ARIO BAVA’S FIRST major project after the completion of La maschera del demonio represented a sharp
shifting of gears. Esther and the King, a pres- tigious international co-production between Galatea and 20th Century-Fox, was based on the Book of Esther from the Old Testament. It was also the pet project of one of Hollywood’s most illustrious veteran filmmakers, Raoul Walsh (1887–1980). Walsh was the director of such Hollywood classics as The Thief of Bagdad (the 1924 version with Douglas Fairbanks), The Big Trail (1930, the first widescreen Western), The Roar- ing Twenties (1939, one of the last gangster films made before the advent of film noir), High Sierra and They Died With Their Boots On (both 1941), and the incendiary White Heat (1949). Walsh was given his start in films by David
Wark Griffith, who assigned him his first di- rectorial effort (co-directed with Christy Cabanne) the year Bava was born: The Life of General Villa (1914). He also acted in Griffith films—his most notable screen role being that of John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and was one of the thirty-six original founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Like Bava, Walsh had acquired a reputa- tion for bailing out troubled productions. In 1954, when director Robert Wise was falling behind schedule with Warner Brothers’ $4,000,000 epic Helen of Troy and realized that he no longer had the time to direct sev- eral crucial action scenes he had reserved for himself, Walsh was sent to Rome to helm second unit action sequences with Yakima Canutt.1