The Best Directors Ever - 1920s
Points from my "The Best Films Ever Made"-Lists. Vol. 1 = 100%, Vol. 2 = 50%, Vol. 3 = 33%, Vol. 4 = 25%, Vol. 5 = 20 %, Vol. 6 = 17%
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F.W. Murnau was a German film director. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at the age of 12, and became a friend of director Max Reinhardt. During World War I he served as a company commander at the eastern front and was in the German air force, surviving several crashes without any severe injuries.
One of Murnau's acclaimed works is the 1922 film Nosferatu, an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Although not a commercial success due to copyright issues with Stoker's novel, the film is considered a masterpiece of Expressionist film.
He later emigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made three films: Sunrise (1927), 4 Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930). The first of these three is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.
In 1931 Murnau travelled to Bora Bora to make the film Tabu (1931) with documentary film pioneer Robert J. Flaherty, who left after artistic disputes with Murnau, who had to finish the movie on his own. A week prior to the opening of the film Tabu, Murnau died in a Santa Barbara hospital from injuries he had received in an automobile accident that occurred along the Pacific Coast Highway near Rincon Beach, southeast of Santa Barbara. Only 11 people attended his funeral. Among them were Robert J. Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, who delivered the eulogy.
Of the 21 films Murnau directed, eight are considered to be completely lost.
In July 2015 Murnau's grave was broken into, the remains disturbed and the skull removed by persons unknown. Wax residue was reportedly found at the site, leading some to speculate that candles had been lit, perhaps with an occult or ceremonial significance. As this disturbance was not an isolated incident, the cemetery managers are considering sealing the grave.3906 points- Actor
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Joseph Frank Keaton was born on October 4, 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, to Joe Keaton and Myra Keaton. Joe and Myra were Vaudevillian comedians with a popular, ever-changing variety act, giving Keaton an eclectic and interesting upbringing. In the earliest days on stage, they traveled with a medicine show that included family friend, illusionist Harry Houdini. Keaton himself verified the origin of his nickname "Buster", given to him by Houdini, when at the age of three, fell down a flight of stairs and was picked up and dusted off by Houdini, who said to Keaton's father Joe, also nearby, that the fall was 'a buster'. Savvy showman Joe Keaton liked the nickname, which has stuck for more than 100 years.
At the age of four, Keaton had already begun acting with his parents on the stage. Their act soon gained the reputation as one of the roughest in the country, for their wild, physical antics on stage. It was normal for Joe to throw Buster around the stage, participate in elaborate, dangerous stunts to the reverie of audiences. After several years on the Vaudeville circuit, "The Three Keatons", toured until Keaton had to break up the act due to his father's increasing alcohol dependence, making him a show business veteran by the age of 21.
While in New York looking for work, a chance run-in with the wildly successful film star and director Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, resulted in Arbuckle inviting him to be in his upcoming short The Butcher Boy (1917), an appearance that launched Keaton's film career, and spawned a friendship that lasted until Arbuckle's sudden death in 1933. By 1920, after making several successful shorts together, Arbuckle moved on to features, and Keaton inherited his studio, allowing him the opportunity to begin producing his own films. By September 1921, tragedy touched Arbuckle's life by way of a scandal, where he was tried three times for the murder of Virginia Rapp. Although he was not guilty of the charges, and never convicted, he was unable to regain his status, and the viewing public would no longer tolerate his presence in film. Keaton stood by his friend and mentor through out the incident, supporting him financially, finding him directorial work, even risking his own budding reputation offering to testify on Arbuckle's behalf.
In 1921, Keaton also married his first wife, Natalie Talmadge under unusual circumstance that have never been fully clarified. Popular conjecture states that he was encouraged by Joseph M. Schenck to marry into the powerful Talmadge dynasty, that he himself was already a part of. The union bore Keaton two sons. Keaton's independent shorts soon became too limiting for the growing star, and after a string of popular films like One Week (1920), The Boat (1921) and Cops (1922), Keaton made the transition into feature films. His first feature, Three Ages (1923), was produced similarly to his short films, and was the dawning of a new era in comedic cinema, where it became apparent to Keaton that he had to put more focus on the story lines and characterization.
At the height of his popularity, he was making two features a year, and followed Ages with Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924) and The General (1926), the latter two he regarded as his best films. The most renowned of Keaton's comedies is Sherlock Jr. (1924), which used cutting edge special effects that received mixed reviews as critics and audiences alike had never seen anything like it, and did not know what to make of it. Modern day film scholars liken the story and effects to Christopher Nolan Inception (2010), for its high level concept and ground-breaking execution. Keaton's Civil War epic The General (1926) kept up his momentum when he gave audiences the biggest and most expensive sequence ever seen in film at the time. At its climax, a bridge collapses while a train is passing over it, sending the train into a river. This wowed audiences, but did little for its long-term financial success. Audiences did not respond well to the film, disliking the higher level of drama over comedy, and the main character being a Confederate soldier.
After a few more silent features, including College (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Keaton was informed that his contract had been sold to MGM, by brother-in-law and producer Joseph M. Schenck. Keaton regarded the incident as the worst professional mistake he ever made, as it sent his career, legacy, and personal life into a vicious downward spiral for many years. His first film with MGM was The Cameraman (1928), which is regarded as one of his best silent comedies, but the release signified the loss of control Keaton would incur, never again regaining his film -making independence. He made one more silent film at MGM entitled Spite Marriage (1929) before the sound era arrived.
His first appearance in a film with sound was with the ensemble piece The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929), though despite the popularity of it and his previous MGM silents, MGM never allowed Keaton his own production unit, and increasingly reduced his creative control over his films. By 1932, his marriage to Natalie Talmadge had dissolved when she sued him for divorce, and in an effort to placate her, put up little resistance. This resulted in the loss of the home he had built for his family nicknamed "The Italian Villa", the bulk of his assets, and contact with his children. Natalie changed their last names from Keaton to Talmadge, and they were disallowed from speaking about their father or seeing him. About 10 years later, when they became of age, they rekindled the relationship with Keaton. His hardships in his professional and private life that had been slowly taking their toll, begun to culminate by the early 1930s resulting in his own dependence on alcohol, and sometimes violent and erratic behavior. Depressed, penniless, and out of control, he was fired by MGM by 1933, and became a full-fledged alcoholic.
After spending time in hospitals to attempt and treat his alcoholism, he met second wife Mae Scrivens, a nurse, and married her hastily in Mexico, only to end in divorce by 1935. After his firing, he made several low-budget shorts for Educational Pictures, and spent the next several years of his life fading out of public favor, and finding work where he could. His career was slightly reinvigorated when he produced the short Grand Slam Opera (1936), which many of his fans admire for giving such a good performance during the most difficult and unmanageable years of his life.
In 1940, he met and married his third wife Eleanor Norris, who was deeply devoted to him, and remained his constant companion and partner until Keaton's death. After several more years of hardship working as an uncredited, underpaid gag man for comedians such as the Marx Brothers, he was consulted on how to do a realistic and comedic fall for In the Good Old Summertime (1949) in which an expensive violin is destroyed. Finding no one who could do this better than him, he was given a minor role in the film. His presence reignited interest in his silent films, which lead to interviews, television appearances, film roles, and world tours that kept him busy for the rest of his life.
After several more film, television, and stage appearances through the 1960s, he wrote the autobiography "My Wonderful World of Slapstick", having completed nearly 150 films in the span of his ground-breaking career. His last film appearance was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) which premiered seven months after Keaton's death from the rapid onset of lung cancer. Since his death, Keaton's legacy is being discovered by new generations of viewers every day, many of his films are available on YouTube, DVD and Blu-ray, where he, like all gold-gilded and beloved entertainers can live forever.3857 points- Writer
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Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the toothbrush mustache, bowler hat, bamboo cane, and a funny walk.
Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in Walworth, London, England on April 16, 1889, to Hannah Harriet Pedlingham (Hill) and Charles Chaplin, both music hall performers, who were married on June 22, 1885. After Charles Sr. separated from Hannah to perform in New York City, Hannah then tried to resurrect her stage career. Unfortunately, her singing voice had a tendency to break at unexpected moments. When this happened, the stage manager spotted young Charlie standing in the wings and led him on stage, where five-year-old Charlie began to sing a popular tune. Charlie and his half-brother, Syd Chaplin spent their lives in and out of charity homes and workhouses between their mother's bouts of insanity. Hannah was committed to Cane Hill Asylum in May 1903 and lived there until 1921, when Chaplin moved her to California.
Chaplin began his official acting career at the age of eight, touring with the Eight Lancashire Lads. At age 18, he began touring with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe, joining them on the troupe's 1910 United States tour. He traveled west to California in December 1913 and signed on with Keystone Studios' popular comedy director Mack Sennett, who had seen Chaplin perform on stage in New York. Charlie soon wrote his brother Syd, asking him to become his manager. While at Keystone, Chaplin appeared in and directed 35 films, starring as the Little Tramp in nearly all.
In November 1914, he left Keystone and signed on at Essanay, where he made 15 films. In 1916, he signed on at Mutual and made 12 films. In June 1917, Chaplin signed up with First National Studios, after which he built Chaplin Studios. In 1919, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists (UA).
Chaplin's life and career was full of scandal and controversy. His first big scandal was during World War I, at which time his loyalty to England, his home country, was questioned. He had never applied for American citizenship, but claimed that he was a "paying visitor" to the United States. Many British citizens called Chaplin a coward and a slacker. This and other career eccentricities sparked suspicion with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), who believed that he was injecting Communist propaganda into his films. Chaplin's later film The Great Dictator (1940), which was his first "talkie", also created a stir. In the film, Chaplin plays a humorous caricature of Adolf Hitler. Some thought the film was poorly done and in bad taste. However, the film grossed over $5 million and earned five Academy Award Nominations.
Another scandal occurred when Chaplin briefly dated 22 year-old Joan Barry. However, Chaplin's relationship with Barry came to an end in 1942, after a series of harassing actions from her. In May 1943, Barry returned to inform Chaplin that she was pregnant and filed a paternity suit, claiming that the unborn child was his. During the 1944 trial, blood tests proved that Chaplin was not the father, but at the time, blood tests were inadmissible evidence, and he was ordered to pay $75 a week until the child turned 21.
Chaplin also was scrutinized for his support in aiding the Russian struggle against the invading Nazis during World War II, and the United States government questioned his moral and political views, suspecting him of having Communist ties. For this reason, HUAC subpoenaed him in 1947. However, HUAC finally decided that it was no longer necessary for him to appear for testimony. Conversely, when Chaplin and his family traveled to London for the premier of Limelight (1952), he was denied re-entry to the United States. In reality, the government had almost no evidence to prove that he was a threat to national security. Instead, he and his wife decided to settle in Switzerland.
Chaplin was married four times and had a total of 11 children. In 1918, he married Mildred Harris and they had a son together, Norman Spencer Chaplin, who lived only three days. Chaplin and Harris divorced in 1920. He married Lita Grey in 1924, who had two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr. and Sydney Chaplin. They were divorced in 1927. In 1936, Chaplin married Paulette Goddard, and his final marriage was to Oona O'Neill (Oona Chaplin), daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1943. Oona gave birth to eight children: Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Chaplin, Josephine Chaplin, Victoria Chaplin, Eugene Chaplin, Jane Chaplin, Annette-Emilie Chaplin, and Christopher Chaplin.
In contrast to many of his boisterous characters, Chaplin was a quiet man who kept to himself a great deal. He also had an "un-millionaire" way of living. Even after he had accumulated millions, he continued to live in shabby accommodations. In 1921, Chaplin was decorated by the French government for his outstanding work as a filmmaker and was elevated to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1952. In 1972, he was honored with an Academy Award for his "incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century". He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. No formal reason for the honour was listed. The citation simply reads "Charles Spencer Chaplin, Film Actor and Producer".
Chaplin's other works included musical scores that he composed for many of his films. He also authored two autobiographical books, "My Autobiography" (1964) and its companion volume, "My Life in Pictures" (1974).
Chaplin died at age 88 of natural causes on December 25, 1977 at his home in Vevey, Switzerland. His funeral was a small and private Anglican ceremony according to his wishes. In 1978, Chaplin's corpse was stolen from its grave and was not recovered for three months; he was re-buried in a vault surrounded by cement.
Six of Chaplin's films have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress: The Immigrant (1917), The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940).
Charlie Chaplin is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema, whose movies were and still are popular throughout the world and have even gained notoriety as time progresses. His films show, through the Little Tramp's positive outlook on life in a world full of chaos, that the human spirit has and always will remain the same.2967 points- Director
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King Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter of Hungarian descent. He was born in Galveston, Texas to lumberman Charles Shelton Vidor and his wife Kate Wallis. King's paternal grandfather Károly (Charles) Vidor had fled Hungary as a refugee following the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (1849-1849). The Kingdom of Hungary had attempted to gain independence from the Austrian Empire, but the revolutionary troops failed against the allied armies of the Austrian Empire and the Russian Empire. After the restoration of Habsburg power, Hungary was placed under brutal martial law. Karoly fled the country and settled in Galveston, Texas by the early 1850s.
During his childhood, King Vidor was a witness of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. The hurricane caused between 6,000 and 12,000 fatalities in the United States, based on varying estimates. Most of these deaths occurred in the vicinity of Galveston. Every house in the city sustained damage, about 3600 houses were completely destroyed, and an estimated 10,000 people were left homeless, out of a population of about 38,000. King Vidor would later give a somewhat fictionalized account of his hurricane experience in a 1935 interview.
By the early 1910s, Vidor was working as a freelance newsreel cameraman and cinema projectionist. In 1913, he directed the short film "The Grand Military Parade", his directing debut. In 1915, Vidor moved to Hollywood, California and was hired as a screenwriter and short-film director by Judge Willis Brown (1881-1931), owner of the Boy City Film Company in Culver City. Brown had gained fame as a judge of the Utah Juvenile Court and a progressive expert on boys' reformation, but had been kicked out of service when it was discovered that he did not actually have a law degree. Brown had established himself as a film producer in order to produce films depicting his main concerns about American society: juvenile delinquency and racial discrimination. Vidor served as a screenwriter and director of at least 10 films with these topics, while working for Brown.
In 1919, Vidor directed his first feature film: "The Turn in the Road". It was a silent drama film, depicting a businessman who loses his faith in God and any interest in industry, when his beloved wife dies in childbirth. Vidor's first major hit was the feature "Peg o' My Heart" (1922), an adaptation of a popular Broadway theatrical play. Following this success, Vidor was signed to a long-term contract for the studio Goldwyn Pictures. The studio was under the administration of Polish-American producer Samuel Goldwyn (1879-1974). In 1924, Goldwyn Pictures merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures into a new company: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Vidor remained on contract with this new company.
In the 1920s, Vidor's most famous silent feature films were the war film "The Big Parade" (1925), the Academy-Award nominated drama "The Crowd" (1928), the comedy "Show People"" (1928), and the comedy-drama "The Patsy" (1928). His first sound film was the drama "Hallelujah" (1929), about the life of sharecroppers. It was one of the first Hollywood films with a cast consisting fully of African-Americans. Vidor expressed an interest in "showing the Southern Negro as he is" and attempted to depict African-American life beyond the popular stereotypes of the era.
Vidor faced no problem in transitioning from silent film to sound film, and continued regularly working on feature films until the late 1950s. His last major film was the Biblical-romance "Solomon and Sheba" (1959), featuring love, court intrigues, and military invasions during the reign of legendary Solomon, King of Israel (estimated to the 10th century BC). Afterwards he worked on short films and documentaries, his last film being the documentary "The Metaphor" (1980). The 86-year-old Vidor chose to retire from filmmaking in 1980.
In 1982, Vidor died at his ranch in Paso Robles, California, from an unspecified heart disease. He was 88-years-old and well past his prime. His remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered in his ranch.
Vidor was nominated 5 times for the Academy Award for Best Director, without ever winning. He was nominated for the feature films "The Crowd" (1928), "Hallelujah" (1929), "The Champ" (1931), "The Citadel" (1938), and "War and Peace" (1956). He won an Academy Honorary Award in 1979. Part of his modern fame rests on an uncredited part as an assistant director. Vidor directed the scenes set in Kansas for the novel adaptation "The Wizard of Oz" (1939).2963 points- Director
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Victor Sjöström was born on September 20, 1879, and is the undisputed father of Swedish film, ranking as one of the masters of world cinema. His influence lives on in the work of Ingmar Bergman and all those directors, both Swedish and international, influenced by his work and the works of directors whom he himself influenced.
As a boy Sjöström was close to his mother, who died during childbirth when he was seven years old. Biographers see this truncated relationship as being essential to the evolution of his dramatic trope of strong-willed, independent women in his films. He was masterful at eliciting sensitive performances from actresses, such as that of Lillian Gish in his American classic The Wind (1928).
The teenaged Sjöström loved the theater, but after his education he turned to business, becoming a donut salesman. Fortunately for the future of Swedish cinema, he was a flop as a salesman, and turned to the theater, becoming an actor and then director. The Swedish film company Svenska Bio hired him and fellow stage director Mauritz Stiller to helm pictures, and from 1912-15 he directed 31 films. Only three of them survive (it is estimated that approximately 150,000 films, or 80% of the total silent-era production, has been lost). He directed Ingeborg Holm (1913), considered the first classic of Swedish cinema.
