RetroClips

Regeneration is widely credited as the first feature-length gangster film, a slum-kid-to-gang-leader story that a 28-year-old Raoul Walsh shot as his solo directorial debut on location in New York's actual Bowery tenements, using real residents as extras instead of a studio backlot. The film's climactic boat fire was directly inspired by the real 1904 General Slocum disaster, in which a burning excursion steamer killed roughly 1,000 people in the East River, one of the deadliest disasters in New York City history before September 11.