Directors of Adventure films
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- Actor
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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 1943.1920 The Mark of Zorro
1922 Blood and Sand
1925 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ- 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.1934 The Count of Monte Cristo
1940 The Son of Monte Cristo
1945 Captain Kidd- Director
- Cinematographer
- Producer
Victor Fleming entered the film business as a stuntman in 1910, mainly doing stunt driving - which came easy to him, as he had been a mechanic and professional race-car driver. He became interested in working on the other side of the camera, and eventually got a job as a cameraman on many of the films of Douglas Fairbanks. He soon began directing, and his first big hit was The Virginian (1929). It was the movie that turned Gary Cooper into a star (a fact Cooper never forgot; he and Fleming remained friends for life). Fleming's star continued to rise during the '30s, and he was responsible for many of the films that would eventually be considered classics, such as Red Dust (1932), Bombshell (1933), Treasure Island (1934), and the two films that were the high marks of his career: Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ironically Fleming was brought in on both pictures to replace other directors and smooth out the troubled productions, a feat he accomplished masterfully. His career took somewhat of a downturn in the '40s, and most of his films, with the exception of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), weren't particularly successful. He ended his career with the troubled production Joan of Arc (1948), which turned out to be a major critical and financial failure.1925 Lord Jim
1934 Treasure Island
1937 Captains Courageous
1948 Joan of Arc- 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.1940 The Mark of Zorro
1963 Cleopatra- Director
- Producer
- Writer
The son of Louis K. Sidney the vice president of M.G.M. and Hazel Mooney of The Mooney Sisters. In his teens he worked as studio messenger going through every department learning the techniques and secrets of the trade. In 1933 he was assigned to direct screen tests of Judy Garland, Robert Taylor and Janet Leigh then he was promoted to shorts and the 'Our Gang' comedies winning two Oscars.He was promoted to features in 1942 directing such as 'Annie Get Your Gun', 'Showboat' and 'Pal Joey'.1948 The Three Musketeers
1952 Scaramouche- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Curtiz began acting in and then directing films in his native Hungary in 1912. After WWI, he continued his filmmaking career in Austria and Germany and into the early 1920s when he directed films in other countries in Europe. Moving to the US in 1926, he started making films in Hollywood for Warner Bros. and became thoroughly entrenched in the studio system. His films during the 1930s and '40s encompassed nearly every genre imaginable and some, including Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), are considered to be film classics. His brilliance waned in the 1950s when he made a number of mediocre films for studios other than Warner. He directed his last film in 1961, a year before his death at 74.1935 Captain Blood
1936 Anthony Adverse
1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood
1940 The sea hawk
1941 The Sea Wolf
1954 The Egyptian
1960 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Born in Brazil in 1897, Alberto Cavalcanti began his film career in France in 1920, working as writer, art director and director. He directed the avant-garde documentary Nothing But Time (1926) ("Nothing but Time"), a portrait of the lives of Parisian workers in a single day. He moved to England in 1933 to join the GPO Film Unit under John Grierson, working as a sound engineer (Night Mail (1936)) then as a producer. He went to work for Ealing Studios during the war, initially as head of Michael Balcon's short film unit until 1946, again working as an art director, producer and director. His notable films as director include Champagne Charlie (1944), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947) and I Became a Criminal (1947). After the latter film he moved back to Brazil. There he made Song of the Sea (1953) ("The Song of the Sea") and A Real Woman (1954) ("Woman of Truth") with his own production company. However, his progressive political views caught the attention of the the right-wing Brazilian authorities, and Cavalcanti thought it prudent to return to Europe in 1954. He eventually settled in France, where he continued his work in television. He died in Paris in 1982.1929 Le capitaine Fracasse- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Richard Lester was one of the most influential directors of the 1960s, and continued his career into the 1970s and early '80s. He is best remembered for the two films he helmed starring The Beatles: A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), the frenetic cutting style of which was seen by many as the predecessor of the music video a generation later.
Lester had made his name with the Oscar-nominated short subject The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959) that he made with "The Goon Show" veterans Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. He then directed Sellers in The Mouse on the Moon (1963), which was produced by Walter Shenson. The Goons were a favorite of The Beatles, and when Shenson got the rights to make a movie with The Beatles, Lester seemed to be the ideal director for the project.