Despite the exigencies of working in an industrial art form, most Svenska Bio films of this period are embarrassments in an artistic sense--turgid melodramas, absurd romances and shaggy dog-style comedies--and there is no reason to think that the director didn't helm his share of such fare. Even taking that into account, Sjöström managed to develop a personal style. The reason he became internationally famous (and wooed by Hollywood) was the richness of his films, which were full of psychological subtleties and natural symbolism that was integrated into the works as a whole. He dealt with such major themes as guilt, redemption and the rapidly evolving place of women in society.
His 1920 film The Phantom Carriage (1921) (a.k.a. "Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness") was an internationally acclaimed masterpiece, and Goldwyn Pictures hired him to direct Name the Man! (1924) (Goldwayn was folded into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924, where he worked until shortly after the advent of sound). Sjöström's name was changed to "Victor Seastrom" (a phonetic pronunciation in a country with limited word fonts), and he became a major American director, a pro-to David Lean, who was renowned for balancing artistic expression with a concern for what would play at the box office. His first MGM film was the Lon Chaney melodrama He Who Gets Slapped (1924). It was not only a critical success but a huge hit, getting the new studio off onto a sound footing.
He was highly respected by MGM chief Louis B. Mayer and by production head Irving Thalberg, who shared Sjöström's concerns with art that did not exclude profit. Sjöström became one of the most highly paid directors in Hollywood, reaching his peak at the end of the silent era (when the silent film reached its maturation as an art form) with two collaborations with Lillian Gish: The Scarlet Letter (1926) and "The Wind" (1926), his last masterpiece.
He departed Hollywood for Sweden after A Lady to Love (1930), returning one last time to helm Under the Red Robe (1937) for 20th Century-Fox, and although he made two movies in Sweden in the intervening years, his career as a director basically ended with the sound era. He returned to his first avocation, acting in Swedish films, in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. In his later years he was a mentor to Ingmar Bergman and gave a remarkable performance in Bergman's masterpiece "Wild Strawberries" (1957), for which he won the National Board of Review's Best Actor Award. In his professional life he was a workaholic, and in his private life was reticent about his films and his fame and remained intensely devoted to his wife Edith Erastoff and his family.
Victor Sjöström died on January 3, 1960, at the age of 80.2304 points- Writer
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New York-born writer and director with a penchant for comedy. He graduated from Fordham University, and, from 1916, worked at Kalem on the 'Ham and Bud' series (Lloyd Hamilton & Bud Duncan). When Kalem was taken over by Vitagraph, Taylor became feature continuity writer. Sometime after 1920, he joined Hal Roach as a full screenwriter, eventually becoming an integral part of Harold Lloyd's writing staff. He often worked in tandem with Fred C. Newmeyer as co-director of such comedy classics as Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925). Among his important solo directing efforts were Harold Lloyd's For Heaven's Sake (1926), Exit Smiling (1926), with Beatrice Lillie; Tempest (1928), with John Barrymore and Ambassador Bill (1931),with Will Rogers.
In 1937, Taylor founded Chase Productions in conjunction with his writer-brother Matt and authored the Broadway play 'Stopover', which ran for 23 performances at the Lyceum Theatre. Taylor directed Laurel & Hardy in one of their last features, Nothing But Trouble (1944), then turned to writing. His best novel was a thriller, 'The Man With My Face', about an accountant who comes home one day to find that his life has been taken over by a doppelganger and he is subsequently persecuted as an impostor. This was turned into a 1951 motion picture, starring Barry Nelson, for which Taylor also wrote the screenplay.1829 points- Director
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Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914, he traveled in Europe, and he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris from 1913-14. At the start of World War I, he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely wounded in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918, he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzal. In 1920, he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. Lang--who was an anti-Nazi mainly because of his Catholic background--did not accept the position (it was later offered to and accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl) and, after secretly sending most of his money out of the country, fled Germany to Paris. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934, initially under contract to MGM. Over the next 20 years, he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult with, and abusive to, actors, he found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Germany and made what turned out to be his final three films there, none of which were well received.
In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was an avid collector of primitive art and habitually wore a monocle, an affectation he picked up during his early days in Vienna. After his divorce from von Harbou, he had relationships with many other women, but from about 1931 to his death in 1976, he was close to Lily Latte, who helped him in many ways.1811 points- Actor
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Fred C. Newmeyer was a professional baseball player from 1909-13 before beginning his career as an extra at Universal Pictures. He worked his way up the ladder to become a prop man, then assistant director and, finally, director. Notable among his films are Seven Keys to Baldpate (1925) with Douglas MacLean and The Potters (1927), starring W.C. Fields. His interest in baseball never waned and sometimes surfaced as a theme in his films, particularly with Warming Up (1928), a vehicle for Jean Arthur and Richard Dix.
Newmeyer specialized almost exclusively in comedy, first as an actor and then as a very capable director. He turned out several entries in the "Our Gang" series, as well as numerous other shorts for Hal Roach. He actually helmed the very first "Our Gang" effort, but it was deemed unsatisfactory and the piece was eventually remade by Robert F. McGowan. However, Newmeyer later worked on some of Harold Lloyd's best films, either as solo director (Grandma's Boy (1922), Dr. Jack (1922)) or in collaboration with Sam Taylor (The Freshman (1925), Safety Last! (1923)).
With the advent of sound Newmeyer, ill-advisedly, forsook daredevil comedy for more serious subjects. Subway Express (1931), a "thriller" he made for Columbia, was plain dull, and General Spanky (1936) (starring ex-"Our Gang" star George 'Spanky' McFarland) was mushy melodrama at its worst. After that, Newmeyer's directing career quietly petered out.1710 points- Director
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The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In the following years, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and then director. The Proletkult's director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, became a big influence on Eisenstein, introducing him to the concept of biomechanics, or conditioned spontaneity. Eisenstein furthered Meyerhold's theory with his own "montage of attractions"--a sequence of pictures whose total emotion effect is greater than the sum of its parts. He later theorized that this style of editing worked in a similar fashion to Marx's dialectic. Though Eisenstein wanted to make films for the common man, his intense use of symbolism and metaphor in what he called "intellectual montage" sometimes lost his audience. Though he made only seven films in his career, he and his theoretical writings demonstrated how film could move beyond its nineteenth-century predecessor--Victorian theatre-- to create abstract concepts with concrete images.1485 points- Director
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From Ernst Lubitsch's experiences in Sophien Gymnasium (high school) theater, he decided to leave school at the age of 16 and pursue a career on the stage. He had to compromise with his father and keep the account books for the family tailor business while he acted in cabarets and music halls at night. In 1911 he joined the Deutsches Theater of famous director/producer/impresario Max Reinhardt, and was able to move up to leading acting roles in a short time. He took an extra job as a handyman while learning silent film acting at Berlin's Bioscope film studios. The next year he launched his own film career by appearing in a series of comedies showcasing traditional ethnic Jewish slice-of-life fare. Finding great success in these character roles, Lubitsch turned to broader comedy, then beginning in 1914 started writing and directing his own films.
His breakthrough film came in 1918 with The Eyes of the Mummy (1918) ("The Eyes of the Mummy"), a tragedy starring future Hollywood star Pola Negri. Also that year he made Carmen (1918), again with Negri, a film that was commercially successful on the international level. His work already showed his genius for catching the eye as well as the ear in not only comedy but historical drama. The year 1919 found Lubitsch directing seven films, the two standouts being his lavish Passion (1919) with two of his favorite actors--Negri (yet again) and Emil Jannings. His other standout was the witty parody of the American upper crust, The Oyster Princess (1919) ("The Oyster Princess"). This film was a perfect example of what became known as the Lubitsch style, or the "Lubitsch Touch", as it became known--sophisticated humor combined with inspired staging that economically presented a visual synopsis of storyline, scenes and characters.
His success in Europe brought him to the shores of America to promote The Loves of Pharaoh (1922) ("The Loves of Pharaoh") and he become acquainted with the thriving US film industry. He soon returned to Europe, but came back to the US for good to direct new friend and influential star Mary Pickford in his first American hit, Rosita (1923). The Marriage Circle (1924) began Lubitsch's unprecedented run of sophisticated films that mirrored the American scene (though always relocated to foreign or imaginary lands) and all its skewed panorama of the human condition. There was a smooth transition between his silent films for Warner Bros. and the sound movies--usually at Paramount--now embellished with the flow of speech of Hollywood's greats lending personal nuances to continually heighten the popularity at the box office and the fame of Lubitsch's first-rate versatility in crafting a smart film. There was a mix of pioneering musical films and some drama also through the 1930s. The of those films resulted in Paramount making him its production chief in 1935, so he could produce his own films and supervise production of others. In 1938 he signed a three-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox.
Certainly two of his most beloved films near the end of his career dealt with the political landscape of the World War II era. He moved to MGM, where he directed Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka (1939), a fast-paced comedy of "decadent" Westerners meeting Soviet "comrades" who were seeking more of life than the mother country could--or would--offer. During the war he directed perhaps his most beloved comedy--controversial to say the least, dark in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way--but certainly a razor-sharp tour de force in smart, precise dialog, staging and story: To Be or Not to Be (1942), produced by his own company, Romaine Film Corp. It was a biting satire of Nazi tyranny that also poked fun at Lubitsch's own theater roots with the problems and bickering--but also the triumph--of a somewhat raggedy acting troupe in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. Jack Benny's perfect deadpan humor worked well with the zany vivaciousness of Carole Lombard, and a cast of veteran character actors from both Hollywood and Lubitsch's native Germany provided all the chemistry needed to make this a classic comedy, as well as a fierce statement against the perpetrators of war. The most poignant scene was profoundly so, with Felix Bressart--another of Reinhardt's students--as the only Jewish bit player in the company. His supreme hope is a chance to someday play Shylock. He gets his chance as part of a ruse in front of Adolf Hitler's SS bodyguards. The famous soliloquy was a bold declaration to the world of the Axis' brutal inhumanity to man, as in its treatment of and plans for the Jewry of Europe.
Lubitsch had a massive heart attack in 1943 after having signed a producer/director's contract with 20th Century-Fox earlier that year, but completed Heaven Can Wait (1943). His continued efforts in film were severely stymied but he worked as he could. In late 1944 Otto Preminger, another disciple of Reinhardt's Viennese theater work, took over the direction of A Royal Scandal (1945), with Lubitsch credited as nominal producer. March of 1947, the year of his passing, brought a special Academy Award (he was nominated three times) to the fading producer/director for his "25-year contribution to motion pictures." At his funeral, two of his fellow directorial émigrés from Germany put his epitaph succinctly as they left. Billy Wilder noted, "No more Lubitsch." William Wyler answered, "Worse than that - no more Lubitsch films."1308 points- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Georg Wilhelm Pabst is considered by many to be the greatest director of German cinema, in his era. He was especially appreciated by actors and actresses for the humane way in which he treated them. This was in contrast to some of his contemporaries, such as Arnold Fanck, who have been characterized as martinets.1272 points- Director
- Producer
- Editor
Clarence Leon Brown was the son of Larkin Harry and Catherine Ann (Gaw) Brown of Clinton, Massachusetts. His family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, when he was 12 years old. He graduated from Knoxville High School in 1905 and from the University of Tennessee with a B.A. in mechanical and electrical engineering in 1912. After graduation Brown settled in Alabama, where he operated a Stevens Duryea dealership called the Brown Motor Car Co. He soon tired of the car business and, fascinated by the movies, moved to New Jersey to study with French director Maurice Tourneur at Peerless Productions in Fort Lee.
During his career Brown directed or produced more than 50 widely-acclaimed full-length films--many during his long association with prestigious MGM--and worked with many of the industry's most illustrious performers. He also maintained close ties with the University of Tennessee, donating the money necessary to construct the institution's Clarence Brown Theatre during the 1970s and an additional $12 million after his death.1245 points- Writer
- Director
- Editor
The illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper, Carl Theodor Dreyer was born in Copenhagen on the 3th of February, 1889. He spent his early years in various foster homes before being adopted by the Dreyers at the age of two. Contrary to popular belief (perhaps nourished by the fact that his films often deal with religious themes) Dreyer did not receive a strict Lutheran upbringing, but was raised in a household that embraced modern ideas: in his spare time the adoptive father was an avid photographer, and the Dreyers voted for The Danish Social Democrates. When he was baptized the reasoning was culturally, not religiously motivated. Dreyer's childhood was an unhappy one. He did not feel his adoptive parents' love (especially the mother), and longed for his biological mother, whom he never knew.
After working as a journalist, he entered the film industry, and advanced from reading scripts to directing films himself. In the silent era his output was large, but it quickly diminished with the arrival of the talkie. In his lifetime he was recognized as being a fanatical perfectionist amongst producers, and thus difficult to work with. His career was dogged by problems with the financing of his films, which led to large gaps in his output - and after the critics, too, denounced Vampyr (1932), he returned to journalism in 1932, and became a cinema manager in 1952 - though he still made features up to the mid- 1960s, a few years before his death. His films are typically slow, intense studies of human psychology, usually of people undergoing extreme personal or religious crises. He is now regarded as the greatest director ever to emerge from Denmark.1212 points- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Fred Niblo entered films in 1917 after two decades as a touring actor in vaudeville and one-time manager of 'The Four Cohans' (he married Josephine Cohan, the sister of George M. Cohan). He made his film debut with two early Australian silent films in 1916. He worked for Thomas H. Ince from 1917 as producer-director, many of his films starring his second wife, Australian actress Enid Bennett. Niblo joined Paramount under a three-year contract from 1918-21 and then settled at MGM (1923-31). During this period, his chief claim to fame rests on directing the epic Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), filmed in Italy (though completed in California) at the (then) staggering cost of $4 million. Niblo was brought in by Louis B. Mayer to replace director Charles Brabin after the production ran into financial difficulties.He not only rescued it but made it into one of the biggest blockbusters of the decade. However, it was second-unit director B. Reeves Eason who deserves credit for the famous chariot race.
In 1926 Niblo replaced Swedish director Mauritz Stiller who had a disagreement with producer Irving Thalberg, on Greta Garbo's The Temptress (1926). This, alongside Camille (1926) and The Mysterious Lady (1928), were his last successes. His career failed to survive the transition to sound and even a stint in England could not resuscitate it. After a few small parts as an actor, Niblo slipped quietly into relative obscurity in 1943.1085 points- Actor
- Writer
- Director
Erich von Stroheim was born Erich Oswald Stroheim in 1885, in Vienna, Austria, to Johanna (Bondy), from Prague, and Benno Stroheim, a hatter from Gleiwitz, Germany (now Gliwice, Poland). His family was Jewish.
After spending some time working in his father's hat factory, he emigrated to America around 1909. Working in various jobs he arrived in Hollywood in 1914 and got work in D.W. Griffiths' company as a bit player. America's entry into WW1 enabled him to play sadistic monocled German officers but these roles dried up when the war ended. He turned to writing and directing but his passion for unnecessary detail such as Austrian guards wearing correct and expensively acquired regulation underwear which was never seen in 'Foolish Wives' caused the budget to reach a reported $1 million. Although the film became a hit the final edit was given to others resulting in a third of his footage being cut. Irving Thalberg fired him from 'Merry Go Round' which was completed by Rupert Julien. He then started on 'Greed', which when completed was unreleasable being 42 reels with a running time of 7 hours. It was eventually cut down to 10 reels which still had a striking effect on audiences. 'The Wedding March' was so long that even in it's unfinished state it was released as two separate films in Europe. Gloria Swanson fired him from her production of 'Queen Kelly' when with no sign of the film nearing completion the costs had risen to twice the budget partly due to him re-shooting scenes that had already been passed by the Hays office. She then had to spend a further $200,000 putting the footage into releasable state. It was the end for him as a director, but he made a reasonable success as an actor in the talkies.1061 points- Actor
- Director
- Producer
Frank Borzage was born on 23 April 1894 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. He was an actor and director, known for Bad Girl (1931), 7th Heaven (1927) and No Greater Glory (1934). He was married to Juanita Scott, Edna Skelton and Rena Rogers. He died on 19 June 1962 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA.1054 points- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Robert Wiene was born on 24 April 1873 in Breslau, Silesia, Germany [now Wroclaw, Dolnoslaskie, Poland]. He was a writer and director, known for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Das wandernde Licht (1916) and The Knight of the Rose (1925). He died on 17 July 1938 in Paris, France.1023 points- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Raoul Walsh's 52-year directorial career made him a Hollywood legend. Walsh was also an actor: He appeared in the first version of W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain" renamed Sadie Thompson (1928) opposite Gloria Swanson in the title role. He would have played the Cisco Kid in his own film In Old Arizona (1928) if an errant jackrabbit hadn't cost him his right eye by leaping through the windshield of his automobile. Warner Baxter filled the role and won an Oscar. Before John Ford and Nicholas Ray, it was Raoul Walsh who made the eye-patch almost as synonymous with a Hollywood director as Cecil B. DeMille's jodhpurs.
He interned with the best, serving as assistant director and editor on D.W. Griffith's racist masterpiece, The Clansman, better known as The Birth of a Nation (1915), a blockbuster that may have been the highest-grossing film of all time if accurate box office records had been kept before the sound era. He pulled triple duty on that picture, playing John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater and ranked as the most notorious American actor of all time until Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens).
The year before The Clansman, Walsh was second unit director on The Life of General Villa (1914), also playing the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa as a young man. Walsh got his start in the business as co-director of another Pancho Villa flick, The Life of General Villa (1914), in 1912. The movie featured footage shot of an actually battle between Villa's forces and Mexican federal troops.
