Regeneration

"The first full-length gangster picture ever made," according to its director, Raoul Walsh, who would later make The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, The Bowery and White Heat, Regeneration is a powerful slum melodrama produced in 1915 on location on the Lower East Side of New York City, with a gaggle of authentic low-life types performing alongside professional actors. It's in the tradition of The Three Musketeers of Pig Alley, directed by D.W. Griffith from who Walsh learned his craft as an assistant on The Birth of a Nation. But in camera and editing techniques as well as in performance, the former apprentice equals and often surpasses the master.

Regeneration was added to the library of Congress National Registry of essential American films in 2000.

The gangsters in Regeneration aren't Mafiosi; they are two-bit street corner hoodlums trapped by their circumstances. Regeneration approaches them sympathetically yet unblinkingly, bringing to mid Jack Warner's comment that Raoul Walsh's idea of a tender scene is when he burns down the whorehouse. The tough-as-nails orphan bred on unforgiving slum streets to become a hoodlum hero (Rockcliffe Fellowes) eventually finds the straight path from Mamie Rose, a settlement house worker (Anna Q. Nilsson), but the melodrama doesn't compromise the characters or the visual authenticity of this amazing first feature.