That project, "A Hard Day's Night", was not only a huge box-office hit but a major critical success as well. "Village Voice" movie critic Andrew Sarris, the American promoter of the "auteur theory" in America, described "A Hard Day's Night" as "the Citizen Kane (1941) of juke box musicals." Lester had arrived, and his next film, the Swinging Sixties yarn The Knack... and How to Get It (1965), won the Palme d'Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. He also directed the wildly satirical How I Won the War (1967), which came a year after the huge success of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), his adaptation of the smash Broadway play, which relied on the Keatonesque slapstick Lester had used so well in The Beatles films ("Forum" even featured Lester's hero Buster Keaton in a small but highly amusing role).
Aside from "A Hard Day's Night", the success of which relies as much on The Beatles themselves as auteurs (Lester claims that the script by Alun Owen was largely jettisoned during filming, and its scripted "quips" were replaced by the real things from The Beatles themselves), Lester's true '60s masterpiece is Petulia (1968) (1968). A corrosive look at the American upper-middle-class and the fragmentation of American society, "Petulia" is one of the great, if unheralded, American films. Propelled by the luminous presence of Julie Christie and the powerhouse performance of George C. Scott, "Petulia" was a success at the box office, although some critics were upset over the blackness of the comedy. It was to prove to be his last great film, as he stumbled soon after it was released. The Bed Sitting Room (1969), a Samuel Beckett-influenced satire based on a play (and script) by Spike Milligan co-starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cooke--from the smash revue "Beyond the Fringe"--was a resounding flop at the box office and among critics, and Lester found himself unemployable.
However, The Three Musketeers (1973), which he shot simultaneously with The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge (1974) for producer Ilya Salkind, resurrected his career. When the Salkinds (Ilya and his father Alexander Salkind) were in the midst of filming Superman (1978) simultaneously with its sequel, Lester was hired as a supervising producer, then took over the filming of the sequel, Superman II (1980), when original director Richard Donner was fired. The sequel was a financial and critical success (as much as comic book films were in the early 1980s), and he was hired to direct the far-less successful Superman III (1983).
At the end of the 1980s, Lester returned to the storyline that had revitalized his career back in the early 1970s, filming a second sequel to "The Three Musketeers." However, after his close friend, actor Roy Kinnear died during the shooting of The Return of the Musketeers (1989), Lester seemed to lose heart with the movie-making business. He has not directed another film.1973 The Three Musketeers
1974 The Four Musketeers
1976 Robin and Marian
1989 The Return of the Musketeers- Actor
- Director
- Writer
An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry was English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, distant German and very remote Portuguese. The age-old story goes that the small town of his birth was won by John's grandfather in a poker game. John's father was the equally magnanimous character actor Walter Huston, and his mother, Rhea Gore, was a newspaperwoman who traveled around the country looking for stories. The only child of the couple, John began performing on stage with his vaudevillian father at age 3. Upon his parents' divorce at age 7, the young boy would take turns traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his father and the country with his mother on reporting excursions. A frail and sickly child, he was once placed in a sanitarium due to both an enlarged heart and kidney ailment. Making a miraculous recovery, he quit school at age 14 to become a full-fledged boxer and eventually won the Amateur Lightweight Boxing Championship of California, winning 22 of 25 bouts. His trademark broken nose was the result of that robust activity.
John married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Harvey, and also took his first professional stage bow with a leading role off-Broadway entitled "The Triumph of the Egg." He made his Broadway debut that same year with "Ruint" on April 7, 1925, and followed that with another Broadway show "Adam Solitaire" the following November. John soon grew restless with the confines of both his marriage and acting and abandoned both, taking a sojourn to Mexico where he became an officer in the cavalry and expert horseman while writing plays on the sly. Trying to control his wanderlust urges, he subsequently returned to America and attempted newspaper and magazine reporting work in New York by submitting short stories. He was even hired at one point by mogul Samuel Goldwyn Jr. as a screenwriter, but again he grew restless. During this time he also appeared unbilled in a few obligatory films. By 1932 John was on the move again and left for London and Paris where he studied painting and sketching. The promising artist became a homeless beggar during one harrowing point.
Returning again to America in 1933, he played the title role in a production of "Abraham Lincoln," only a few years after father Walter portrayed the part on film for D.W. Griffith. John made a new resolve to hone in on his obvious writing skills and began collaborating on a few scripts for Warner Brothers. He also married again. Warners was so impressed with his talents that he was signed on as both screenwriter and director for the Dashiell Hammett mystery yarn The Maltese Falcon (1941). The movie classic made a superstar out of Humphrey Bogart and is considered by critics and audiences alike--- 65 years after the fact--- to be the greatest detective film ever made. In the meantime John wrote/staged a couple of Broadway plays, and in the aftermath of his mammoth screen success directed bad-girl 'Bette Davis (I)' and good girl Olivia de Havilland in the film melodrama In This Our Life (1942), and three of his "Falcon" stars (Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet) in the romantic war picture Across the Pacific (1942). During WWII John served as a Signal Corps lieutenant and went on to helm a number of film documentaries for the U.S. government including the controversial Let There Be Light (1980), which father Walter narrated. The end of WWII also saw the end of his second marriage. He married third wife Evelyn Keyes, of "Gone With the Wind" fame, in 1946 but it too lasted a relatively short time. That same year the impulsive and always unpredictable Huston directed Jean-Paul Sartre's experimental play "No Exit" on Broadway. The show was a box-office bust (running less than a month) but nevertheless earned the New York Drama Critics Award as "best foreign play."