In 1915, in addition to helping out the great Griffith, Walsh directed no less than 14 films, including his first feature-length film, The Regeneration (1915), which he also wrote. The movie starred silent cinema superstar Anna Q. Nilsson as a society woman turned social worker who aids the regeneration of a Bowery gang leader. It was a melodrama, but an effective one. In his autobiography, Walsh credited D.W. Griffith with teaching him about the art of filmmaking and about production management techniques. The film is memorable for its shots of New York City, where Walsh had been born 28 years earlier on March 11, 1887.
Raoul Walsh would continue to be a top director for 40 years and would not hang up his director's megaphone (if he still had one at that late in the game) until 1964. As a writer, his last script was made in 1970, meaning his career as a whole spanned seven decades and 58 years.
He introduced the world to John Wayne in The Big Trail (1930) in 70mm wide-screen in 1930. It would take nine more years and John Ford to make the Duke a star. In one three-year period at Warner Bros., he directed The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1940), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Manpower (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), and Gentleman Jim (1942), among other films in that time frame. He helped consolidate the stardom of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn while directing the great James Cagney in one of his more delightful films, The Strawberry Blonde (1941). This was the same director that would elicit Cagney's most searing performance since The Public Enemy (1931) in the crime classic White Heat (1949).
Novelist Norman Mailer says that Walsh was dragged off of his death bed to direct the underrated film adaptation of Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1958). The movie is as masculine and unsentimental as the book, an exceedingly harsh look at the power relations between men at war on the same side that includes the attempted murder of prisoners of war and the "fragging" of officers (Sergeant Croft allows his lieutenant to walk into an ambush). Walsh was at his best when directing men in war or action pictures.
Raoul Walsh seemingly recovered from Mailer's phantasmagorical death bed, as he lived another 22 years after The Naked and the Dead (1958). He died on December 31, 1980, in Simi Valley, California, at the age of 93.998 points- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Herbert Brenon was born on 13 January 1880 in Dublin, Ireland, UK [now Republic of Ireland]. He was a director and writer, known for Beau Geste (1926), Ivanhoe (1913) and Sorrell and Son (1927). He was married to Mrs. Herbert Brenon. He died on 21 June 1958 in Los Angeles, California, USA.936 points- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Vsevolod Pudovkin was born on 28 February 1893 in Penza, Russian Empire [now Russia]. He was a director and actor, known for Admiral Nakhimov (1947), Zhukovsky (1950) and Minin i Pozharskiy (1939). He was married to Anna Zemtsova. He died on 30 June 1953 in Jurmala, Latvian SSR, USSR [now Latvia].932 points- Producer
- Director
- Editor
His parents Henry C. DeMille and Beatrice DeMille were playwrights. His father died when he was 12, and his mother supported the family by opening a school for girls and a theatrical company. Too young to enlist in the Spanish-American War, Cecil followed his brother William C. de Mille to the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts, making his stage debut in 1900. For twelve years he was actor/manager of his mother's theatrical company. In 1913, Jesse L. Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn and DeMille formed the Lasky Film Company (which years later evolved into Paramount Pictures), and the next year went west to California and produced the successful six reeler, The Squaw Man (1914), of historical significance as the first feature length film produced in Hollywood. He championed the switch from short to feature-length films and is often credited with making Hollywood the motion picture capital of the world. Rather than putting his money into known stars, he emphasized production values. He also developed stars, notably Gloria Swanson. He produced and directed 70 films and was involved in many more. Many of his films were romantic sexual comedies (he is supposed to have believed that Americans were curious only about money and sex). His best-known were biblical/religious epics: Joan the Woman (1916), The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932), The Crusades (1935), Samson and Delilah (1949), and The Ten Commandments (1956). From 1936 to 1945 he hosted and directed the hour-long "Lux Radio Theatre", which brought the actors and stories of many movies to the airwaves and further established him as the symbol of Hollywood. He appeared as himself in the classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) with his former star Gloria Swanson as the fictitious disturbed former silent film actress Norma Desmond. His niece Agnes de Mille was the acclaimed choreographer of both the original Broadway production and film version of Oklahoma! (1955).885 points- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Had been out of work and was pretty much broke when he killed himself. He borrowed Buster Keaton's gun and after eating a meal that he could not pay for, shot himself. There are two stories; One says it was in the restroom of the cafe on Santa Monica Blvd, and the other story states he did it in the phone booth. His last real work was directing Buster Keaton on his local Los Angeles tv show on KTTV. This was in the early fifties and it was live. The show ran for just a year, but was popular. KTTV was having money problems and could not keep it on the air. The few tapes that survived show Keaton doing his typical gags, many that had been re-worked from his past glory.866 points- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Edward Sedgwick was born on 7 November 1892 in Galveston, Texas, USA. He was a director and actor, known for Murder in the Fleet (1935), Chasing the Moon (1922) and The Flaming Frontier (1926). He was married to Ebba Havez and Rose L. Elgueta. He died on 7 March 1953 in North Hollywood, California, USA.850 points- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Walter Ruttmann was born on 28 December 1887 in Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for Metropolis (1927), Mannesmann - Ein Film der Mannesmannröhren-Werke (1937) and Acciaio (1933). He was married to Christine Margarete Helene Prasch, Nina Hamson, Erna Treitel and Maria Christina Agnes Sommer. He died on 15 July 1941 in Berlin, Germany.826 points- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Josef von Sternberg split his childhood between Vienna and New York City. His father, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, could not support his family in either city; Sternberg remembered him only as "an enormously strong man who often used his strength on me." Forced by poverty to drop out of high school, von Sternberg worked for a time in a Manhattan store that sold ribbons and lace to hat makers. A chance meeting in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, led to a new career in the cleaning and repair of movie prints. This job provided an entrée to the film production industry, then flourishing in Fort Lee, New Jersey. As an apprentice film-maker, from around 1916 to the early 1920s, von Sternberg developed a lasting contempt for most of the directors and producers he worked for (an exception was Emile Chautard, who acted in some of Sternberg's films of the 1930s), and was sure that he could improve on their products. Staked to a few thousand dollars -- even then an absurdly small budget -- von Sternberg proved himself right with The Salvation Hunters (1925), which became a critical and financial hit. For the next couple of years he seesawed between acclaim and oblivion, sometimes on the same project (for instance, he received the rare honor of directing a film for Charles Chaplin, but it was shelved after only one showing and later disappeared forever). His commercial breakthrough was Underworld (1927), a prototypical Hollywood gangster film; behind the scenes, von Sternberg successfully battled Ben Hecht, the writer, for creative control. With The Last Command (1928), starring the equally strong-willed Emil Jannings, von Sternberg began a period of almost a decade as one of the most celebrated artists of world cinema. Both his film career and his personal life were transformed in the making of The Blue Angel (1930). Chosen by Jannings and producer Erich Pommer to make Germany's first major sound picture, von Sternberg gambled by casting Marlene Dietrich, then obscure, as Lola Lola, the night-club dancer who leads Jannings' character into depravity. The von Sternberg-Dietrich story, both on-screen (he directed her in six more movies) and off (he became one of her legions of lovers, more in love with her than most) is a staple of film histories. His films of the mid-'30s are among the most visionary ever made in Hollywood, but in spite of their visual sumptuousness, contemporary audiences found them dramatically inert. The films' mediocre box office and a falling-out with Ernst Lubitsch, then head of production at Paramount Pictures (Sternberg's employer), meant that after The Devil Is a Woman (1935) he would never again have the control he needed to express himself fully. In his sardonic autobiography, he more or less completely disowned all of his subsequent films. In spite (or perhaps because) of his truncated career and bitter personality, von Sternberg remains a hero to many critics and filmmakers. His best films exemplify the proposition, as he put it, that in any worthwhile film the director is "the determining influence, and the only influence, despotically exercised or not, which accounts for the worth of what is seen on the screen."815 points- Director
- Art Director
- Actor
Lev Kuleshov was a Russian director who used the editing technique known as the "Kuleshov effect." Although some of the editing innovations, such as crosscutting were used by other directors before him, Kuleshov was the first to use it in the Soviet Russia. he was driving a Ford sports car amidst hard situation in the post-Civil war USSR, and remained a controversial figure who joined the Soviet communist party and destroyed archives of rare silent movies during his experiments, thus clearing way for his own works: documentaries and feature films ranging from political cinema to timeless gems.
He was born Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov on 1 January, 1899, in Tambov, Russia. His father, Vladimir Kuleshov, belonged to Russian landed gentry, was a patron of arts and owner of a private estate in Central Russia. His mother, Pelagea Shubina, was a teacher before she married his father. His parents understood his weaknesses (poor speaking ability and bouts of depression) and strengths (a sharp eye, persistence and determination). His forte was the ability to see what for others remained unseen. Young Kuleshov received exclusive private education at the home of his father who had a degree from Moscow Art College. After the death of his father, 15-year-old Kuleshov and his mother moved to Moscow. There he studied art and history at the prestigious Stroganov School, then continued his studies at Moscow School of Painting, Architecture and Sculpture focusing on oil painting.
In 1916 he started his film career as a set designer at the Moscow film studio of Aleksandr Khanzhonkov and occasionally acted in some of its productions. He played a young lover opposite Emma Bauer, a stunning beauty, whom he truly fell in love with even before the filming started. That was the silent film Za schastem (1917). Watching himself on the silver screen, young Kuleshov was disappointed with the comic effect of his acting conflicting with naturalism of his true feelings. He decided to focus on directing and developing the style of his own. His new friend, experienced film-maker Akhramovich-Ashmarin, introduced him to American school of film-making, which also influenced his work.
With the help from Khanzhonkov's leading cinematographer, Yevgeny Bauer, Kuleshov made his first experimental works in editing. In 1917, he made his first publication in 'Vestnik Kinematografii': in three consecutive articles Kuleshov trashed the "salon" traditions of his employer by writing about an artist's role in converting film industry into a new form of art. His directorial career began under the patronage of Bauer, with whom Kuleshov worked as art director on such films, as Nabat (1917) and Za schastem (1917), and completed the latter as director after the original director Bauer died. In 1918, Kuleshov made his directorial debut with 'Project of Engineer Prite', and the film brought him attention of film studio executives who gave the 19-year-old beginner a chance to participate in documenting the early history of the Civil War-era Russia.
Following the Russian revolution of 1917, Kuleshov joined the Bolsheviks and sided with the Red Army in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1919, which was a continuation of the First World War. He covered the war on the Eastern front with a documentary crew. After the end of the Civil War, the Communist Party solidified control of the country, thus helping Kuleshov's career. His friend, Vladimir Gardin, appointed him instructor at the Moscow Film School. There he made a career as director and teacher. In 1920, he directed a war film Na krasnom fronte (1920), a government sponsored film about the Red Army. For some time Kuleshov continued wearing the Red Army uniform, to show his loyalty to the new government.
He studied the techniques of Hollywood directors, particularly D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett and introduced such innovations as crosscutting in editing and montage into Russian cinema. For his experiments Kuleshov was cutting old silent films from the archives of Khanzhonkov, Bauer and other private studios nationalized by the socialist govenment. Kuleshov used the archives of old silent movies for his own cutting experiments and thus most of the film archives was destroyed. Kuleshov remained quiet about this part of his career when he experimented with editing technique. He focused on putting two shots together to achieve a new meaning.
The "Kuleshov effect" is using the Pavlovian physiology to manipulate the impression made by an image and thus to spin the viewer's perception of that image. To demonstrate such manipulation, Kuleshov took a shot of popular Russian actor Ivan Mozzhukhin's expressionless face from an early silent film. He then edited the face together with three different endings: a plate of soup, a seductive woman, a dead child in a coffin. The audiences believed that Ivan Mozzhukhin acted differently looking at the food, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire, or grief respectively. Actually the face of Ivan Mozzhukhin in all three cases was one and the same shot repeated over and over again. Viewers own emotional reactions become involved in manipulation. Images spin those who are prone to be spun. Although editing and montage have already been used in art, architecture, fashion, politics, book publishing, theatrical productions and religious events (just look at placement of icons in churches, or photos in books, or pictures at exhibitions), the use of such editing in silent films was innovative and eventually led to more advanced visual effects.
Vsevolod Pudovkin, who claimed to have been the co-creator of Kuleshov's experiment, later described how the audience "raved about the acting... the heavy pensiveness of Ivan Mozzhukhin's mood over the soup, the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same." Kuleshov demonstrated the effect of editing that was successfully used in montage of such films, as Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Konets Sankt-Peterburga (1927) among other Soviet films. Kuleshov's good education, as well as his connections among Russian intellectual elite also helped his career.
At that time, Kuleshov and a group of his students, among them actress Aleksandra Khokhlova, collaborated on several movies that are now generally regarded as seminal films in Russian cinema. Among them are The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), a satire on clash of civilizations showing naive American Christian pastor who comes to Russia just to be robbed twice, but then helped by exemplary Soviet policeman. In 1926 he produced his most popular film, By the Law (1926), based on a Jack London story. The movie was successful in Russia and especially in Europe. In 1933, he directed The Great Consoler (1933), based on biography of American writer O. Henry. The film was highly praised by Osip Brik and Lilya Brik. It was an interesting advancement in Kuleshov's experimental style.
In 1936, he received his Ph.D and became professor of directing and Moscow Film School. In 1941, Kuleshov's book 'Osnovy kinorezhissury' (aka... Fundamentals of Film Direction) was published in Moscow. Kuleshov was promoted to high position within the Soviet film industry and was designated Doctor of Science for the book, which was translated in several languages and became regarded among filmmakers worldwide.
During WWII, Kuleshov made two films. One, made in collaboration with writer Arkadiy Gaydar, was Klyatva Timura (1942). To complete the film, Kuleshov with his film crew was moved on Soviet government expense from cold Moscow to warm Stalinabad, the capital of Turkmenistan. There, in 1943, together with his wife, Aleksandra Khokhlova, he directed his last movie, We from the Urals (1944), a film about young Soviet boys making heroic efforts in the Eastern Front of WWII. After that, he returned from Central Asia back to Moscow. The Soviet capital was recovering after attacks of Nazi armies. For his contribution to art, and also for his dedication to communist ideas, a prestigious position as Artistic Director of the Moscow Film Institute (VGIK) where he worked for the next 25 years. Over the course of his career, his students were hundreds of Soviet filmmakers, such as directors Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet, Mikhail Kalatozov and many others. His most trusted and devoted friend was Sergei Eisenstein.
Kuleshov visited Paris and presented a retrospective of his films in 1962. There he enjoyed much attention from international media. His friends in the Western world included many celebrities, such as Yves Montand, Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet among others. Kuleshov was member of the Jury at 1966 Venice Film Festival and attended other film festivals as a special guest. He made several exclusive trips outside of the Soviet Union.Kuleshov was a friend of the State security chief, KGB General V.N. Merkulov.
Kuleshov was awarded Order of Lenin, Order of Red Banner, was designated People's Artist of Russia (1969), and received other decorations and perks from the Soviet government.
Outside of his film career, Lev Kuleshov was fond of hunting, he owned a collection of exclusive hunting guns and often used them to kill game outside of Moscow and in Southern Russia. He also spent much time at Mediterranean resort near Yalta in Crimea and often made hunting trips in that area. Kuleshov was married to his student Aleksandra Khokhlova, and lived with his wife in a prestigious block on Lenin Prospect in central Moscow. There he died in 1970, and was laid to rest in Moscow's most prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery. Kuleshov's funeral took place while the Soviet Union was celebrating the centennial anniversary of the former leader Vladimir Lenin.809 points- Art Director
- Director
- Production Designer
Paul Leni was born on 8 July 1885 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was an art director and director, known for The Man Who Laughs (1928), Das Rätsel von Bangalor (1918) and The Last Warning (1928). He died on 2 September 1929 in Los Angeles, California, USA.807 points- Director
- Writer
Ted Wilde was born on 16 December 1889 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Speedy (1928), The Kid Brother (1927) and For Heaven's Sake (1926). He died on 17 December 1929 in Hollywood, California, USA.806 points- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Dziga Vertov was born on 2 January 1896 in Bialystok, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire [now Podlaskie, Poland]. He was a director and writer, known for Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Three Songs About Lenin (1934) and The Sixth Part of the World (1926). He was married to Elizaveta Svilova. He died on 12 February 1954 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia].804 points- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Charles Reisner (also frequently billed as "Riesner") started his professional life as a prizefighter. He performed in vaudeville for ten years and eventually wound up writing lyrics for musical comedy on Broadway. After a spell under the auspices of impresario Charles B. Dillingham, Reisner moved to California in 1915, finding a job as an actor in one-reel comedies at Universal. He added further credentials to his resume at Vitagraph before his arrival at Keystone, where he made the acquaintance of Charles Chaplin. Before long his innate ability to devise intricate visual sight gags got him involved as a gag writer (as well as occasional bit part actor) in classic Chaplin comedies at First National, including A Dog's Life (1918) and The Kid (1921). His collaboration with the famous comic ended with The Gold Rush (1925), for which Reisner was credited as assistant director.
Moving on to Warner Brothers, he directed Charles' brother Syd Chaplin in The Man on the Box (1925), Oh! What a Nurse! (1926) and The Better 'Ole (1926). Reisner also worked on the frenetic Buster Keaton comedy Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), using many of the old sight gags from bygone days of vaudeville comedy. Alas, it failed at the box office and proved to be Keaton's last film for his own production company.
