The first feature-length gangster film ever made, Regeneration is also a fascinating excursion into pre-World War I New York, particularly the slums where Raoul Walsh shot on location, recruiting indigents from Hell's Kitchen as extras. (In his book Each Man in His Time, Walsh gives a humorous account of dressing men in drag when not enough women showed up, and of his own arrest for starting a “fire” on a Hudson River barge for one of the film's key action scenes.) Swedish actress Anna Q. Nilsson stars as a society girl running a Bowery mission where she meets Rockliffe Fellowes, a gangleader whose roots as a battered kid from the Lower East Side are traced in the film's opening sequences. Tailed by a nemesis named Skinny the Rat and a kindly shadow called Hunchy, he does battle with the D.A. and the Devil, and wins the girl's love before the final shootout. For his first film for Fox, Walsh notes, “I would be able to use some of the techniques which Griffith taught me, without anyone looking over my shoulder.”