Hollywood glory came to him again in association with Bogart and Warner Brothers'. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a classic tale of gold, greed and man's inhumanity to man set in Mexico, won John Oscars for both director and screenplay and his father nabbed the "Best Supporting Actor" trophy. John can be glimpsed at the beginning of the movie in a cameo playing a tourist, but he wouldn't act again on film for a decade and a half. With the momentum in his favor, John hung around in Hollywood this time to write and/or direct some of the finest American cinema made including Key Largo (1948) and The African Queen (1951) (both with Bogart), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Moulin Rouge (1952). Later films, including Moby Dick (1956), The Unforgiven (1960), The Misfits (1961), Freud (1962), The Night of the Iguana (1964) and The Bible in the Beginning... (1966) were, for the most part, well-regarded but certainly not close to the level of his earlier revered work. He also experimented behind-the-camera with color effects and approached topics that most others would not even broach, including homosexuality and psychoanalysis.
An ardent supporter of human rights, he, along with director William Wyler and others, dared to form the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947, which strove to undermine the House Un-American Activities Committee. Disgusted by the Hollywood blacklisting that was killing the careers of many talented folk, he moved to St. Clerans in Ireland and became a citizen there along with his fourth wife, ballet dancer Enrica (Ricki) Soma. The couple had two children, including daughter Anjelica Huston who went on to have an enviable Hollywood career of her own. Huston and wife Ricki split after a son (director Danny Huston) was born to another actress in 1962. They did not divorce, however, and remained estranged until her sudden death in 1969 in a car accident. John subsequently adopted his late wife's child from another union. The ever-impulsive Huston would move yet again to Mexico where he married (1972) and divorced (1977) his fifth and final wife, Celeste Shane.
Huston returned to acting auspiciously with a major role in Otto Preminger's epic film The Cardinal (1963) for which Huston received an Oscar nomination at age 57. From that time forward, he would be glimpsed here and there in a number of colorful, baggy-eyed character roles in both good and bad (some positively abysmal) films that, at the very least, helped finance his passion projects. The former list included outstanding roles in Chinatown (1974) and The Wind and the Lion (1975), while the latter comprised of hammy parts in such awful drek as Candy (1968) and Myra Breckinridge (1970).
Directing daughter Angelica in her inauspicious movie debut, the thoroughly mediocre A Walk with Love and Death (1969), John made up for it 15 years later by directing her to Oscar glory in the mob tale Prizzi's Honor (1985). In the 1970s Huston resurged as a director of quality films with Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Wise Blood (1979). He ended his career on a high note with Under the Volcano (1984), the afore-mentioned Prizzi's Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987). His only certifiable misfire during that era was the elephantine musical version of Annie (1982), though it later became somewhat of a cult favorite among children.
