William Wellman on the set of Young Eagles (1930).

As Terence Rafferty reports in The New York Times, “On Friday Film Forum began rolling out a big Wellman retrospective — 42 movies in three weeks, starting, aptly, with his World War I flyboy extravaganza Wings (1927), which won the first Academy Award for best picture — and the series demonstrates pretty conclusively that he had the right stuff. Wellman’s movies are much better known than he is, in part because they’re so different from one another that it can be difficult to remember that the same director who made the classic gangster film The Public Enemy (1931) was also responsible for the wonderful screwball comedies Nothing Sacred (1937) and Roxie Hart (1942), the original A Star Is Born (1937), the stark western The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and the extraordinarily moving World War II drama The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He’s a hard man to get a fix on; you think for a moment that you’ve got him in your sights, and then he’s gone.

What’s constant in Wellman’s work, for all its radical variations in style and tone, is a fascination with pure movement: how people get from one place to another, and how they arrange themselves once they’re there. Early in his career he made two vigorous pictures about riding the rails: the silent Beggars of Life (1928) and Wild Boys of the Road (1933). In both there are remarkable sequences of characters jumping on and off moving trains, filmed with as little trickery as possible: in most cases, you can see that the actors are doing their own stunts (just as in Wings, when Wellman actually sent his poor actors up in those rickety-looking planes). And after the excitement of those scenes, when people are settling into their boxcars and trying to get their heart rates back down again, something of that kinetic charge seems to linger in the way the figures group themselves in the frame. Even when Wellman’s people are at rest, they look about to burst into motion.”

This is more than enough work for anyone to merit a retrospective; at his best, as in Wild Boys of the Road and The Ox-Bow Incident, Wellman is unsentimental, economical, and absolutely on target with both his characters, and his narrative structure. He knew how to shoot quickly, and cheaply, and in addition to having his actors do their own stunts, as Rafferty notes, he famously used real machine gun bullets to rake the wall of a building on the Warner Bros. back lot in Public Enemy for that little extra sense of realism.  “Wild Bill” Wellman was a true American original, and it’s nice that he’s finally getting a full throttle tribute to his large, varied, and unremittingly kinetic body of work. The series uses all 35mm prints, a real rarity these days, and is programmed by Bruce Goldstein.

As David Edelstein put it in New York Magazine, “You might as well pitch a tent at Film Forum for its 42 films by William Wellman… You get racy pulp (the stunningly tawdry Night Nurse), brassy screwball comedy (Nothing Sacred), and female-centric melodramas like Roxie Hart and the rare Louise Brooks [film] Beggars of Life. Even his most ‘manly’ films had a streak of sensitivity.” If you live in New York metro area, you absolutely owe it to yourself to check this series out; it’s really a once in a lifetime opportunity to see these films as they were meant to be seen, with superb projection, and an enthusiastic audience.