During the 1930s Reisner made occasional forays into mystery and crime drama with minor entries like Sophie Lang Goes West (1937), but he was always more comfortable directing the screen's zaniest comedians, from Jack Benny in It's in the Air (1935) to The Marx Brothers in their hilarious and underrated The Big Store (1941), from Bud Abbott and Lou Costello who were Lost in a Harem (1944) to Joan Davis in one of the screen's last full-on slapstick farces, The Traveling Saleswoman (1950).803 points- Director
- Actor
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Renowned director Rex Ingram started his film career as a set designer and painter. His directorial debut was The Great Problem (1916). A true master of the medium, Ingram despised the business haggling required in the Hollywood system. He was also unhappy with the level of writing he found in American writers. This led him to work with such foreign writers as Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, which resulted in the first major role for the young Rudolph Valentino. Ingram was a great friend of Erich von Stroheim who, like Ingram, was a great filmmaker but often went way over budget. In 1924 Ingram moved to Nice, France, where, in his own studios, he directed films of his own choosing, often with his then-wife Alice Terry. In his later career he acted as a mentor to the young Michael Powell.782 points- Writer
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German film director E.A. Dupont was an influential critic and newspaper columnist before breaking into the film industry. He wrote several screenplays and worked as a story editor for Richard Oswald before turning to directing in 1917. Over the next eight years Dupont became a respected exponent of the German expressionist movement. He was particularly acclaimed for his film Variety (1925), which stood out for brilliant lighting effects and fluid camera work. Encouraged by his success, Dupont left Decla-Bioskop and joined Universal in Hollywood, but only completed one film. Crossing the Atlantic again, he signed with British National Pictures in 1928. He briefly became their leading director, again demonstrating his visual flair with two prestige productions: Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929). The latter was BIP's most expensively made picture up to this time.
After the advent of sound Dupont's career began to falter. His first "talkie", the "Titanic" story Atlantic (1929)-- shot in both English and French-- was an expensive flop, due mainly to poor dialogue and stilted performances. His next two ventures, respectively in France and Germany, had an even worse critical reception. Dupont next tried his luck in Hollywood. After 1933 he worked at different times for Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Critical success proved elusive, as almost all of his assignments were low-budget second features. After being fired from the set of Hell's Kitchen (1939) for slapping a junior member of the cast who had mocked his accent, Dupont spent most of the 1940s in Hollywood as a talent agent and publicist. He eventually resumed his directing career with an offbeat minor film noir, The Scarf (1951), and a watchable precursor to The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Steel Lady (1953). Among his last films was the notorious sci-fi stinker The Neanderthal Man (1953). He died of cancer in December 1956.769 points- Director
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Edward "Eddie" Cline began his career in the film business as one of the Keystone Kops. The former vaudevillian appeared sporadically in films as an actor until 1922, but became increasingly active behind the camera as a gagman and scenario writer for Mack Sennett. From 1916 he worked on a steady stream of two-reelers, either as director or assistant director, for such comedians as Buster Keaton, Ford Sterling and Mack Swain. An expert in slapstick comedy with an unerring sense of timing, Cline was consistently in demand by Hollywood studios during the 1920s and served short-term contracts with Fox (the "Sunshine" comedies), Pathe, First National, MGM and Paramount.
During the sound era he had more periods of steadier employment, particularly at Universal (1939-45). He became the favorite director of comedian W.C. Fields. In fact, Fields would often demand Cline's participation, much to the consternation of the studios. In one instance, director Edward Sedgwick was assigned to the Fields comedy You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), but was replaced by Cline just two days into shooting because he couldn't get along with Fields. Cline frequently worked out comedy routines by standing in for the Fields character in rehearsals. As for being able to get along with the notoriously prickly star, Cline believed in just "letting him run with it" and later editing out any unwanted ad-libs (which Fields had a habit of inserting at the end of his lines). Unfortunately, those famous ad-libs often tended to crack up the camera crew and ruin the take . . .
Cline directed Fields in some of his funniest comedies, including My Little Chickadee (1940) and The Bank Dick (1940) (the climactic car chase was largely due to Cline's input). He teamed up once more with Keaton for the anachronistic slapstick farce The Villain Still Pursued Her (1940). Cline's output diminished by the mid-'40s and he retired from directing in 1951.650 points- Director
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William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life personality and lifestyle.
A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the 29th of February in Brookline, MA, Wellman was the great-great-great grandson of Francis Lewis, one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Wellman's father was a stockbroker and his mother, the former Cecilia McCarthy, was born in Ireland. Despite an upper-middle-class upbringing, the young Wellman was a hell-raiser. He excelled as an athlete and particularly enjoyed playing ice hockey, but he also enjoyed joyriding in stolen cars at nights.
Cecilia Wellman served as a probation officer for "wayward boys" (juvenile delinquents) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and was such a success in her field that she was asked to address Congress on the subject of delinquency. One of her charges was her own son, as the young Bill was kicked out of school at the age of 17 for hitting his high school principal on the head with a stink bomb. He tried making a living as a candy salesman and a cotton salesman, but failed. He worked for a lumber yard but was fired after losing control of a truck and driving it through the side of a barn. Eventually he wound up playing professional ice hockey in Massachusetts. While playing at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, an actor named Douglas Fairbanks took note of him. Impressed by Wellman's good looks and the figure he cut on ice, the soon-to-be silent-film superstar suggested to him that he had what it took to become a movie actor. Wellman's dream was to become an aviator, but since his father "didn't have enough money for me to become a flier in the regular way . . .I went into a war to become a flier."
When he was 19 years old, through the intercession of his uncle, Wellman joined the air wing of the French Foreign Legion, where he learned to fly. In France he served as a pilot with the famous Lafayette Flying Corps (better known as the Lafayette Escadrille), where he won his nickname "Wild Bill" due to his devil-may-care style in the air. He and fellow pilot Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player, were in the Black Cat group. Wellman was shot down by anti-aircraft fire and injured during the landing of his plane, which had lost its tail section. Out of 222 Escadrille pilots 87 were killed, but Wellman was fated to serve out the duration of the war. In the spring of 1918 he was recruited by the US Army Air Corps, joining "because I was broke, and they were trying to get us in." Commissioned an officer, he was sent back to the US and stationed at Rockwell Field, in San Diego, CA, to teach combat fighting tactics to the new AAC pilots.
Wellman would fly up to Hollywood and land on Fairbanks' polo fields to spend the weekend. Fairbanks told the returning hero that he would help him break into the movies when the war was over, and he was as good as his word. Fairbanks envisioned Wellman as an actor and cast him as the juvenile in The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919) and as a young officer in Evangeline (1919), but acting was something Wellman grew to hate, a hatred he later transferred to actors in his employ. He was fired by fellow macho director Raoul Walsh from "Evangeline" for slapping the lead actress, who Wellman didn't know was Walsh's wife. Disgusted with acting, Wellman told Fairbanks he wanted to be a director, and Fairbanks helped him into the production end of the business. It was a purely financial decision, he later recalled, as directors made more money than supporting actors at the time.
Goldwyn Pictures hired him as a messenger in 1920 and he soon worked his way up the ladder, first as an assistant cutter, then as an assistant property man, property man, assistant director and second-unit director before making his uncredited directorial debut later that year at Fox with Twins of Suffering Creek (1920) starring Dustin Farnum (the silent film B-Western star whom Dustin Hoffman's star-struck mother named the future double-Oscar winner after). Wellman later remembered the film as awful, along with such other B-Westerns as Cupid's Fireman (1923), starring Buck Jones, whose westerns he began directing in 1923 after serving his apprenticeship.
Fox Films gave Wellman his first directing credit in 1923 with the Buck Jones western Second Hand Love (1923) and, other than the Dustin Farnum picture The Man Who Won (1923), he turned out Jones pictures for the rest of his time at Fox. The studio fired him in 1924 after he asked for a raise after completing The Circus Cowboy (1924), another Buck Jones film. Moving to Columbia, he helmed When Husbands Flirt (1925), then went over to MGM for the slapstick comedy The Boob (1926) before landing at Famous Players-Lasky (now known as Paramount Pictures after its distribution unit), where he directed You Never Know Women (1926) and The Cat's Pajamas (1926). It was as a contract director at the now renamed Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky Corp. that he had his breakout hit, due to his flying background. Paramount entrusted its epic WW I flying epic Wings (1927) to Wellman, and the film went on to become the first Academy Award-winning best picture.
Paramount paid Wellman $250 a week to direct "Wings". He also gave himself a role as a German pilot, and flew one of the German planes that landed and rolled over. The massive production employed 3,500 soldiers, 65 pilots and 165 aircraft. It also went over budget and over schedule due to Wellman's perfectionism, and he came close to being fired more than once. The film took a year to complete, but when it was released it turned out to be one of the most financially successful silent pictures ever released and helped put Gary Cooper, whom Wellman personally cast in a small role, on the path to stardom. "Wings" and Wellman's next flying picture, The Legion of the Condemned (1928)--in which Cooper had a starring role--initiated the genre of the World War One aviation movie, which included such famous works as Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930) and Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930). Despite his success in bringing in the first Best Picture Oscar winner, Paramount did not keep Wellman under contract.
Wellman's disdain for actors already was in full bloom by the time he wrapped "Wings". Many actors appearing in his pictures intensely disliked his method of bullying them to elicit an performance. Wellman was a "man's man" who hated male actors due to their narcissism, yet he preferred to work with them because he despised the preparation that actresses had to go through with their make-up and hairdressing before each scene. Wellman shot his films fast. The hard-drinking director usually oversaw a riotous set, in line with his own lifestyle. He married five women, including a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, before settling down with Dorothy Coonan Wellman, a former Busby Berkeley dancer. Wellman believed that Dorothy saved him from becoming a caricature of himself. She appeared as a tomboy in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), a Depression-era social commentary picture made for the progressive Warner Bros. studio (and which is a favorite of Martin Scorsese). It came two years after Wellman's masterpiece, The Public Enemy (1931), one of the great early talkies, one of the great gangster pictures and the film that made James Cagney a superstar. Scorsese says that Wellman's use of music in the film influenced his own first gangster picture, Mean Streets (1973) .
Wellman was as adept at comedy as he was at macho material, helming the original A Star Is Born (1937) (for which he won his only Oscar, for best original story) and the biting satire Nothing Sacred (1937)--both of which starred Fredric March--for producer David O. Selznick. Both movies were dissections of the fame game, as was his satire Roxie Hart (1942), which reportedly was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite films.
During World War Two Wellman continued to make outstanding films, including The Ox-Bow Incident (1942) and Story of G.I. Joe (1945), and after the war he turned out another war classic, Battleground (1949). In the 1950s Wellman's best later films starred John Wayne, including the influential aviation picture The High and the Mighty (1954), for which he received his third and last best director Oscar nomination. His final film hearkened back to his World War One service, Lafayette Escadrille (1958), which featured the unit in which Wellman had flown. He retired as a director after making the film, reportedly enraged at Warner Bros.' post-production tampering with a film that meant so much to him.
Other than David O. Selznick, not many people in Hollywood particularly liked the hell-raising iconoclast Wellman. Louis B. Mayer's daughter Irene Mayer Selznick, the first wife of David O. Selznick, said that Wellman was "a terror, a shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine I-don't-know-what". The Directors Guild of America in 1973 honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
William Wellman died (from leukemia) in 1975.645 points- Director
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John Ford came to Hollywood following one of his brothers, an actor. Asked what brought him to Hollywood, he replied "the train". He became one of the most respected directors in the business, in spite of being known for his westerns, which were not considered "serious" film. He won six Oscars, counting (he always did) the two that he won for his WWII documentary work. He had one wife; a son and daughter; and a grandson, Dan Ford who wrote a biography on his famous grandfather.544 points- Director
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- Additional Crew
Wallace Worsley was born on 8 December 1878 in Wappingers Falls, New York, USA. He was a director and actor, known for The Ace of Hearts (1921), A Blind Bargain (1922) and The Penalty (1920). He was married to Julia M. Taylor. He died on 26 March 1944 in Hollywood, California, USA.537 points- Director
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Allan Dwan was born on 3 April 1885 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was a director and writer, known for Bound in Morocco (1918), A Perfect Crime (1921) and Panthea (1917). He was married to Marie Shelton and Pauline Bush. He died on 28 December 1981 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.513 points- Writer
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- Editor
Born an illegitimate son of a wealthy physician, Abel Flamant, and a working class mother, Francoise Perethon. He was raised by his mother and her boyfriend, who later became her husband, Adolphe Gance. Pressured by his parents, he began his working career as a lawyer's clerk in hopes of achieving a prosperous career in law. But his passion for the theatre lured him to the stage and at 19 he made his stage debut in Brussels. Within a year, after returning to Paris, he made his screen debut as an actor in Moliere (1909). He made other film appearances in minor roles as well as taking a crack at screen-writing.
Living in poverty during this period in his life, he suffered from starvation and tuberculosis. But he regained strength enough to form a production company in 1911, and made his debut as a director that same year with La Digue (1911). However, like the rest of his early films, it was unsuccessful and as a consequence, he returned to the stage with a five-hour long play, Victoire de Samothrace, which he wrote himself. It was due to be a success with Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role, but the sudden outbreak of WWI canceled the premiere.
Due to his ill health he was kept out of most of the war. During this time he managed to achieve a profitable status at the Film d'Arte company as a director. He turned out such successful films as Mater Dolorosa (1917) and La Dixieme Symphonie (1918), but he gained a reputation at Film d'Arte as a wild experimentalist - using such outlandish techniques for the time as close-ups and dolly shots. As a consequence, he was frequently at odds with the management. At the point of being one of the most well known film directors in France, he entered the tail end of WWI. He was discharged shortly after due to mustard gas poisoning. But he requested that he be redrafted so that he could shoot on-location battle scenes for his latest idea for a film J'accuse! (1919). The three-hour long, triangular melodrama about the "futility of war" became a box-office smash all over Europe. It was Europe's first fictional film to show authentic footage of the catastrophes of war. Being an experimentalist, he employed a rapid cutting technique that is said to have influenced such Russian filmmakers as Sergei Eisenstein and Pudovkin.
During the making of his next film, The Wheel (1923), he and his second wife, Ida Danis, fell ill with the flu. Although he recovered and worked on the film in stages, his wife did not - she died shortly before the film's release. Grieved by death of his wife and friend, actor Severin Mars, who starred in many of his films, he fled Europe and sailed to America. The trip turned out to be a nationwide promotion of I Accuse. He recalls that he did not like the Hollywood filmmaking system and refused an offer from MGM to direct for a hefty sum. The happiest moment was D.W. Griffith's praise of I Accuse at a screening in New York.
Returning to France, Gance released the final cut of La Roue to much acclaim, especially for its montage sequence. His most important and outstanding film is Napoleon (1927). Considered to be a dictionary of all the techniques of the silent film era and an introduction to some techniques to come. It was shot using a three-camera panoramic process that involves the use of three projectors and a curved windscreen to create a deep, vast panoramic look. A couple thousand extras were used to fill the shots. Being the experimentalist that he was, he shot scenes in color, more than a decade before Hollywood would make The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939) in color, and in 3-D. But he decided against incorporating them into the film in fear that they would jar the audience's attention. The film received a standing ovation the night of its premiere at the Paris Opera. It was then shown only in 8 European cities due to the expensive and technical apparatus and large size theatre needed to project the film. In the US, MGM purchased the distribution rights and elected not to show the film using the three projector windscreen equipment, claiming that it would interfere with the introduction of sound. Nonetheless, that doesn't explain why MGM decided to drastically cut the film and rearrange it. As a consequence, the general release in the US was a not a success, audiences laughed at the film and critics panned it. It was the last film of Gance's career that was to possess that magnitude of creativeness. His sound films were mainly done for studios, where he lacked the ability to be creative. He would return to Napoleon a couple times in his career. In 1934 he added stereophonic sound effects to the original film using a Pictographe. He had criticized film historians throughout the rest of his life for not giving his film Napoleon (1927) the attention it deserves. Finally, British director Kevin Brownlow spent two decades doing the arduous task of putting the film back together in its original format. It was first screened in London using the three projector format with a score composed and conducted by Carl Davis in 1979. Francis Ford Coppola produced the screenings at the Radio City Hall in the US, in 1981 to much acclaim. His father Carmine Coppola, composed and conducted the score in the US. Finally, Napoleon (1927) and its director received the respect they deserve.506 points- Actor
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- Producer
For more than three decades, Henry King was the most versatile and reliable (not to mention hard-working) contract director on the 20th Century-Fox lot. His tenure lasted from 1930 to 1961, spanning most of Hollywood's "golden" era. King was renowned as a specialist in literary adaptations (A Bell for Adano (1945), The Sun Also Rises (1957)) and for his nostalgic depictions of rural or small-town America (Margie (1946)). Much of his work was characterized by an uncomplicated approach and a vivid visual style rather than cinematic tricks or technical individuality. For the most part it was his meticulous attention to detail, and his reliance on superior plots and good acting, that got the job done. King was, above all, an astute judge of talent. He introduced Ronald Colman to American audiences in The White Sister (1923), drawing a mustache on the actor's clean-shaven face with a retouching pencil--the real thing later becoming a Colman trademark. King discovered Gary Cooper and cast him in a leading dramatic role in his outdoor western The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926), over the initial objections of producer Samuel Goldwyn who thought Coop was just another "damn cowboy". Goldwyn quickly changed his mind after seeing the rushes. Other King discoveries included the lovely Jean Peters (in Captain from Castile (1947)) and Tyrone Power, whom he actively promoted to the point of badgering studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck to star him in Lloyd's of London (1936). Power subsequently became one of Fox's most popular stars.