Huston lived the macho, outdoors life, unencumbered by convention or restrictions, and is often compared in style or flamboyancy to an Ernest Hemingway or Orson Welles. He was, in fact, the source of inspiration for Clint Eastwood in the helming of the film White Hunter Black Heart (1990) which chronicled the making of "The African Queen." Illness robbed Huston of a good portion of his twilight years with chronic emphysema the main culprit. As always, however, he continued to work tirelessly while hooked up to an oxygen machine if need be. At the end, the living legend was shooting an acting cameo in the film Mr. North (1988) for his son Danny, making his directorial bow at the time. John became seriously ill with pneumonia and died while on location at the age of 81. This maverick of a man's man who was once called "the eccentric's eccentric" by Paul Newman, left an incredibly rich legacy of work to be enjoyed by film lovers for centuries to come.1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1951 The African Queen
1956 Moby Dick
1975 The Man Who Would Be King- Director
- Producer
- Actor
Richard Donner was born on 24 April 1930 in The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Superman (1978), Ladyhawke (1985) and Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (1980). He was married to Lauren Shuler Donner. He died on 5 July 2021 in Los Angeles, California, USA.1985 Ladyhawke- Director
- Cinematographer
- Writer
Peter Hyams was born in New York on July 26, 1943, and attended Hunter College Elementary School. He studied art and music at the Art Students League and the High School of Music and Art as well as at Syracuse University, where he majored in music and art. Before he became a CBS News news anchor in New York at the age of 21 he had been a drummer with such important jazz musicians as Bill Evans and Maynard Ferguson and had played at Birdland, Small's Paradise and the Newport Jazz Festival. His paintings have hung in such prestigious galleries as the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hyams brought to film direction essential elements of music and painting. From music comes a special sensitivity to structure and rhythm; from painting a heightened sense of light and color. These important insights help Hyams to achieve his goal of creating films which "reach people's emotions, not their minds." Peter Hyams is 6'1" and lives in Brentwood, California, with his wife George-Ann. He has three sons: Chris, John and Nick.2001 The Musketeer- Writer
- Producer
- Director
Randall Wallace was born on 28 July 1949 in Jackson, Tennessee, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for We Were Soldiers (2002), Pearl Harbor (2001) and Braveheart (1995).1998 The Man in the Iron Mask
as writer: Braveheart (1995)- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Cinematographer
Carroll Ballard was born on 14 October 1937 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a director and cinematographer, known for Fly Away Home (1996), Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and The Black Stallion (1979).1979 The Black Stallion
1983 Never Cry Wolf
1996 Fly Away Home
2005 Duma- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Pierre Aknine is known for Death of a President (2011), An Ordinary Man (2019) and My Son's Murderer Will Die Tonight (2014).2005 D'Artagnan et les trois mousquetaires
2007 Ali Baba et les 40 voleurs- Director
- Visual Effects
- Producer
Joseph Eggleston Johnston II is an American film director from Texas who is known for directing the cult classic film The Rocketeer, Jumanji, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Wolfman, October Sky, The Pagemaster, Jurassic Park III and Captain America: The First Avenger. He was an art director for Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Star Wars original trilogy.2004 Hidalgo- Director
- Writer
- Producer
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.1922 Robin Hood
1929 The Iron Mask
1939 The Three Musketeers- Director
- Actor
- Writer
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.1922 The Prisoner of Zenda
1923 Scaramouche- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Frank Lloyd was an unpretentious, technically skilled director, who crafted several enduring Hollywood classics during the 1930's. He started out as a stage actor and singer in early 1900's London and was well-known as an imitator of Harry Lauder. After several years in music hall and with touring repertory companies, Lloyd emigrated to Canada in 1909 and joined the travelling theatrical troupe of Winnipeg entrepreneur C.P. Walker. In between acting, he made ends meet by working as a repair man on telegraph lines. While in Edmonton, Alberta, he met and married the German-American soubrette Alma Haller. Lloyd spent several months on the vaudeville circuit and in burlesque shows on the West Coast before marking his arrival in Hollywood with an acting contract at Universal in 1913. After two years of consistently poor critical notices, he gave up the acting profession for good and turned his skills to writing and directing.
In two years at Fox, 1917-19, he directed some fifteen films, often starring the popular matinée idol William Farnum. The majority were Zane Grey westerns (including an early version of Riders of the Purple Sage (1918)) and adaptations of classic literature (such as A Tale of Two Cities (1917) and Les Misérables (1917)). After a spell with Samuel Goldwyn, Lloyd joined First National/Warner Brothers (1922-31) and became the resident specialist in period drama and swashbuckling adventure. As his reputation grew, he was given charge of his own production unit. Among his most famous films during this period are Oliver Twist (1922), with Jackie Coogan in the title role and Lon Chaney as Fagin; The Eternal Flame (1922), a historical drama based on a novel by Honoré de Balzac; and The Sea Hawk (1924), with Milton Sills. In 1929, Lloyd became the second director to receive a coveted Academy Award, for The Divine Lady (1928), one of three films for which he had been nominated.
Much of Lloyd's acclaim is based on his work during the 1930's. At Fox (1931-34), he directed Noël Coward's Cavalcade (1933), and the historical fantasy Berkeley Square (1933) -- both with meticulous attention to geographic and period detail. Immensely popular at the box office, the former won Lloyd his second Oscar and returned $ 5 million in grosses from a production cost of $1.25 million. 'Berkeley Square' was described by the New York Times as "an example of delicacy and restraint" and "in a class by itself" (September 14, 1933). Lloyd's brief stint at MGM in 1935 culminated in the greatest success of his career. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) won the Best Picture Oscar in its year and heaped praise on the director for maintaining strong narrative cohesion throughout, and for eliciting superb performances from stars Clark Gable (as Fletcher Christian) and Charles Laughton (as Captain Bligh). Lloyd continued in the same vein with the rollicking Foreign Legion adventure Under Two Flags (1936) and the sweeping (though historically inaccurate), big budget western epic Wells Fargo (1937). Also at Paramount, and, once again with his own production unit , he filmed the romantic story of adventurer-poet François Villon, If I Were King (1938), with excellent production values and superb acting from Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone.
