The Yellow Ticket

United States

1931

88 Min

Black and White

1.20:1

English

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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SCR Guy Bolton, Jules Furthman, William M. Conselman, Michael Morton

CAST Elissa Landi, Lionel Barrymore, Laurence Olivier, Walter Byron, Arnold Korff, Mischa Auer, Edwin Maxwell, Rita La Roy, Boris Karloff, Edmund Mortimer, Michael Mark, Sarah Padden, Harry Semels, Ivan Linow, Ann Kunde

MUSIC Carli Elinor, R.H. Bassett, Hugo Friedhofer

Before the Museum of Modern Art’s 1975 retrospective of his work, Raoul Walsh’s world seemed to many to be almost exclusively masculine. His best-known films were the rugged action vehicles he made at Warner Brothers in the forties with James Cagney (The Roaring Twenties, White Heat), Humphrey Bogart (They Drive by Night, High Sierra), and Errol Flynn (Gentleman Jim, Objective Burma). The MoMA series made clear that Walsh had just as often concerned himself with the lives of women.

Especially pertinent to The Yellow Ticket are a number of films made in the course of the director’s fifty year career that deal with the semi-mythic figure that has fascinated artists throughout history, the “bad girl.” Theda Bara in Carmen (1915), Dolores del Río in The Loves of Carmen (1927), Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson (1928), Janet Gaynor in The Man Who Came Back (1931), Mae West in Klondike Annie (1936), Marlene Dietrich in Manpower (1941), and Jane Russell in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956) all played women who were not by their contemporary standards “nice.”

The situation is more complex in The Yellow Ticket, since it is clearly established that the heroine played by Elissa Landi is a virgin, even though she carries the notorious passport issued by the tsarist police to Russian prostitutes. Her reasons for obtaining the ticket (it was the only means by which a Jewish woman could travel within Russia) and how she finally rids herself of its burden betray the script’s theatrical origin, but these are not Walsh’s primary concerns.

Unlike the 1918 version of The Yellow Ticket (with Fannie Ward, Warner Oland, and Milton Sills), Walsh’s film devotes more than half of its running time and nearly all of its imaginative mise-èn-scene to the ticket itself and the stigma it represents. By the strength and detail of these scenes (the bordello, the women’s prison, the railway coach, et al.), Walsh gives the ticket a significance that transcends its melodramatic plot function. The heroine’s possession of the yellow ticket is taken by men of all classes (excepting the hero who is, after all, English) as a passport to her body, an official notice to all that she is “no better than she ought to be.” Raoul Walsh’s The Yellow Ticket is not so much about tsarist oppression of Jews as it is about masculine oppression of women. —Robert Regan (MoMA, 1976)

Director

Raoul Walsh

Raoul Walsh’s 52-year directorial career made him a Hollywood legend, and the slam-band nature of his best films means that he is still remembered while the memory of Allan Dwan, a director with an equally long career, has practically faded from public consciousness. Walsh was also an actor: He appeared in the first version of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain renamed Sadie Thompson (1928) opposite Gloria Swanson in the title role. He would have played the Cisco Kid in his own film In Old Arizona (1928) if an errant jackrabbit hadn’t cost him his right eye by leaping through the windshield of his automobile. Warner Baxter filled the role and won an Oscar. Before John Ford and Nicholas Ray, it was Raoul Walsh who made the eye-patch almost as synonymous with a Hollywood director as Cecil B. DeMille’s jodhpurs.

He interned with the best, serving as assistant director and editor on D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece, The Clansman, better known as read more

Raoul Walsh’s 52-year directorial career made him a Hollywood legend, and the slam-band nature of his best films means that he is still remembered while the memory of Allan Dwan, a director with an equally long career, has practically faded from public consciousness. Walsh was also an actor: He appeared in the first version of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain renamed Sadie Thompson (1928) opposite Gloria Swanson in the title role. He would have played the Cisco Kid in his own film In Old Arizona (1928) if an errant jackrabbit hadn’t cost him his right eye by leaping through the windshield of his automobile. Warner Baxter filled the role and won an Oscar. Before John Ford and Nicholas Ray, it was Raoul Walsh who made the eye-patch almost as synonymous with a Hollywood director as Cecil B. DeMille’s jodhpurs.

He interned with the best, serving as assistant director and editor on D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece, The Clansman, better known as The Birth of a Nation (1915), a blockbuster that may have been the highest-grossing film of all time if accurate box office records had been kept before the sound era. He pulled triple duty on that picture also playing John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater.

The year before The Clansman, Walsh was second unit director on The Life of General Villa (1914), also playing the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa as a young man. Walsh got his start in the business as co-director of another Pancho Villa flick, The Life of General Villa (1914), in 1912. The movie featured footage shot of an actually battle between Villa’s forces and Mexican federal troops.

In 1915, in addition to helping out the great Griffith, Walsh directed no less than 14 films, including his first feature-length film, Regeneration (1915), which he also wrote. The movie starred silent cinema superstar Anna Q. Nilsson as a society woman turned social worker who aids the regeneration of a Bowery gang leader. It was a melodrama, but an effective one. In his autobiography, Walsh credited D.W. Griffith with teaching him about the art of filmmaking and about production management techniques. The film is memorable for its shots of New York City, where Walsh had been born 28 years earlier on March 11, 1887.

Raoul Walsh would continue to be a top director for 40 years and would not hang up his director’s megaphone (if he still had one at that late in the game) until 1964. As a writer, his last script was made in 1970, meaning his career as a whole spanned seven decades and 58 years.

He introduced the world to John Wayne in The Big Trail in 70mm wide-screen in 1930. It would take nine more years and John Ford to make the Duke a star. In one three-year period at Warner Bros., he directed The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Manpower (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), and Gentleman Jim (1942), among other films in that time frame. He helped consolidate the stardom of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn while directing the great James Cagney in one of his more delightful films, The Strawberry Blonde (1941). This was the same director that would elicit Cagney’s most searing performance since The Public Enemy (1931) in the crime classic White Heat (1949).

Novelist Norman Mailer says that Walsh was dragged off of his death bed to direct the underrated film adaptation of Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1958). The movie is as masculine and unsentimental as the book, an exceedingly harsh look at the power relations between men at war on the same side that includes the attempted murder of prisoners of war and the “fragging” of officers (Sergeant Croft allows his lieutenant to walk into an ambush). Walsh was at his best when directing men in war or action pictures.

Raoul Walsh seemingly recovered from Mailer’s phantasmagorical death bed, as he lived another 22 years after The Naked and the Dead (1958). He died on December 31, 1980, in Simi Valley, California, at the age of 93. —IMDb

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