All in all, not bad for a guy who had left school at 15 to work for the Norfolk & Western Railroad. After enduring the machine shops for a few years, King found more suitable employment as an apprentice actor with the touring Empire Stock Company, where he often performed song-and-dance routines in blackface. During his travels he befriended comedy actress Pearl White. While accompanying her on a visit to the Lubin film studio in Philadelphia in 1913, he was somehow talked into trying out as an actor. Before long King found himself cast as assorted western villains in scores of one-reelers. Moving to California the following year, he graduated to romantic leads in full-length feature films with the Balboa Amusement Company, often co-starring opposite popular child actress Marie Osborne. King's directing career began in 1915 and gathered momentum after he joined The American Film Manufacturing Company, and, subsequently, Thomas H. Ince. His first success was the army comedy 23 1/2 Hours' Leave (1919). By 1921 King fronted his own production company, Inspiration Pictures, releasing through First National. The rustic southern drama Tol'able David (1921) was his next critically acclaimed picture, but not until joining Goldwyn at United Artists (1925-30) did he manage to turn out a consistent string of hits, including The White Sister (1923) and Romola (1924)--both shot on location in Italy--and the archetypal tearjerker Stella Dallas (1925). For King, the transition to sound pictures was a mere formality.
In 1930 King qualified for his pilot's license and began busily scouting locations from the air, earning him the sobriquet "The Flying Director". When not airborne or on the golf course (his other passion), he demonstrated his amazing versatility with box-office hits across a wide variety of genres: striking and colorful swashbucklers (The Black Swan (1942)); romantic or religious melodramas--their sentimentality well-tempered so they never seemed maudlin--such as (The Song of Bernadette (1943) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)); epics (In Old Chicago (1938), with its splendid recreation of the 1871 great fire, the entire enterprise filmed at a staggering cost of $1.8 million); popular musicals (Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), Carousel (1956)); psychological war drama (Twelve O'Clock High (1949)); and uncompromisingly tough, offbeat westerns (The Gunfighter (1950) and the underrated The Bravados (1958)). The latter three all starred King's preferred leading actor, Gregory Peck. Peck was also on hand for The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), reputedly Ernest Hemingway's favorite among all his filmed adaptations. Of course, King also had his occasional failures. Topping that list was Zanuck's pet project, the biopic Wilson (1944). Overly serious to the point of being dour, its pacifist message was lost to an audience in the middle of a world war. King's other notable dud, near the end of his career, was Beloved Infidel (1959). Badly miscast, the film chronicling the affair between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham was played out, inaccurately, as a genteel and overly glossy romance.
Though nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Director, King failed to snag the coveted trophy. However, he did win a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America in 1956. More importantly, perhaps, he seems to have enjoyed his work, stating in a 1978 interview, "I've had more fun directing pictures than most people have playing games" (New York Times, July 1 1982).493 points- Director
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Belonging to a well-situated family, Charles Browning fell in love at the age of 16 with a dancer of a circus. Following her began his itinerary of being clown, jockey and director of a variety theater which ended when he met D.W. Griffith and became an actor. He made his debut in Intolerance (1916). Working later on as a director, he had his first success with The Unholy Three (1925) (after about 25 unimportant pictures) which had his typical style of a mixture of fantasy, mystery and horror. His biggest hit was the classic Dracula (1931), in which he also appears as the voice of the harbor master.438 points- Director
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Jacques Feyder was born on 21 July 1885 in Ixelles, Brabant, Belgium. He was a director and writer, known for Carnival in Flanders (1935), Le grand jeu (1934) and Fahrendes Volk (1938). He was married to Françoise Rosay. He died on 24 May 1948 in Rive-de-Prangins, Switzerland.399 points- Writer
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Aleksandr Dovzhenko was born on 10 September 1894 in Vyunishche, Sosnitsa Ueyzd, Chernigov Governorate, Russian Empire [now Sosnitsa, Sosnitsa Raion, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine]. He was a writer and director, known for Earth (1930), Shors (1939) and Life in Bloom (1949). He was married to Yuliya Solntseva. He died on 25 November 1956 in Moscow, Russian SFSR, USSR [now Russia].397 points- Director
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Benjamin Christensen was born on 28 September 1879 in Viborg, Denmark. He was a director and writer, known for Blind Justice (1916), Häxan (1922) and The Devil's Circus (1926). He was married to Karen Winther, Sigrid Stahl and Ellen Arctander. He died on 2 April 1959 in Copenhagen, Denmark.397 points- Director
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British film director Anthony Asquith was born on November 9, 1902, to H.H. Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his second wife. A former home secretary and the future leader of the Liberal Party, H.H. Asquith served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1908-1916 and was subsequently elevated to the hereditary peerage. His youngest child, Anthony, was called Puffin by his family, a nickname given him by his mother, who thought he resembled one. Puffin was also the name his friends called him throughout his life.
Asquith was active in the British film industry from the late silent period until the mid-1960s. As a director he was highly respected by his contemporaries and had a long and successful career; by the 1960s he was one of only three British directors (the others being David Lean and Carol Reed) who were directing major international motion picture productions. However, Asquith's proclivity for adapting plays for the screen caused an erosion in his critical reputation as a filmmaker after his death. He was faulted for what was perceived as his failure to focus, like his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, on the cinematic. Asquith was known as an actor's director, and solicited some of the finest film performances from Britain's greatest actors, including Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave.
Although Asquith's first love was music, he lacked musical talent. He channeled his artistic ambitions toward the nascent motion picture, and was instrumental in the formation of the London Film Society to promote artistic appreciation of film. Asquith traveled to Hollywood in the 1920s to observe American film production techniques, and after returning to England, he became a director.
Among his best-known films is Pygmalion (1938), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's stage play, which he co-directed with its star, Leslie Howard. The film was a major critical success, even in the United States, winning multiple Academy Award nominations. Nobel Prize-winner Shaw, who had been a co-founder of the London Film Society along with Asquith, won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for the film. Asquith had a long professional association with playwright Terence Rattigan, and two of Asquith's most famous and successful pictures were based on Rattigan plays, The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951). Asquith directed the screen version of Rattigan's first successful play, French Without Tears (1940), in 1940.
Asquith's most successful postwar film was, arguably, his adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). More than a half-century after it was made, Asquith's film remains the best adaptation of Wilde's work. Ironically, Asquith's father H.H., while serving as Home Secretary, ordered Wilde's arrest for his homosexual behavior. Wilde's arrest, for "indecent behavior", led to his incarceration in the Reading jail and destroyed the great playwright, personally. The Wilde incident stifled gay culture in Britain for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Another irony of the situation is that H.H.'s youngest son, Anthony, himself was gay.
By the 1960s Asquith was directing Hollywood-style all-star productions, including the episodic The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), once again from a screenplay by Rattigan, and the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor potboiler The V.I.P.s (1963), also with a screenplay by Rattigan. It is based in an incident in the life of Laurence Olivier, a frequent Asquith collaborator. In 1967 Asquith was tipped to direct the big-screen adaptation of the best-selling novel The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) set to co-star Olivier and Anthony Quinn, but he had to drop out of the production due to ill heath. He died on February 20, 1968, at the age of 65.
The British Academy Award for best music is named the Anthony Asquith Award in his honor.395 points- Director
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A businessman and operetta director, Joe May, one of the founders of the German cinema, started directing films in 1911 and started his own production company a few years later. He gave famous German director Fritz Lang his start in films, employing him as a screenwriter in his early films. After the Nazi takeover, May fled to the United States where he directed several excellent action films for Universal, but never could quite break into the ranks of the "A" picture directors. May never bothered to completely learn the English language and was never popular with his casts and crews due to his dictatorial nature. He ended his career by directing his last film for Monogram in 1944 at the age of 64. He later briefly owned a restaurant in Hollywood that failed because, in keeping with his Teutonic roots, told customers what they should order.394 points- Director
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In France from 1923. Kirsanoff was at the forefront of Parisian avant-garde filmmaking thanks to works such as Ménilmontant (1926), which combined soviet style montage with hand-held camerawork and lyrically composed static shots. Kirsanoff's early silent films, many starring his first wife Nadia Sibirskaia, are considered his best works. With the coming of sound the quality of his output declined, though he continued to direct commercial ventures into the 1950's. His second marriage was to editor Monique Kirsanoff.392 points- Director
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Marcel L'Herbier was born on 23 April 1888 in Paris, France. He was a director and writer, known for L'inhumaine (1924), Le bonheur (1934) and Sacrifice d'honneur (1935). He was married to Marcelle Pradot. He died on 26 November 1979 in Paris, France.390 points- Actor
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Coming to the US at the age of 34, New Zealand-born Rupert Julian started his career as a stage and screen actor touring Australia and New Zealand. Having made his name (and a cool million for Universal) as a dead ringer for Kaiser Wilhelm II in the 1918 film The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918), he turned director. His output was mostly routine until he was assigned to complete Merry-Go-Round (1923) when director Erich von Stroheim was fired from it. His best-known picture was Lon Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera (1925) (though he in turn was fired and replaced before filming was completed), but he soon fell into a professional decline, and after directing only two films after the advent of sound, his career fizzled out.389 points- Director
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David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting. In the years following "Birth", Griffith never again saw the same monumental success as his signature film and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948, one of the most dichotomous figures in film history.329 points- Director
- Actor
- Producer
Chicago-born Robert Z. Leonard studied law at the University of Colorado, but the legal profession proved not to be his forte and he dropped out in favor of a career in the theatre. When his family moved to Hollywood in 1907 Leonard sought work in the fledgling film industry, starting as an actor with Selig Polyscope. Though he became an established star by 1916, his chief interest lay on the other side of the camera. Turning to directing from 1913, he helmed a brace of short comedy features and got his break when he was assigned a serial, The Master Key (1914), in 1914. From 1915-19 he was under contract at Universal, where he became chiefly associated with the films of his future wife, the ex-Ziegfeld Follies star Mae Murray. In 1919 Leonard and Murray founded Tiffany Productions, specifically as a means of creating suitable star vehicles for her. While the company lingered on as Tiffany-Stahl on the Talisman lot--one of the "Poverty Row" studios turning out cheap westerns and even cheaper "Chimp Comedies"' (yes, the stars were chimps and a lot cheaper to maintain than humans!)--Leonard and Murray moved on to join the newly-established Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924.
Leonard's union with the volatile Murray ended in divorce in 1925. After clashing with MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, Murray left the studio two years later. Leonard married another actress, Gertrude Olmstead, and went on to become one of the studio's most reliable contract directors for the next three decades. Fitting in perfectly with the studio system, he was part of a highly efficient team of top craftsmen under the auspices of producer Hunt Stromberg, turning out scores of musicals and light comedies. Though not generally regarded by film critics as among the top echelon of Hollywood directors, Leonard nevertheless capably handled a variety of A-grade pictures, often starring temperamental personalities. Among his most successful hits for MGM were the backstage musical Dancing Lady (1933); the opulent multi Oscar-winning musical biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936) (completed on a budget of $2 million); all but two of the popular cycle of Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald operettas; and the stylish, witty Pride and Prejudice (1940), an adaptation of the famed Jane Austen novel, a production that typified the most lavish of MGM's post-Thalberg costume dramas. It was scripted by no less than Aldous Huxley and starred Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson.
While many of his films may be dismissed for lacking artistic merit, the plain truth is that few lost money. Leonard gave the public what it wanted: he excelled at providing escapist entertainment, particularly with glossy, all-star extravaganzas like Ziegfeld Girl (1941) or Week-End at the Waldorf (1945). It was ironic, that, in 1949, he made a rare and unsuccessful foray into the genre of film noir with The Bribe (1949), an endeavor equally untypical of its studio. Starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner (at her most ravishing) and Vincent Price as a war surplus racketeer, the picture bombed at the box office. Producer Pandro S. Berman subsequently lamented it as "a heap of junk" that should "never have been made", but in retrospect "The Bribe" is not at all bad. In fact, it has gained something of a cult following over the years. Scenes from it were conspicuously used by Steve Martin for his excellent montage comedy Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982).
Leonard left MGM on the studio retirement plan in 1955. He then had a brief sojourn in Italy, where he directed Gina Lollobrigida in Beautiful But Dangerous (1955) before finally making his swan song at Universal with a less-than-memorable family film, Kelly and Me (1956). With his wife Gertrude, Leonard resided in Beverly Hills until his death in August 1968.305 points- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Grigori Aleksandrov was a Soviet-Russian filmmaker best known as director of Volga - Volga (1938), The Circus (1936), and October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1927), as well as co-star in Battleship Potemkin (1925) by director Sergei Eisenstein.
He was born Grigori Vasilyevich Mormonenko on January 23, 1903 in Ekaterinburg, Russia. His father, Vasili Mormonenko, was a worker. Young Aleksandrov was obsessed with acting and movies. At the age of 9 he was hired as a delivery boy at the Ekaterinburg Opera; there he eventually worked as an assistant dresser, electrician, decorator, and assistant director. He studied violin and piano at the Ekaterinburg School of Music, graduating in 1917. During the Russian Civil War of 1917-1920, he was road manager with the Theatre of Eastern Front of the Red Army. After the Civil War he graduated from the Directors Courses for Proletariat Theatre in Ekaterinburg, and was appointed Inspector of Arts at the Ekaterinburg Regional Administration. His job was to supervise theaters and to select films in compliance with the new ideology.
Aleksandrov met Eisenstein in 1921. They worked together on several stage productions in 1921-24. In 1923 Aleksandrov appeared as Glumov in a stage production of A. Ostrovsky's play at the Moscow Proletkult Theatre, directed by Eisenstein. They worked together on the scenario of their first films: 'Stachka' (1924) and 'Bronenosets Potemkin' (1925). They wrote and directed 'Oktyabr' (1927), a historical film made to look like a documentary about the Russian revolution. In 1929-1933 both Aleksandrov and Eisenstein were sent to study and work in Hollywood. Back in the Soviet Union Aleksandrov made a short documentary film titled 'International' (1932).
In 1933 Aleksandrov had a meeting with Joseph Stalin and Maxim Gorky at the Gorky's State Dacha near Moscow. Stalin offered the oportunity to Aleksandrov to make a musical comedy for the Soviet people. 'Veselye Rebyata' (aka.. Jolly fellows) was completed in 1934, starring Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova. 'Veselye Rebyata' became the #1 box office hit in Russia and was awarded at the Venice Film Festival. Leonid Utyosov and Lyubov Orlova became instant celebrities, and songs by composer Isaak Dunaevskiy became popular hits in the Soviet Union.
Aleksandrov directed and edited the documentary of Stalin's speech about the Soviet constitution, titled 'Doklad tov. Stalina o proekte Konstitutsii SSSR na VIII Chresvychaynom S'ezde Sovetov' (1937). After that Aleksandrov returned to making comedies. Aleksandrov's wife, Lyubov Orlova, starred in almost all of his feature films, such as 'Tsirk' (1936), 'Volga-Volga' (1938), 'Svetly Put' (1940), 'Vesna' (1947) among his other films. His 1930s comedies remained rather popular among several generations of viewers in the Soviet Union, as well as internationally. In 1942 Joseph Stalin sent a copy of Volga - Volga (1938) to American president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
However, Aleksandrov's success came at a painful price, as he suffered from many attacks by some less fortunate and envious filmmakers, as well as from blackmailing by invisible and anonymous enemy. In 1938 Aleksandrov's colleagues, cinematographer Vladimir Nilsen, and producer Boris Shumyatskiy, were executed by the firing squad for anti-government activities. At the same time both Aleksandrov and Orlova were falsely accused of spying for the Nazi Germany, but were cleared of all charges.
During the 1950s he taught directing at State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). His last films had little success, and some, like 'Skvorets i lira' (1973) were not even released in theaters. Aleksandrov also made a few documentaries, including one about Lenin, and one about his wife, star actress Lyubov Orlova.
Grigori Aleksandrov received the Stalin's Prize twice (1941, 1950), the Order of Lenin twice (1939, 1950), the Order of Red Star (1938), and the Order of the Red Banner twice (1963, 1967). He was designated People's Actor of the USSR. Grigori Aleksandrov died of kidney infection on December 16, 1983, at the Kremlin Hospital in Moscow, and was laid to rest next to his wife, Lyubov Orlova in Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow, Russia.258 points- Director
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- Actor
Abram Room was born on 28 June 1894 in Vilna, Russian Empire [now Vilnius, Lithuania]. He was a director and writer, known for Nashestvie (1945), Sud chesti (1949) and Belated Flowers (1970). He died on 26 July 1976 in Moscow, Russian SFSR, USSR [now Russia].257 points- Director
- Writer
- Production Designer
Budapest-born director Paul Fejos first called attention to himself in Kecskemét, Hungary, as a student actor. During World War I he was a soldier in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and after the war he became a student of chemistry. His artistic inclination, however, drew him to the scenery workshop of the local opera house. In 1919 he organized the film-scenic affairs of the Government of the Commune. Later he became scenic director of Orient Film and in 1920 he was the leading director for the Mobil Film Co., and also wrote the scripts for his films. His early works are adventure sketches, but even they show his growing reputation for demanding high standards. He still kept his hand in stage work, though, and tried to establish a folklorist passion play in the Hungarian city of Mikófalva.