After completing a two-year contract at Columbia (1940-41), Lloyd served in World War II in command of the 13th Air Force Combat Camera Unit, turning out short documentaries. He rose to the rank of major and was decorated with the Legion of Merit. After the war, he temporarily retired to life on his Carmel Valley ranch, but made a brief comeback after the death of his wife Alma. His swan song for Republic Studio was the story of the Battle of the Alamo, The Last Command (1955), a suitably-titled finale to the career of one of the great action directors of the period. Lloyd has a star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.1935 Mutiny on the Bounty
1936 Under Two Flags
1938 If I Were King- Director
- Cinematographer
- Writer
David Smith was born on 28 October 1872 in Faversham, Kent, England, UK. He was a director and cinematographer, known for The Man from Brodney's (1923), The Woman in the Web (1918) and Captain Blood (1924). He was married to Emma Wilgers. He died on 25 April 1930 in Santa Barbara, California, USA.1924 Captain Blood- 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 93.1924 The Thief of Bagdad
1951 Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.
1952 Blackbeard, the Pirate- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Augusto Genina was born on 28 January 1892 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Cielo sulla palude (1949), Bengasi (1942) and L'assedio dell'Alcazar (1940). He was married to Carmen Boni. He died on 18 September 1957 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.1925 Cirano di Bergerac- Director
- Producer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
American second feature director George Sherman arrived in California aboard the SS Mongolia (bound from New York City, where he was born), on which he served as a bellboy. He began his career in the movie business in the mail room at Warner Brothers before working his way up to assistant director. By 1937, he had graduated to directing in his own right under contract to Republic Pictures. Sherman specialized almost exclusively in "B" westerns there (including the "Three Mesquiteers" series, which featured a young John Wayne). He also made occasional forays into action and horror themes, often managing to achieve a sense of style over substance. 'Variety', commenting on his handling of the "Mesquiteers" series, singled out his ability to imparting a "poetry in motion" to his "unified timing of cowboys mounting, riding, wheeling, galloping and dismounting of steeds" (July 2 1939). From 1940, Sherman also served as associate producer on many of his films.
The diminutive (5'0") Sherman turned out reliable low-budget fare for Columbia between 1945-48, then moved on to do the same at Universal for another eight years. After that, he turned to freelancing and working in television. The only "A"-grade products to his credit were two westerns, both starring John Wayne: The Comancheros (1961) (as producer) and Big Jake (1971) (as director, although Wayne took over when Sherman fell ill).1946 The Bandit of Sherwood Forest
1952 Against All Flags
1958 The Son of Robin Hood- Director
- Writer
- Producer
The son of Thomas William Powell and Mabel (nee Corbett). Michael Powell was always a self-confessed movie addict. He was brought up partly in Canterbury ("The Garden of England") and partly in the south of France (where his parents ran a hotel). Educated at Kings School, Canterbury and Dulwich College, he worked at the National Provincial Bank from 1922-25. In 1925 he joined Rex Ingram making Mare Nostrum (1926). He learned his craft by working at various jobs in the (then) thriving English studios of Denham and Pinewood, working his way up to director on a series of "quota quickies" (short films made to fulfill quota/tariff agreements between Britain and America in between the wars). Very rarely for the times, he had a true "world view" and, although in the mold of a classic English "gentleman", he was always a citizen of the world. It was therefore very fitting that he should team up with an émigré Hungarian Jew, Emeric Pressburger, who understood the English better than they did themselves. Between them, under the banner of "The Archers", they shared joint credits for an important series of films through the 1940s and '50s. Powell went on to make the controversial Peeping Tom (1960), a film so vilified by critics and officials alike that he didn't work in England for a very long time. He was "re-discovered" in the late 1960s and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese tried to set up joint projects with him.
In 1980 he lectured at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He was Senior Director in Residence at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in 1981, and in fact married Scorsese's longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker. He died of cancer in his beloved England in 1990.1940 The Thief of Bagdad
1950 The Elusive Pimpernel- Director
- Additional Crew
- Art Director
James Whale was an English film director, theatre director and actor. He is best remembered for his four classic horror films: Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He also directed films in other genres, including what is considered the definitive film version of the musical Show Boat (1936).
