouble. Some of the more memorable ones include Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, and Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. But none of these misguided authority figures can match the sadism and brutality of Wolf Larsen, the megalomaniac captain of Jack London’s novel, The Sea Wolf, who was famously portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in a 1941 Warner Bros. production directed by Michael Curtiz.

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