In 1923, after the failure of his film Egri csillagok (1923), he left Hungary. Arriving in Vienna, Austria, he worked with the legendary Max Reinhardt, then traveled to Berlin to study with Fritz Lang. He later went to the US, working at the Rockefeller Institute for Chemistry as an assistant chemist, eventually becoming a medical bacteriologist. His passion for film never left him, though, and in 1927 he used his own money to produce and direct an avant-garde piece called "Az utolsó pillanat", which told the story of a suicide victim. The film was critically and financially successful, and Universal Pictures put him under contract. His next film was Lonesome (1928), a sweet film about two lonely people who meet at an amusement park, enjoy a wonderful day together but lose each other in the crowd and frantically search for each other. In 1932 he returned to Hungary to shoot two films for a French production company: Ítél a Balaton (1933) and Spring Shower (1932), a tale of a servant girl for a wealthy family who is fired and driven from her village when she gets pregnant by the fiance of the family's daughter.
He stayed in Europe for a while, shooting films in Austria and Denmark, then traveled to Asia and spent several years shooting documentaries. He made his last film in 1941 and switched careers to archaeological and anthropological research. He led an archaeological expedition to ancient Inca towns in South America, and published several scientific papers. He was President of the Wenner-Green Foundation and spent time lecturing on archaeology. He died in New York City in 1963.257 points- Director
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Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev was born on March 22, 1905, in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Kiev, Ukraine). His father, named Mikhail Kozintsev, was a medical doctor. Young Kozintsev studied at the Kiev Gymnazium. There, in 1919, he organized experimental theatre "Arlekin" together with his fellow students Sergei Yutkevich and Aleksei Kapler. During 1919 and 1920 Kozintsev studied art at the Kiev School of Art under the tutelage of Alexandra Exter.
Experiments. In 1920 Kozintsev moved to Petrograd (Leningrad or St. Petersburg). There he studied art at the "VKHUTEMAS" at the Academy of Fine Arts for two years. In 1921 Kozintsev with Sergei Yutkevich, Leonid Trauberg, and Leonid Kryzhitsky organized and led the Factory of Excentric Actors (FEKS). There Kozintsev directed radically avant-garde staging of plays "Zhenitba" (Marriage 1922) by Nikolay Gogol and "Vneshtorg na Eifelevoi Bashne" (Foreign trade on Eiffel Tower 1923). They were based in the former Eliseev Mansion on Gagarinskaya street No. 1 in St. Petersburg. Kozintsev and FEKS collaborated with writer Yuri Tynyanov, cinematographer Andrey Moskvin, young actor-director Sergey Gerasimov, artist Igor Vuskovich, and young composer Dmitri Shostakovich among others. Initially FEKS was the main platform for experimental actors, directors and artists, and was strongly influenced by Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Artistic position. In 1924 Kozintsev and Trauberg came to "SevZapKino" Studios (now Lenfilm Studios). There Kozintsev continued his FEKS experiments in his first eccentric comedy 'Pokhozhdenie Oktyabriny' (1924). Kozintsev's early films were strongly criticized by official Soviet critics. His film 'Shinel' (1926) was compared to German Expressionism and accused of distortion of the original classic story by Nikolay Gogol. Kozintsev strongly argued against such comparisons with German expressionism; he was unhappy until the end of his life about such criticism of his early experimental works. Kozintsev insisted that his cheerful experiments were essential in the city of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) after the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought destruction, depression, crime, and degradation of culture.
Early films. Kozintsev made twelve films together with Leonid Trauberg. Their collaboration began in 1921, in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Their film-trilogy about Russian revolutionary hero Maxim was made from 1935-1941, when people in the Soviet Russia were terrorized under the most brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. In departure from experimental youthfulness and freedom of their FEKS years, the Maxim trilogy was a trade-off blend of experiment and Soviet propaganda. It was still a powerful work and was even banned by censorship in the United States from the 1930s-1950s. For that work Kozintsev and Trauberg were awarded the Stalin's State Prize in 1941. After the Second World War Kozintsev and Trauberg made their last film together: 'Prostye Lyudi (Plain People 1946), which was censored and remained unreleased until 1958, when "Nikita Khrushchev' lifted the ban imposed by Stalin's censorship.
Highlights. Grigori Kozintsev ascended to his best works after the death of Stalin. Then Nikita Khrushchev initiated the "Thaw" which played a role in some liberation of individual creativity in the Soviet film industry. Kozintsev's adaptations of classical literature combined some experimental elements of his earlier silent films with the approach of a mature master. His Don Quixote (1957), King Lear (1969) and especially Hamlet (1963) were recognized worldwide as his highest achievements. In _Korol Lir (1969)_ Kozintsev made a brilliant decision to cast actors from the Baltic States as the Lear's family. Jüri Järvet, Regimantas Adomaitis, Donatas Banionis, Juozas Budraitis, and Elza Radzina together with Oleg Dal, Galina Volchek, Aleksey Petrenko made a powerful acting ensemble.
Hamlet and King Lear. Kozintsev first staged Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and 'King Lear" in 1941. His collaboration with Boris Pasternak began in 1940, when Pasternak was working on his Russian translation of the Shakespeare's originals. Both plays were prepared for stage under direction of Kozintsev. King Lear was staged in 1941, but further work was interrupted because of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Hamlet was staged in 1954. At the same time Kozintsev continued developing the idea of filming _Gamlet (1964)_, until everything came together in his legendary film. The adaptation by Boris Pasternak, the music by Dmitri Shostakovich, the direction by Kozintsev, and the acting talent of Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy produced special creative synergy. Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy was praised as the best Hamlet by Sir Laurence Olivier.
Legacy. In the 1920s Kozintsev taught at the Leningrad School of Acting. From 1944-1964 Kozintsev led his master-class for film directors at the Soviet State Film Institute (VGIK). Among his students were many prominent Russian directors and actors such as Sergey Gerasimov and others. Kozintsev was the head of master-class for film directors at Lenfilm Studios from 1964-1971. He wrote essays on William Shakespeare, Sergei Eisenstein, Charles Chaplin, and Vsevolod Meyerhold and published theoretical works on film direction. Grigori Kozintsev lived near Lenfilm Stidios in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) for the most part of his life. His work and presence was essential to the status of Lenfilm Studios as well as to the film community in Leningrad during the political and economic domination of Moscow as the Soviet capital. From his early works of the 1920s to his masterpiece _Gamlet (1964)_, Kozintsev was faithful to creative experimental approach.
Kozintsev was designated the People's Artist of the USSR. He was awarded the State Lenin's Prize of the USSR (1965), and received other awards and nominations. He died in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on May 11, 1973, and was laid to rest in the Necropolis of the Masters of Art in St. Aleksandr Nevsky Convent in St. Petersburg, Russia.256 points- Writer
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Leonid Zakharovich Trauberg is Soviet film director and screenwriter. People's Artist of the RSFSR (1987). Leonid Trauberg was born in Odessa. After moving to Petrograd, the family settled in house number 7, apt. 4, along Kolomenskaya street.
In December 1921, together with Grigoriy Kozintsev and G. Kryzhitskiy, he wrote the "Eccentric Theater Manifesto," which was proclaimed at a debate organized by them. In 1922, Kozintsev and Trauberg organized the Theater Workshop "Factory of an Eccentric Actor", and in the same year they put in it an eccentric reworking of "Marriage" by Nikolay Gogol. For two years, they staged 3 more plays based on their own plays, and in 1924 they transferred their experiments in the field of eccentric comedy to cinema, transforming the theater workshop into the FEKS Film Workshop.
The first full-length film by Kozintsev and Trauberg - the romantic melodrama Chyortovo koleso (1926) according to the script of Adrian Piotrovsky - was already a mature work. Love for a bright eccentric was combined with a convincing display of urban life. This film has a permanent creative team; in addition to the directors, it included cameraman Andrey Moskvin and artist Yevgeni Yenej, who worked with Kozintsev in almost all of his films.
In 1926-1932, Leonid Trauberg taught at the Leningrad Institute of Performing Arts, in 1926-1927 he was the head of the film department of the Leningrad Theater Institute. In 1961-1965 he taught at the VKSR under the Goskino USSR.256 points- Director
- Cinematographer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
American director, cinematographer, and assistant director of silent films. A native of Chicago, Urson was the nephew of E.J. Hite of the Thanhauser Film Co. With his uncle's help, Urson was trained as a cameraman and eventually relocated to California as a camera operator for Fine Arts Productions. Director Marshall Neilan hired him as an assistant director, which led to work as cinematographer for James Cruze on several films. From 1920 on, Urson worked closely as an assistant director with Cecil B. DeMille on most of the latter's films, simultaneously directing his own for DeMille and others. Urson drowned while on a visit to Michigan, at 41.256 points- Director
- Additional Crew
- Producer
John G. Blystone was born on 2 December 1892 in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Men on Call (1930), Our Hospitality (1923) and Ankles Preferred (1927). He was married to Gwendolyn Davis. He died on 6 August 1938 in Beverly Hills, California, USA.253 points- Director
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Robert G. Vignola was born on 5 August 1882 in Trivigno (Potenza), Basilicata, Italy. He was a director and actor, known for Broken Dreams (1933), The Knife (1918) and More Deadly Than the Male (1919). He died on 25 October 1953 in Hollywood, California, USA.252 points- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
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William Beaudine, the director of nearly 350 known films (nearly one for every day of the year; some listings of his work put his output at 500 movies and hundreds of TV episodes) and scores of television episodes, enjoyed a directing career that stretched across seven decades from the 'Teens to the '70s (he also was a screenwriter, credited on 26 films and one TV series). His movies, ranging from full-length features to one- and two-reel shorts, included the notorious Mom and Dad (1945) of 1945--the Gone with the Wind (1939) of the hygiene/exploitation genre--for infamous producer Kroger Babb, one of the notorious "Forty Thieves" of the exploitation circuit. His final, as well as very likely best-known, films were the grind-house/drive-in horror classics Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966) and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966) (in 1966, when he made these two cheapies, he was the oldest active director in Hollywood, at 74). Beaudine was prolific not only because he mastered efficient filmmaking but also because he started in the early days of the film industry, when one- and two-reelers were ground out like sausages, and that's how he learned to make them. Although he was responsible for some prestigious pictures in the silent era--i.e., Mary Pickford's Sparrows (1926)--after 1937 he worked primarily churning out programmers at Poverty Row studios. When producers needed an efficiently-made potboiler shot on a two-week (or less) schedule, William Beaudine was the go-to guy, and he remained so through the mid-'60s.
William Washington Beaudine was born January 15, 1892, in New York City, an advantageous location for a tyro filmmaker at the turn of the last century, because the original "Hollywood" of America was located in nearby Ft. Lee, NJ (Thomas A. Edison, the inventor of the first motion picture production device and, more importantly, holder of several of its most important patents, was headquartered there. The patent monopoly he helped found did not want filmmakers operating too far away, as it wanted to oversee the industry to ensure it did not use pirated equipment that infringed its patents. California arose as a major production center in the 'Teens because it was far away from the prying eyes of the Edison trust, which was not averse to hiring thugs to wreck the equipment and beat up the employees of companies that defied it). Beaudine started in the industry as a $10-per-week prop boy, factotum and extra in 1909 with American Mutoscope and the Biograph Co., where he first worked with D.W. Griffith, the father of the American film. He began appearing as an actor in Mack Sennett's Biograph films in 1912 and continued to work behind the camera while appearing in front of it in 44 films through 1915. From 1911-14 he was an assistant director or second-unit director on 55 movies. He wed Marguerite Fleischer in October 1914 (they remained married until his death in 1970), the same year he moved to California. Although hired by the Kalem Co. as an actor, he got his first chance to direct while working on the studio's "Ham and Bud" comedy series in 1915. He directed at least five films in 1915, and served as an assistant to Griffith on his seminal masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915) and its follow-up, the aptly named Intolerance (1916). By 1916 Beaudine was making $100 per week as a director, and turned out as many as 150 short comedies before graduating to feature film assignments in 1922. Beaudine, like fellow director John Ford, was known for "editing in the camera", i.e., shooting only those scenes that are absolutely necessary, which saved time and raw stock. He did not shoot full coverage of scenes, with master shots and alternate takes (his contemporary William A. Wellman, another master of editing in the camera, did Beaudine--who was known as "One-Shot"--one better as "Two-Shot"--he would film two shots of a scene in case one was ruined in the developing lab), but no more than what he knew was necessary, and since he worked almost exclusively on low-budget "quickies" for the last 30 years of his career (he directed over half of the Bowery Boys films), producers valued him for his ability to make pictures quickly and economically, despite the gaffes (which likely would not be noticed by the audiences for these movies anyway). His attitude towards most of the films he was shooting at the time can be summed up by an incident in the 1940s, when he was informed that an East Side Kids quickie he was making for Monogram was falling behind schedule. His reply was, "You mean someone out there is actually waiting to see this . . . ?".
Beaudine churned out low-budget films by the gross, in a wide variety of genres. That's why it may be difficult for some to believe that, in the silent days, he was one of the more respected directors in the industry, and had established himself as a seasoned comedy director with a light but sure touch for such major studios as Goldwyn, Metro, First National and Warner Bros. He was renowned for his skill at working with children, which won him two assignments directing films for Mary Pickford at United Artists: Little Annie Rooney (1925) and the above-mentioned "Sparrows", a Gothic suspense thriller that is an ur-The Night of the Hunter (1955) (it reportedly influenced "Hunter" director Charles Laughton). Beaudine's finest silent film is generally considered to be The Canadian (1926), based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham.
By the time talkies arrived, Beaudine was a top director in Hollywood, his salary increasing from $1,250 a week in 1925 to $2,000-$2,500 a week in 1926. For directing the "Izzy and Mike" (Jewish/Irish comedy) The Cohens and the Kellys in Paris (1928) in 1928, he earned $20,000 (approximately $215,000 in 2006 terms), which was not bad considering the speed at which he turned out his films. Even after the Great Depression hit in 1929, as late as 1931 Beaudine was commanding $2,000 a week. Unfortunately, like many other Americans, he was heavily leveraged in the stock market and was virtually wiped out by the Crash of '29. He moved to England in 1935 and directed more than a dozen films there before returning to the US. Once home, however, he discovered that during his absence Hollywood got along just fine without him, and he couldn't find a job for two years. When he was finally offered work it was near the bottom of the Hollywood food chain, at low-rent studios like Monogram or PRC. By 1940 his once flourishing career had declined to the point that, where he had once commanded $2500 a week, he was now lucky to get jobs paying $500 a picture, and was turning out bottom-of-the-double-bill films like Desperate Cargo (1941) and the The Ape Man (1943). The lowest point of his career is generally considered to be the aforementioned "Mom and Dad" for Kroger Babb (an independent producer who often released through Monogram, for whom Beaudine did much work). "Mom and Dad" was a "hygiene" picture, featuring footage of a live birth, that Babb "four-walled" in territories across the U.S. ("four-walling" was the practice of renting an entire theater outright, which meant that after the rental fee was paid, all money taken in went to the exhibitor). Babb was a master showman, and his practice of having screenings for males and females at separate times, and providing a "doctor" and two "nurses" (who were in reality actors) to give a hygiene lecture and sell sex hygiene books at inflated prices (the money being collected by the "nurses", who ostensibly were there lest anyone faint from such a frank divulging of "the facts of life") was a masterful touch, capitalizing on the extreme sexual repression of the era to titillate and make a barrel full of money while doing it. These tactics were also helpful in keeping local authorities at bay--after all, who could close down a theater that showed such an "educational" film?
Some cinema historians say that "Mom and Dad" may well have been, on a return-on-investment basis, the most profitable film in history, grossing as much as $100 million. Babb later recounted that each one of his investors got back $63,000 for each $1,000 invested in the film. In a pre-"Kinsey Report" world filled with ignorance and misinformation--deliberate and otherwise--about biology and sex, "Mom, and Dad" filled a void and turned a handsome profit while doing so (it was playing at drive-ins in the South and Midwest at least until 1977, long after the sexual revolution of the "Swinging Sixties", so potent was the "birth of a baby" come-on to the rural audiences for whom it was made). "Mom and Dad" was likely the top-grossing picture of 1947. The film was so heavily promoted that "Time" magazine commented that the ad campaign "left only the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life." Until the advent of The Blair Witch Project (1999), many film historians regarded "Mom and Dad" as the purest and most successful exploitation film in history.
By the end of the 1940s Beaudine had churned out 60 movies. Still, he was regarded highly enough as a man who could make a movie quickly and efficiently to command a salary of $3,000 per week for The Lawton Story (1949), an adaptation of a Passion Play staged in Lawton, OK (which was re-released in 1951 by Babb's Hallmark company). His paced slowed somewhat in the 1950s, when he made only 23 films, most of them for Allied Artists (formerly Monogram). A quarter-century after directing superstar Mary Pickford, Beaudine was reduced to piloting a washed-up, drug-addicted former Dracula and two Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis clones in the pathetic Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), with Lugosi, Duke Mitchell (the Martin clone) and Sammy Petrillo (the Lewis clone). In the "plot", Mitchell is turned into--what else?--a singing gorilla. Beaudine, who had worked with Lugosi in 1943's "The Ape Man" and the East Side Kids entry Ghosts on the Loose (1943) (most memorable for featuring a young Ava Gardner), wrapped the film in nine days on a budget of $50,000. In fact, during his preparation for playing Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994), the chronicle of another director of bad movies, Martin Landau watched "Brooklyn Gorilla" three times. Landau, who would earn an Oscar for his turn as Lugosi, said that it was so bad "it made the Ed Wood films look like 'Gone with the Wind'".