In 1931 Universal Pictures signed him to a five-year contract and his first project was Waterloo Bridge (1931). Based on the Broadway play by Robert E. Sherwood, the film starred Mae Clarke. That same year Universal chief Carl Laemmle Jr. offered Whale his choice of any property the studio owned. Whale chose Frankenstein (1931), mostly because none of Universal's other properties particularly interested him and he wanted to make something other than a war picture.
In 1933 Whale directed The Invisible Man (1933), based on the book by H.G. Wells. Shot from a script approved by Wells, the film blended horror with humor and confounding visual effects. It was critically acclaimed, with "The New York Times" listing it as one of the ten best films of the year, and it broke box-office records in cities across America. So highly regarded was the film that France, which restricted the number of theaters in which undubbed American films could play, granted it a special waiver because of its "extraordinary artistic merit". Also in 1933 Whale directed the romantic comedy By Candlelight (1933). He directed Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a sequel of sorts to "Frankenstein", which Whale was somewhat apprehensive about making because he feared being pigeonholed as a horror director. "Bride" hearkened back to an episode from Mary Shelley's original novel in which the Monster promises to leave Frankenstein and humanity alone if Frankenstein makes him a mate. He does, but the mate is repelled by the monster who then, setting Frankenstein and his wife free to live, chooses to destroy himself and his "bride." The film was a critical and box office success. However, his next major project, The Road Back (1937), was a critical and financial disaster, and contributed to his retiring from the film industry in 1941.
Beset by personal, health and professional problems, James Whale committed suicide by drowning himself in the swimming pool of his Pacific Palisades (CA) home on 29 May 1957 at the age of 67. He left a suicide note, which his longtime companion David Lewis withheld until shortly before his own death decades later. Because the note was suppressed, the death was initially ruled accidental.1939 The Man in the Iron Mask
1940 Green Hell- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Actor / director John Cromwell was born December 23, 1887, in Toledo, OH. He made his Broadway debut on October 14, 1912, in Marian De Forest's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" at the Playhouse Theatre. The show was a hit, running for a total of 184 performances. Cromwell appeared in another 38 plays on Broadway between February 24, 1914--when he appeared in Frank Craven's "Too Many Cooks" at the 39th Street Theatre (a hit show he co-directed with Craven that ran for a total of 223 performances)--and October 31, 1971, when he closed with "Solitaire/Double Solitaire" at the John Golden Theatre after 36 performances. In addition to "Cooks", Cromwell directed or staged 11 plays and produced seven plays on Broadway. Among the highlights of his Broadway acting career were his multiple appearances as a Shavian actor. He was "Charles Lomax" in the original Broadway production of George Bernard Shaw's "Major Barbara" in 1915 (Guthrie McClintic, who married Katharine Cornell in 1921 and became a notable Broadway director, played a butler) and as "Capt. Kearney" in the revival of "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" the following year (McClintic played "Marzo"). He also appeared as "Brother Martin Ladvenu" in Katharine Cornell's 1936 "Saint Joan", directed by McClintic, and played "Freddy Eynsford Hill" in Cedric Hardwicke's 1945 revival of "Pygmalion", starring Gertrude Lawrence as "Eliza Doolittle" and Raymond Massey as "Henry Higgins".
As for William Shakespeare, he played "Paris" to Katharine Cornell's "Juliet" and Maurice Evans' "Romeo" in McClntic's "Rome and Juliet" in 1935, and appeared as "Rosenkrantz" in McClintic's 1936 Broadway staging of "Hamlet", with John Gielgud in the title role, Lillian Gish as "Ophelia" and Judith Anderson as "Gertrude". He also appeared as "Lennox" in the 1948 revival of Shakespeare's "Scottish Play", with Michael Redgrave as "Macbeth" and Flora Robson as "Lady Macbeth" (young actors also featured in the play who went on to renown were Julie Harris, Martin Balsam and Beatrice Straight). Cromwell won a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Play in 1952 for "Point of No Return", in which he supported Henry Fonda, and appeared as the father, "Linus Larabee Sr.", in "Sabrina Fair" the next year.
