Регенерация: История гангстера Регенерация: История преступника / Регенерация: Возрождение души

1915 film by Raoul Walsh

Regeneration (alternately called The Regeneration) is a 1915 American silent biographical crime drama co written and directed by Raoul Walsh. The film, which was the first full length feature film directed by Walsh, stars Rockliffe Fellowes and Anna Q. Nilsson and was adapted for the screen by Carl Harbaugh and Walsh from the 1903 memoir My Mamie Rose, by Owen Frawley Kildare and the adapted 1908 play by Kildare and Walter C. Hackett. It was feared lost until a copy was located by the Museum of Modern Art.

Cited as one of the first full length gangster films, Regeneration tells the story of a poor orphan who rises to control the mob until he meets a woman for whom he wants to change. The film is a "candid adaptation" of the autobiography of Owen Frawley Kildare, called the Kipling of the Bowery. The story follows the life of Owen (Rockliffe Fellowes), a young Irish American boy who is forced into a life of poverty after his mother dies. As a result, Owen is forced to live on the street eventually turning to a life of crime. Owen is eventually reformed, however, by the benevolent social worker Marie Deering (Anna Q. Nilsson). Also featured is a fire aboard an excursion ferry, much like the General Slocum disaster of 1904. Deering's choices perplex her beau, a district attorney (Harbaugh) who has declared war on the gangs.

Set in New York City, Regeneration was shot on location in New York City's Lower East Side and used real prostitutes, gangsters and homeless people as extras. By 1915, 28 year old director Raoul Walsh was in New York, with a three picture contract with Fox Film Corporation for $400 a week he was assigned Regeneration, to be the first feature length gangster film in the United States. It was based on the book My Mamie Rose. Walsh's statement that he wrote the script was contradicted by other comments he made that he worked on it with Carl Harbaugh. on a feature, with him going on to film 140 other feature films. When he filmed the scene with actors jumping off a boat into the river, fireboats and police showed up to calm the "crowds", and Walsh was taken to the local station house, amused. The studio "relished" the free publicity. It was re released to theaters on January 12, 1919. although critics noted had "had a gift for revealing emotional vulnerability in even his roughest, toughest heroes." The film is in the public domain.