In 1947, two years after giving the world the landmark naughty picture "Mom and Dad", Beaudine was contracted by an evangelical Christian organization, the Protestant Film Commission, to make a religious-themed movie (beginning in the late 1940s, evangelist Billy Graham had done quite well in converting non-believers with movies made specifically for that purpose). It was successful and the PFC hired him on a regular basis to make more films. By 1955 Beaudine had directed ten of them for the Commission, all crafted to spread the word of God and convert non-believers to Christianity. Ironically, Beaudine himself reportedly was an atheist, who took the jobs solely for the money.
Beaudine's ability to overlook almost anything in order to get film into the can would prove a huge advantage in television. In the 1950s he moved into that medium, directing hundreds of episodes of popular series, including shows for Walt Disney. By the 1960s he was one of the principal directors on Lassie (1954), eventually passing the baton on to his son, William Beaudine Jr., upon his retirement from the show (proving the adage that the fruit really doesn't fall far from the tree). At the time of his retirement in 1967, William Beaudine was the oldest active director in Hollywood. He died in Canoga Park, CA, on March 18, 1970, with a record so prolific that it's unlikely to be ever matched again.
In 2005 the "labor of love" brought into the world by William Beaudine and Kroger Babb, two of Hollywood's most prolific sons, was honored by the Library of Congress' National Film Registry with the inclusion of "Mom and Dad" on the list of the nation's cinematic treasures.251 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Robert J. Flaherty was born on 16 February 1884 in Iron Mountain, Michigan, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Louisiana Story (1948), Man of Aran (1934) and Elephant Boy (1937). He was married to Frances H. Flaherty. He died on 23 July 1951 in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA.250 points- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, Essex, England. He was the son of Emma Jane (Whelan; 1863 - 1942) and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock (1862 - 1914). His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William Hitchcock (born 1890) and Eileen Hitchcock (born 1892). Raised as a strict Catholic and attending Saint Ignatius College, a school run by Jesuits, Hitch had very much of a regular upbringing. His first job outside of the family business was in 1915 as an estimator for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. His interest in movies began at around this time, frequently visiting the cinema and reading US trade journals.
Hitchcock entering the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer. It was there that he met Alma Reville, though they never really spoke to each other. It was only after the director for Always Tell Your Wife (1923) fell ill and Hitchcock was named director to complete the film that he and Reville began to collaborate. Hitchcock had his first real crack at directing a film, start to finish, in 1923 when he was hired to direct the film Number 13 (1922), though the production wasn't completed due to the studio's closure (he later remade it as a sound film). Hitchcock didn't give up then. He directed The Pleasure Garden (1925), a British/German production, which was very popular. Hitchcock made his first trademark film in 1927, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) . In the same year, on the 2nd of December, Hitchcock married Alma Reville. They had one child, Patricia Hitchcock who was born on July 7th, 1928. His success followed when he made a number of films in Britain such as The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939), some of which also gained him fame in the USA.
In 1940, the Hitchcock family moved to Hollywood, where the producer David O. Selznick had hired him to direct an adaptation of 'Daphne du Maurier''s Rebecca (1940). After Saboteur (1942), as his fame as a director grew, film companies began to refer to his films as 'Alfred Hitchcock's', for example Alfred Hitcock's Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976), Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972).
Hitchcock was a master of pure cinema who almost never failed to reconcile aesthetics with the demands of the box-office.
During the making of Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's wife Alma suffered a paralyzing stroke which made her unable to walk very well. On March 7, 1979, Hitchcock was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award, where he said: "I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen and their names are Alma Reville." By this time, he was ill with angina and his kidneys had already started to fail. He had started to write a screenplay with Ernest Lehman called The Short Night but he fired Lehman and hired young writer David Freeman to rewrite the script. Due to Hitchcock's failing health the film was never made, but Freeman published the script after Hitchcock's death. In late 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. On the 29th April 1980, 9:17AM, he died peacefully in his sleep due to renal failure. His funeral was held in the Church of Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Father Thomas Sullivan led the service with over 600 people attended the service, among them were Mel Brooks (director of High Anxiety (1977), a comedy tribute to Hitchcock and his films), Louis Jourdan, Karl Malden, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh and François Truffaut.187 points- Writer
- Director
- Actor
London-born Edmund Goulding was an actor/playwright/director on the London stage, and entered the British army when WWI broke out. Mustered out of the service because of wounds suffered in battle, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1921. He obtained assignments as a screenwriter in Hollywood, wrote a novel, "Fury," in 1922 and directed the film version of it (Fury (1923)). Hired as a screenwriter/director by MGM in 1925, Goulding quickly developed a reputation for turning out tasteful, cultured dramas and drawing-room comedies. His films typified the elegance and refinement with which MGM was identified, the best example of this being Grand Hotel (1932). He was entrusted with the pictures of some of MGM's biggest stars, such as Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. However, one of his best-known films, and probably the one most atypical of his work, was Nightmare Alley (1947), a dark, brooding drama of greed and corruption among high and low society involving phony mentalists and a conniving psychiatrist.187 points- Director
- Actor
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Joseph Henabery was born on 15 January 1888 in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. He was a director and actor, known for The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916) and The Man from Painted Post (1917). He was married to Lillian Nolan and Maceal Nolan. He died on 18 February 1976 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.187 points- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Moshe "Mauritz" Stiller, born July 17, 1883, in Helsinki, Finland, was a director, writer and actor. He began his artistic activity in the theatre, as an actor at 16. Mauritz Stiller portrayed 87 roles from 1899-1916 and directed 16 productions 1911-28. Together with Viktor Sjöström ( director, actor, writer) he was recruited in 1912 as director/actor to the Swedish film industry by Charles Magnusson at AB Svenska Biografteatern. Mauritz Stiller's films was instantly successful. During his first year he directed six feature films. "Herr Arnes pengar" (1919), "Erotikon" (1920) and "Gösta Berlings saga" (1923) are three cornerstones of Swedish film production. In "Gösta Berlings saga" Greta Garbo, 18 years old, made her first major role. Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller came to be best friends and allies forever. Stiller introduced Garbo to the German audience in 1925, before the two sailed of to the USA to make "The Temptress" for Paramount/Irving Thalberg in 1926. Mauritz Stiller directed 51 feature films and appeared as an actor in seven productions from 1912-1927. At 1:05 am Nov 8, 1928, Mauritz Stiller died in Stockholm, after undergoing numerous surgeries, an abscess of a lung ended a great artist's life.186 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Karl Grune (22 January 1890 - 2 October 1962) was an Austrian film director and writer who made many silent films in the 1920s.
Grune was born in Vienna, where he later attended drama school. He volunteered in the First World War, where an injury temporarily deprived him of the ability to speak in 1918.
After the war he made his directing debut in 1919 with Menschen in Ketten ("People in Chains"). In 1923 he made Schlagende Wetter with Liane Haid and Eugen Klöpfer in the leading roles. The film is a notable early example of naturalism in film making, at a time when expressionism was the norm. Also that year he made Die Straße ("The Street"), which is considered Grune's most notable film. In 1926 he made Die Brüder Schellenberg ("The Brothers Schellenberg") with Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover. Many of his early films are now lost.
He emigrated to England in 1933 and there made Abdul the Damned with Fritz Kortner in 1935, and in 1936 he filmed Ruggiero Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci with Richard Tauber.
In his later career he turned to producing films in the 1940s. He died in Bournemouth, England in 1962.185 points- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Hans Richter was born on 6 April 1888 in Berlin, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), 8 X 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1955) and Chesscetera (1957). He was married to Frida Ruppel, Erna Niemeyer, Maria van Vanselow and Elisabeth Steiner. He died on 1 February 1976 in Locarno, Switzerland.185 points- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Gustav Machatý was born on May 9, 1901 in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic). His first experience with the motion picture industry was playing piano at movie theaters, accompanying silent pictures. In 1917, he made his debut as an actor.
In the early 1920s, he emigrated to the United States, taking up residence in Hollywood, where he learned filmmaking as an apprentice to two masters, D.W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim. After serving a four-year apprenticeship in Hollywood, he returned to Prague to make his own films. Two movies, "Erotikon" (1929) and "Ekstase" (1933) made him internationally famous.
"Ekstase" was nominated for the Mussolini Cup at the Venice Film Fesitval. Released as "Ecstasy" in the U.S. with the advertising tag-line "The Most Talked About Picture in the World," "Ekstase" featured young Hedy Kiesler in the nude. Kiesler, who would become internationally famous herself as Hedy Lamar, played a sexually frustrated hausfrau who achieves orgasm (ecstasy) in the arms of a young swain who has espied her in the buff making like one of Busby Berkeley's water nymphs, sans bathing suit.
When exhibitor Samuel Cummins imported the film in 1935, the U.S. Customs Service seized the print, acting under the aegis of the 1930 Customs Act that forbade importing obscene material. Cummins appealed to the federal courts, but the Customs agents had burned the print, and with no physical evidence, his appeal was denied.
The frustrated Cummins edited his next imported copy, cutting out Hedy's naked run through the woods and a scene of horses copulating, and adding a moralistic voice-over that said her character had divorced her impotent husband before her affair. A new ending with a baby was added, suggesting that Hedy and her young swain had married. The U.S. Customs Service allowed this version to be imported into the U.S., but the State of New York Board of Review refused to license the picture for exhibition. Cummins' Eureka Productions filed suit in federal court, but the ban was upheld as the U.S. Court of Appeals held that once a picture was imported into the U.S., it was subject to local censorship.
The film was a modest success on the art house circuit, and once Lamar became famous as an American movie star, all the nudity was cut out of the film and it received a Production Code Administration Seal of Approval in 1940 and was re-released. Even with the cuts, the movie ran afoul of local censors. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts forbade the movie to be shown on Sundays, and the state of Pennsylvania banned it outright. "Ecstasy" was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church's censorship body, the Legion of Decency, making it one of the few foreign films to win that dubious honor.
It was a viewing of "Ekstase" that introduced Hedy Kiesler to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production boss Louis B. Mayer, who despised the film but signed the beautiful Kiesler to a contract and rechristened her Hedy Lamarr. Thus, Gustav Machatý is responsible for giving the motion picture medium the actress who was described as the "Most Beautiful Woman in the World" in the 1940s.
Gustav Machatý died on December 13, 1963 in Munich, Germany.184 points- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Rupert Hughes was born on 31 January 1872 in Lancaster, Missouri, USA. He was a writer and director, known for Souls for Sale (1923), True As Steel (1924) and Look Your Best (1923). He was married to Patterson Dial, Mrs. Rupert Hughes and Agnes Wheeler Hedge. He died on 9 September 1956 in Hollywood, California, USA.184 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Carl Boese was born on 26 August 1887 in Berlin, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for Eva in Seide (1928), Lemkes sel. Witwe (1928) and Rendezvous (1930). He was married to Elena Luber, Margot Hollaender and Grete Hollmann. He died on 6 July 1958 in Berlin, Germany.184 points- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Paul Wegener was born in Arnoldsdorf, West Prussia, part of the German Empire. His birthplace is currently part of Poland, under the name "Jarantowice". Wegener's family included a number of scientists, the most notable being his cousin Alfred Wegener (1880-1930). Alfred is remembered as the originator of the theory of continental drift.
Paul has no known relation to another Paul Wegener (1908-1993), who served as a Nazi Party official and an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS).
Paul Wegener initially followed legal studies in college, but dropped out in order to become a theatrical actor. By 1906, he was part of an acting troupe led by Max Reinhardt (1873-1943). Reinhardt went on to become a film director. By 1912, Wegener himself had become interested in the film medium, and sought roles as a film actor.
In 1913, Wegener heard of an old Jewish legend, concerning the Golem. He wanted to adapt the legend into film, and started co-writing a script with Henrik Galeen (1881-1949). Their script was adapted into the film "The Golem" (1915), with Wegener and Galeen serving as the two co-directors. The film was a success and established Wegener as a celebrated figure in German cinema. Wegener returned to adapting the Golem legend into film, by directing a parody film in 1917 and the more serious "The Golem: How He Came into the World" (1920). The 1920 film remains one of the classics of German cinema. Wegener's other films often reflected his personal interests, such as trick photography, the supernatural, and mysticism.
He continued his film career into the 1930s, and made the transition from silent films to sound films. Under the Nazi regime (1933-1945), several actors and directors faced persecution or exile. Wegener instead found himself favored by the regime and appeared regularly in Nazi propaganda films of the 1940s. Wegener personally disliked the regime (which had persecuted a number of his friends and associates) and reputedly financed a number of German resistance groups.
In 1945, with World War II over and Berlin in ruins, Wegener took initiative as president of an organization intended to improve the living standards for surviving citizens of Berlin. He continued to appear in theatrical productions from 1945 to 1948, although he was suffering from an increasingly poor health.
In July 1948, Wegener collapsed on stage during a theatrical performance. The curtain was brought down and the rest of the performance was canceled. It was his last acting role, as he retired in an attempt to recuperate. He died in his sleep in September 1948. He was survived by his last wife Lyda Salmonova (1889-1968).184 points- Director
- Producer
- Actor
Following a two-year apprenticeship under Cecil B. DeMille as assistant director, Samuel Grosvenor Wood had the good fortune to have assigned to him two of the biggest stars at Paramount during their heyday: Wallace Reid (between 1919 and 1920) and Gloria Swanson (from 1921 to 1923). By the time his seven-year contract with Paramount expired, the former real estate dealer had established himself as one of Hollywood's most reliable (if not individualistic) feature directors. Not bad for a former real estate broker and small-time theatrical thesp. In 1927, Wood joined MGM and remained under contract there until 1939. During this tenure he was very much in sync with the studio's prevalent style of production, reliably turning out between two and three films a year (of which the majority were routine subjects).
Most of his films in the 1920s were standard fare and it was not until he directed two gems with The Marx Brothers, A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937) that his career picked up again. Looking at the finished product it is difficult to reconcile this to Groucho Marx finding Wood "rigid and humorless". Maybe, this assessment was due to Wood being vociferously right-wing in his personal views which would not have sat well with the famous comedian. His testimonies in 1947 before the House Un-American Activities Committee certainly gained Wood more enemies than friends within the industry.
Regardless of his personality or his habitually having to shoot each scene twenty times over, Wood turned out some very powerful dramatic films during the last ten years of his life, beginning with Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). This popular melodrama earned him his first Academy Award nomination. At RKO, he coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Ginger Rogers (and was again nominated himself) for Kitty Foyle (1940). Ronald Reagan gave, arguably, his best performance in Kings Row (1942) under Wood's direction. His most expensive (and longest, at 170 minutes) assignment took him back to Paramount. This was Ernest Hemingway's Spanish Civil War drama For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), bought for $150,000 (De Mille was originally slated as director). In spite of editorial incongruities and the relatively uneven pace, the picture turned out to be the biggest (and last) hit of Wood's career.
Sam Wood died of a heart attack on September 22 1949. He has a star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.183 points- Writer
- Director
- Art Director
A former stage actor and director in his native Denmark, Sven Gade began making films there in 1916. He traveled to Germany a few years later to direct a film version of Hamlet (Hamlet (1921)), then journeyed to Hollywood the next year. He designed sets for other directors' films and directed several of his own, but returned to Denmark in 1928. His career was unable to survive the transition to sound films, and he returned to the stage, where he remained until his retirement.183 points- Director
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Heinz Schall was born on 4 October 1872 in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He is known for Das hohe Lied der Liebe (1922), Hamlet (1921) and Ein Tag auf dem Mars (1921).183 points- Director
- Writer
Arthur Robison was born on 25 June 1883 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Looping the Loop (1928), Warning Shadows (1923) and Der letzte Walzer (1927). He died on 20 October 1935 in Berlin, Germany.146 points- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Producer / director/ screenwriter Monta Bell was born on February 5, 1891, in Washington, DC. He turned to the stage as an actor after trying his hand at journalism in that city. He was cast by Charles Chaplin in the great comedian's The Pilgrim (1923), which was Bell's sole screen appearance as an actor. He worked for Chaplin as an editor and assistant director before becoming a director in his own right in 1924. He specialized in comedies of manners akin to early Cecil B. DeMille and Ernst Lubitsch. He directed Greta Garbo in her American film debut, The Torrent (1924), at MGM.
Bell left MGM to take over Paramount's New York City Astoria Studios as head of production. While he was studio chief, Astoria turned out The Marx Brothers' debut film The Cocoanuts (1929). Going back behind the camera, Bell directed comedies and melodramas in the early '30s, the time of the "talkies". He quit directing in 1933 to return full-time to producing. Twelve years later, he directed his final film, China's Little Devils (1945), starring former silent film star Harry Carey.