With the advent of sound pictures, Cromwell went "Hollywood" in 1929, appearing in The Dummy (1929) in support of Ruth Chatterton and Fredric March. He also co-directed two talkies with A. Edward Sutherland that year, Close Harmony (1929) and The Dance of Life (1929) (he had a bit part as a doorman in the latter). After learning the craft of directing, he directed The Mighty (1929) with George Bancroft, in which he made innovative use of sound. He also directed Jackie Coogan in Tom Sawyer (1930) the next year. He made his name with Ann Vickers (1933) in 1933 and Of Human Bondage (1934) in 1934, two films he shot for RKO based on novels by the preeminent writers Sinclair Lewis and W. Somerset Maugham. Both movies ran into censorship trouble. Lewis' "Ann Vickers" featured Irene Dunne as a reformer and birth control advocate who has a torrid extramarital affair. The novel had been condemned by the Catholic Church, and the proposed movie adaptation proved controversial. The Studio Relations Committee, headed by James Wingate (whose deputy was future Production Code Administration head Joseph Breen, a Roman Catholic intellectual) condemned the script as "vulgarly offensive" before production began. The SRC, which oversaw the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code, refused to approve the script without major modifications, but RKO production chief Merian C. Cooper balked over its excessive demands. Though studio head B.B. Kahane protested the SRC's actions to MPPDA President Will Hays, the studio agreed to make "Ann Vickers" an unmarried woman at the time of her affair, thus eliminating adultery as an issue, and the film received a Seal of Approval. The battle over "Ann Vickers" was one of the reasons the more powerful PCA was created in 1934 to take the place of the SRC.
Joseph Breen, now head of the PCA, warned that the script for W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" was "highly offensive" because the prostitute "Mildred", whom the protagonist, medical student "Philip Carey", falls in love with, comes down with syphilis. Breen demanded that Mildred be turned into less of a tramp, that she be afflicted with tuberculosis rather than syphilis and that she be married to Carey's friend whom she cheats on him with. RKO gave in on every point, as the PCA, unlike the SRC, had the ability to levy a $25,000 fine for violations of the Production Code. Despite the changes, chapters of the Catholic Church's Legion Of Deceny condemned the film in Chicago, Detroit, Omaha and Pittsburgh. Despite a picket line manned by local priests in Chicago, Cromwell's film broke all records at the Hippodrome Theater when it played there in August 1934. Five hundred people had to be turned away opening night. It seemed that wherever the Legion of Decency had condemned the film, it played to capacity crowds. In 1935 Breen ruled that "Of Human Bondage" would have to be changed if RKO wished to re-release it.
Other major films Cromwell directed include Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Algiers (1938), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), Since You Went Away (1944) and Anna and the King of Siam (1946). In 1951 he directed The Racket (1951) starring Robert Mitchum, Lizabeth Scott, and Robert Ryan; he had appeared in the original staging of the Broadway play by Bartlett Cormack on which the movie was based back in 1927.
Busy on Broadway in the 1950s, it was seven years before he directed another film, The Goddess (1958), with a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky and starring Kim Stanley. He directed two more minor films before calling it quits as a movie director in 1961. As a director, Cromwell eschewed flashy camera work, as he felt it detracted from both the story and the actors' performances. Late in his life director Robert Altman cast Cromwell as an actor in two of his films, 3 Women (1977) and A Wedding (1978).
John Cromwell died on September 26, 1979, in Santa Barbara, CA.1938 The Adventures of Marco Polo
1942 Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
A stage actor, Archie Mayo went to Hollywood in 1915 and worked until his retirement in 1946. He began directing slapstick two-reelers, later making features at Warner Bros. just about the time sound was being introduced into films. He did much work for Warners, but he also made films at Goldwyn and 20th Century-Fox. During the 1940s he became somewhat of a tyrant on the set and fought constantly with stars; the heavyset Mayo was referred to by one particular star as a "fat slob". He left the business for 12 years and returned as a producer in 1958.1938 The Adventures of Marco Polo- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Former playwright George B. Seitz left the theater for Hollywood in 1913, and before long he was turning out screenplays for action serials such as The Perils of Pauline (1914), The Exploits of Elaine (1914), and The Iron Claw (1916). In addition to writing and sometimes starring in these productions, he began to direct them as well, with great success. A prolific director, Seitz, unlike many of his B-picture colleagues, survived the transition from silents to talkies quite well, and directed everything from comedies to dramas to westerns at most of the studios around town. Although he spent a good amount of time at Columbia, he came to be most closely associated with MGM, where he directed - among others - almost all of the entries in the fondly remembered "Andy Hardy" series.1936 The Last of the Mohicans- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Screenwriter and director Maurice Tourneur was born Maurice Thomas in the Parisian suburb of Belleville on February 2, 1873, the son of a jewelry merchant. He was trained and employed as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator as a young man. After serving in a French artillery unit in northern Africa, he became an assistant to sculptor Auguste Rodin and later to muralist Amélie Puvis de Chavanne before deciding to change his life along with the changing century and make a new life in the theater.
