Regeneration

Regeneration is a 1915 American silent film directed by Raoul Walsh, based on the memoir of reformed gang member Owen Frawley Kildare and filmed partly on location in New York City's Bowery neighborhood among its actual tenements and streets rather than studio sets. It follows a young man raised amid poverty and crime who becomes a gang leader before a settlement worker's influence and a violent final confrontation lead him toward reform. Though overshadowed in film history by other films of the same year, it is cited by film historians as the earliest surviving American feature length gangster film and an early example of location shooting used for social realism.