The first full-length gangster picture ever made," according to its director, Raoul Walsh, who would later make The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, The Bowery and White Heat, Regeneration is a powerful slum melodrama produced in 1915 on location on the Lower East Side of New York City, with a gaggle of authentic lowlife types performing alongside professional actors. It's in the tradition of The Musketeers of Pig Alley, directed by D.W. Griffith from whom Walsh learned his craft as an assistant on The Birth of a Nation. But in camera and editing technique as well as in performance, the former apprentice equals and often surpasses the master. Regeneration was added to the Library of Congress National Registry of essential American films in 2000.