Monta Bell died on April 4, 1958, in Hollywood, CA.146 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
A graduate of the Boston Polytechnic Institute, Clarence Badger had a varied early career as an artist, stage actor, editor and journalist with several newspapers and magazines (including "The Youth's Companion"), before entering the film business with Mack Sennett in 1915. At Sennett's Triangle-Keystone, his qualifications ensured rapid promotion to writer/director of numerous two-reel situation comedies. Badger's style was gentler, more subtle and based on character development, rather than on the prevalent visual slapstick. Several of his early shorts featured a young Gloria Swanson in the first stages of her climb to stardom.
Badger was lured away from Sennett by Samuel Goldwyn in 1917, to direct a series of comedies with Will Rogers, including the small town farce Jubilo (1919), Doubling for Romeo (1921) and Honest Hutch (1920). During the 1920's, he worked for Paramount and Metro, where his best films were the Civil War romp Hands Up! (1926), Potash and Perlmutter (1923), and the romantic comedy that made Clara Bow into a major star, It (1927). During the remainder of the decade, Badger directed some of the biggest names in the business, from Colleen Moore and Betty Compson, to Jack Buchanan and Bebe Daniels. Pick of the bunch among his last few directorial efforts (under contract to Warner Brothers/First National) was the high-spirited first-time screen adaptation of the Broadway hit musical No, No, Nanette (1930). There were also two back-to-back box office flops, the Herbert Fields musical The Hot Heiress (1931) and the woefully under-acted melodrama Woman Hungry (1931). These failures may have persuaded Badger to leave the industry.
In 1935, he moved out of his Spanish colonial-style mansion in the Hollywood Hills and emigrated to Australia a year later. Except for a couple of independently produced melodramas filmed in New South Wales, Clarence Badger spent the remainder of his life in happy retirement.146 points- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Although all too frequently neglected by fans of silent comedy, Max Linder is in many ways as important a figure as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, not least because he predated (and influenced) them all by several years and was largely responsible for the creation of the classic style of silent slapstick comedy.
Linder started out as an actor in the French theatre, but after making his screen debut in 1905 he quickly became an enormously famous and successful film comedian on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to his character "Max," a top-hatted dandy. By 1912 he was the highest-paid film star in the world, with an unprecedented salary of one million francs. He began to direct films in 1911 and showed equal facility behind the camera, but his career suffered an almost terminal blow when he was drafted into the French army to fight in World War I. He was gassed, and the illness that resulted would blight his career. Although offered a contract in America, recurring ill health meant that his US films had little of the sparkle of his early French work, and a brief attempt to revive his career by making films for the recently-formed United Artists (one of whose founders, of course, was Chaplin) in the early 1920s came to little, although these later films are now regarded as classics. He returned to France and killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925.146 points- Director
- Producer
- Writer
American director of French-Dutch ancestry, born in Paris. He studied the fine arts in Paris before resettling in America. As a set designer for stage productions, he was able to break into films in 1908 doing the same work. He dabbled in screen writing and then began directing, at first sporadically, in 1914. He soon became recognized as a talent and developed a name for himself as a specialist in romantic dramas. His career lasted more than thirty-five years. Although his films include such well-known works as The Son of the Sheik (1926), Raffles (1930), and Mata Hari (1931), he never quite reached the upper reaches of his profession, but was always considered a reliable and occasionally innovative workman.145 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Coming from a show business family (his parents were stage actors), Rowland V. Lee began his career as a child actor in stock and on Broadway. He interrupted his stage career for a stint as a Wall Street stockbroker, but gave that up after two years and returned to the stage. Lee was hired by Thomas H. Ince as an actor in 1915, and after service in World War I returned to Ince, but this time as a director. Lee didn't specialize in any particular genre in the many films he directed, but several of his lower-budget horror films were especially effective in their grim, gritty atmosphere, and his last film, Captain Kidd (1945) with Charles Laughton, had the potential to be a first-rate adventure yarn, but was hampered by its low budget.144 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
If Curtis Bernhardt is a relative unknown, it's because he didn't direct his first Hollywood feature until 1940 at the age of 41. Bernhardt worked for years in Germany until his Jewish heritage made living there impossible by 1933-- he was arrested by the Gestapo and made a harrowing underground escape to France. With Europe plunging into war, he left for America in 1939. Despite his limited grasp of the English language, he was offered seven-year contracts at both Warner Bros. and MGM, largely on the strength of Carrefour (1938)-- which proved so enduring that it was remade as Dead Man's Shoes (1940) in the UK and as Crossroads (1942) by MGM. Most émigrés would have jumped an offer to work at MGM-- considered the "Tiffany" of film studios-- but Berhardt went with Warners, favoring that studio's reputation for hard-boiled realism. His career in Hollywood began with a false start; after working on his first assignment he fell ill and was reassigned an Olivia de Havilland vehicle, My Love Came Back (1940), that gained him good notices. Bernhardt rapidly achieved a reputation as a woman's director with occasional forays into suspense with varied results. He directed one of Humphrey Bogart's least popular films, Conflict (1945), which was burdened by ludicrous plot contrivances, but he snapped back the next year with a winner: My Reputation (1946), a melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck. He had another misfire, however, with the critically panned Devotion (1946) and would end his contract with the studio after three more films in 1947, after which he moved briefly to MGM. Ironically, he would later look back fondly upon Warners' assembly-line production methods compared to his days at MGM, where he felt compelled to bend to the whims of its stars and serve at the behest of studio chief Louis B. Mayer. Berhardt managed to make two above-average films during his short stay at Metro, however--the suspenseful High Wall (1947) starring 'Robert Taylor (I)_ in one of his best mid-career roles, and The Doctor and the Girl (1949), starring the likable Glenn Ford.
Bernhard soon moved to RKO, which was entering its final chaotic decade, directing The Blue Veil (1951), a remake of a French film. He did a one-shot gig at Columbia, directing Bogie once again in the hopelessly set-bound Sirocco (1951), and rounded out the remainder of the 1950s back at MGM, ending his Hollywood career with the middling comedy Kisses for My President (1964) at Warners.
He retired from directing due to illness in the mid-'60s and died in 1981, age 81, at his home in Pacific Palisades, California.144 points- Cinematographer
- Director
- Writer
Beginning his career at age 13 as a stagehand for D.W. Griffith, George W. Hill worked his way up through cinematography and screenwriting to finally begin directing films in the early 1920s. His later films took on a stark, brutally realistic atmosphere and were renowned for their effective use of shadows in the lighting as in The Big House (1930), considered to be his masterpiece. He was found dead in his beach house in 1934, victim of an apparent suicide.144 points- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Arnold Fanck was born March 6, 1889, in Frankenthal, Germany. A trained geologist, he began making documentary and action films after the end of World War I, and his love of geology inspired him to shoot his films in remote mountain locations. These pictures became immensely popular with the German audiences and led to what is known as the "mountain films", a genre that was pretty much begun by Fanck but carried on by other German and Austrian directors. Fanck worked most notably with Leni Riefenstahl, Georg Wilhelm Pabst and American director Tay Garnett.144 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Rouben Mamoulian was born on 8 October 1897 in Tiflis, Russian Empire [now Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia]. He was a director and writer, known for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Applause (1929) and Becky Sharp (1935). He was married to Catharine Azadia Newman. He died on 4 December 1987 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.119 points- Director
- Writer
- Production Manager
Jean Epstein was born on 25 March 1897 in Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire [now Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland]. He was a director and writer, known for The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Mauprat (1926) and Le lion des Mogols (1924). He died on 2 April 1953 in Paris, France.119 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Writer / director Frank Tuttle, whose Hollywood career stretched from the silent movie era to the dawn of the 1960s, was born on August 6, 1892, in New York City. His first credit in the movie industry was as a screenwriter for the Monte Blue picture The Kentuckians (1921) in 1921 for Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount). He made his directorial debut the following year with the melodrama The Cradle Buster (1922), starring Osgood Perkins. A contract director at Paramount, he directed 73 more movies before hanging up his megaphone after 1959's Island of Lost Women (1959). His output included films ranging from the classic This Gun for Hire (1942)--the film that made Alan Ladd a star--to the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy farce Charlie McCarthy, Detective (1939).
Tuttle worked in every genre, including slapstick, and with greats and near-greats, from silent stars Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Louise Brooks, Thomas Meighan and Gloria Swanson to sound-era stand-outs Jean Arthur, Mary Astor, William Bendix, Joan Blondell, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, William Demarest, Cary Grant, Veronica Lake, Fredric March, Adolphe Menjou, William Powell, Robert Preston, Edward G. Robinson, Charles Ruggles, Simone Signoret and Phil Silvers.
Tuttle became notorious during the Hollywood Red Scare for his associations with the American Communist Party, revealed in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Not only had the director had been a member of the Communist Party, but he had hosted Party get-togethers in his New York City home, which served as the site for one meeting of party members attended by V.J. Jerome. Jerome was a cultural commissar for the Communist Party USA, who served as editor of its theoretical journal "The Communist" (later retitled "Political Affairs"). In 1951 Jerome was indicted for subversion under the Smith Act along with other members of the Communist Party. Convicted, he was imprisoned for three years. Lionel Stander, who was blacklisted, was at the Jerome meeting at Tuttle's home.
The same year the Communist Party leadership was indicted along with Jerome, Tuttle returned to the US to play tattle-tale. In an appearance before HUAC, he admitted to being a Party member from 1937-47, when he quit the party as it had become "too violent" for his taste (Jerome and other Communist Party leaders were indicted for advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government). Tuttle went through the ritual of "naming names", including that of director Jules Dassin, who himself was blacklisted and forced into exile in Europe. Avoiding the blacklist by his public show of contrition, Tuttle continued to direct in Hollywood, but ironically his career ended in 1959, the year that the blacklist was broken when Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas openly hired blacklisted Hollywood 10 member Dalton Trumbo to write the scripts for Exodus (1960) and Spartacus (1960), respectively.
Frank Tuttle died on January 6, 1963, in Los Angeles, California. He was 70 years old.119 points- Director
- Actor
- Producer
John S. Robertson was born on 14 June 1878 in London, Ontario, Canada. He was a director and actor, known for The Girl of Today (1918), The Fighting Blade (1923) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). He was married to Josephine Lovett. He died on 5 November 1964 in Escondido, California, USA.119 points- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Horne worked at a number of studios in the early 1920s and directed his first short at The Hal Roach Studios in 1925. He also directed Buster Keaton's successful "College" in 1927. Horne direct ten two-reel shorts for the Hal Roach All Star series between 1925 and 1926. Horne returned to Roach in 1929 and directed late silent shorts for Charley Chase and most significantly, Laurel & Hardy's classic "Big Business." Horne's first talkie for Roach was "Whispering Whoopie" with Charley Chase in 1930; he directed more than 30 sound shorts for Roach, including Laurel & Hardy's "Chickens Come Home" and the 4-reel "Beau Hunks" in which, not being able to find an actor to play an Arabian Riff, played the part himself. While Hal Roach had other directors working on the English language versions of Stan and Ollie's films he preferred Janes to work on the German, French and Spanish versions. Horne left the Roach Studios in 1932 but returned in 1935 to direct their last short "Thicker Than Water" and was an uncredited writer and the credited director of Laurel & Hardy's features "Bonnie Scotland," "The Bohemian Girl" and "Way Out West." Later he worked at Columbia where he produced a number of serials.119 points- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Director Alan Crosland was born in New York City on August 10, 1894, into an upper-middle class family, which soon moved to East Orange, NJ, where Alan was reared. His family's finances allowed for him to spend part of his elementary education in England, where he acquired a curious Anglo-American accent that he would affect for the rest of his life. With a restless personality that was complemented by a sharp intellect and a smooth tongue, Crosland had an uncanny ability to befriend even the most disagreeable people around him (a talent he would put to good use in Hollywood). He attended Dartmouth College but left before graduation, deciding he wanted to become a journalist, and eventually landed a job with the New York Globe, writing articles and short stories on the side for movie magazines. From 1912 he began to moonlight with the nearby Edison Company as an actor and stage manager. He performed a variety of duties there, eventually directing the studio's last feature, The Unbeliever (1918), shortly before being drafted into the US Army during World War I. He served out the Great War in the Army Photo Service. After the armistice he signed with a smaller independent company, Select, one he had briefly worked with prior to the war, remaining with them on ten more pictures through 1922. During this period he gained an enviable reputation for effectively directing some of the most temperamental stars of the day. He was of the few directors who actually liked Erich von Stroheim and obtained effective performances from the notoriously hammy (yet undeniably talented) Lionel Barrymore.
He signed with Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan in 1923, where the reviews for Under the Red Robe (1923) placed him solidly in the ranks of Hollywood's top directors. He became the first director a studio wanted when shooting a big-budget, prestigious historical drama, especially if it starred a difficult actor that might be inclined to spin costs out of control. With his reputation growing, Crosland lived life to the hilt, thoroughly enjoying the 1920s Hollywood lifestyle; he was frequently seen around town looking always dapper in the latest flashy cars and inside the latest hot spot with a dazzling starlet.
After a brief stint at Paramount, Crosland signed with Warner Brothers and was assigned to projects by Darryl F. Zanuck just when the studio was in the midst of a make-or-break gamble on sound with its Vitaphone sound-on-disk system. At that time Warner Brothers was considered almost a "Poverty Row" studio, well below the ranks of MGM, Universal and Paramount. It had acquired an unenviable reputation in Hollywood as having only two major stars, one of whom was a German Shepherd named Rin-Tin-Tin and the other the temperamental, hard-drinking John Barrymore, who was hauled out for its few prestige pictures. One of the five combative brothers who ran the studio, Sam Warner, saw sound as the way to eliminate the need for theatrical orchestras and establish what he felt was Warner's rightful place within the film industry. Crosland's reputation for handling both spectacle and difficult stars made him the obvious choice to direct the studio's first tentative stab at sound, Don Juan (1926), which was the first film to contain synchronized music and sound effects. It was a moderate success and he was picked for an even more ambitious project, The Jazz Singer (1927), a part-talkie, on which the studio's entire fortunes rested. Crosland was chosen to direct the maudlin story largely on his ability to work with the notoriously difficult Al Jolson, after George Jessel (who had starred in the Broadway production) walked out over a pay dispute. The $500,000 production had only 281 spoken words (mostly incidental to the songs and ad-libbed by Jolson) but it ignited the public's voracious appetite for talkies and grossed $3,000,000, a blockbuster in those days.
Hollywood was soon caught up in a war between competing sound technologies: Warner's Vitaphone and Fox's superior Western Electric sound-on-film process. Meanwhile, studios faced enormous conversion costs and uncertainties over their stars' abilities to transition to sound. By 1928 the silent film had reached the pinnacle of its artistic achievement and the early talkies, by comparison, appeared crude. While some studios--most notably MGM (whose parent Loew's faced monumental costs related to converting its extensive theater network)--adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward both the public acceptance of sound and choosing a system, Warner's saw talkies in the form of its Vitaphone as its salvation. In Crosland's world of 1927-29, it should be remembered that sound cameras were fixed and muffled, large microphones had to be cleverly hidden and actors were often justifiably terrified of how their voices would be received. Unfortunately the Vitaphone process seriously limited the ability to edit a film, resulting in stagy long takes, and with its cumbersome electro-mechanical hardware and fragile records that would often break in transit, it was soon obvious that Fox's sound-on-film system was vastly superior (Warner's would quietly admit technological defeat in 1931 and convert).
Technology issues aside, the Vitaphone propelled Warner Brothers solidly into the ranks of the A-list studios and, infused with cash, it acquired Fox's First National theatrical network by 1930, a crucial business move that greatly expanded the studio's distribution capabilities and enabled it to ride out huge losses it would incur from 1931-34. It was during this all-too-brief transition period that Alan Crosland was the most experienced sound director in town. He directed another part-talkie hit, Glorious Betsy (1928), starring Dolores Costello, a return to his favored costume spectacle.
By mid-1929 it became apparent that a movie could not solely depend on the novelty of sound; hits required production values and a degree of action, an uncomfortable situation given the restrictions of the equipment. At this point Crosland stumbled badly. A primitive attempt at color didn't help On with the Show! (1929), a creaky musical starring a badly miscast Betty Compson and Arthur Lake, a textbook example of claustrophobic filmmaking and Crosland's first real flop. He tripped again with Captain Thunder (1930), one of his worst films. His next two assignments delved into the opera genre with dismal box office returns. His personal life became rocky, with his first marriage to Juanita Fletcher failing in 1930. He hastily wed actress Natalie Moorhead, a union that would last less than five years. Although he would direct more than 20 features--some of them moderately successful--after his career triumph with "The Jazz Singer," Crosland fell from the ranks of A-list directors and settled into directing B-level pictures.
Early in the morning of July 10, 1936, he was driving on Sunset Boulevard when his car hit some road debris and he swerved off the road, flipping twice in a construction zone. He was rushed to the hospital with multiple broken bones and a suspected skull fracture. Within four days he contracted pneumonia and his condition was downgraded by his doctor. He died on July 16, 1936, just shy of his 42nd birthday. His last film, The Case of the Black Cat (1936), was completed by William C. McGann. Crosland was survived by his son (with Juanita Fletcher), Alan Crosland Jr., who became a very successful television director in the 1960s-'70s.117 points- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Emmett J. Flynn was born on 9 November 1892 in Denver, Colorado, USA. He was a director and writer, known for The Palace of Pleasure (1926), Shame (1921) and The Lincoln Highwayman (1919). He was married to Margaret Shelby, Nita Flynn and Genevieve Flynn. He died on 4 June 1937 in Hollywood, California, USA.117 points