Tourneur's younger siblings were part of the theatrical establishment--his sister was an actress and his brother a theater manager--so it was not as preposterous a shift in avocation as it might seem. After haunting the theaters of Paris, paying for cheap seats to soak up as much theater as he could, Tourneur became an actor in 1900 with a small troupe on the outskirts of Paris. His salary was 90 francs a month, the equivalent of about $15. Now a professional, he took the stage name "Maurice Tourneur". After learning the stage ropes, he joined the company of the great tragedienne Rejane for a South American tour. He later was a member of stage director Andre Antoine's company.
He married Fernande Petit in 1904, and they had a son, Jacques Tourneur (1904-1977), who would, like his father, become a film director of note. Maurice eventually worked as an actor and set designer for the Theatre de la Renaissance in Paris. In 1911, after having acted in and directed over 400 stage productions, he left the theater for the film industry, following his friend Emile Chautard into the new medium. Starting as an assistant to Chautard, Tourneur had visual arts experience surpassed by few in the nascent "7th Art," the cinema. After working as an assistant director at Societe Francaise des Films et Cinematographes Éclair, he was quickly promoted to director and made films with leading French stars. The subject of his first French silent films was often a gamin or orphan seeking love and shelter.
He had a good command of English from touring in the UK as an actor, and in 1914 the film company Éclair, intent on expanding its US market share, transferred Tourneur to America to manage its studio at Fort Lee, NJ, after a March 17, 1914, fire destroyed the main studio building and the company's negatives. Éclair American Co. went into business in Fort Lee, America's first "Hollywood", in 1911 with a studio designed by Éclair's French architects that incorporated the most modern theories of movie studio design. The studio complex consisted of glass-covered shooting stages with administrative offices, a development laboratory, workshops, scenery storage facilities and dressing rooms. Éclair American signed a distribution deal with the new New Jersey-based Universal Film Manufacturing Co. of Carl Laemmle, whose future production chief, Irving Thalberg, would later clash with Tourneur at MGM. Éclair American mostly produced shorts, but increasingly moved into feature production, keeping in line with the general evolution of the industry, and since Tourneur had experience in directing features, it was only natural that the company hired him.
In 1915 Tourneur moved over to World Film, also headquartered in Ft. Lee. World had been established the year before to import foreign-made features, which dominated American screens until the middle of the 1910s, and to distribute the movies of the newly established feature-film companies associated with producer Lewis J. Selznick, David O. Selznick's father. In a familiar pattern of that time, Selznick created Equitable Pictures and signed Vitagraph star Clara Kimball Young to his company. Selznick then merged with Shubert Pictures--Shubert Theatrical Co.'s movie production company--and Peerless Pictures, the movie production company created by motion picture raw-film-stock magnate Jules Brulatour.
World Pictures, now under Selznick's control, released movies produced by Equitable, Peerless, Shubert Pictures and other independent companies. Movie production was centered at the Peerless Studio in Ft. Lee, built in 1914, and at the Paragon Studio, built in 1916. Gradually World began to dominate the companies whose movies it distributed. Tourneur was the best filmmaker on the lot, whose other employees included Josef von Sternberg (who worked as a film cutter) and Frances Marion, the future Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Tourneur quickly rose to become a major director in the American movie industry, proving to be one of the more innovative pioneers in the development of the narrative film. Adept at using the latest technology to give his pictures a greater visual appeal, he earned critical acclaim and popular success. Tourneur was credited with bringing "stylization" to the American screen through his mastery of set design and lighting. His primary concern, however, was story: "Show the people anything, but show them something," he declared in a May 1920 interview with "Motion Picture Magazine". "This can be either funny or dramatic, but there must be something."
Tourneur opposed the new star system because he felt that a good story could not be told through one character; he also believed that the ideal of the "gleaming personality" of the star promulgated by motion pictures was false, a perversion of life as it actually is lived. Tourneur was more interested in developing a means to convey psychological effects than emphasizing physical action. In this he was opposed to the then-dominant pre-Konstantin Stanislavski acting theories, rooted in the theater, that held that dialogue must be accompanied by an appropriate physical gesture of the hands to underscore the feeling being conveyed by the actor in a scene. Physical action itself, the theory went, conveyed psychological meaning and emotion. It was said that film was born as a form of entertainment for the illiterate masses, and this style constituted a "universal language" that the talkies not only made obsolete, but absurd (one example of this style is the placement of the left-hand on the right forearm, a gesture that can be seen in silent films and was carried on by Harry Carey in his sound films. This was an elocutory gesture that signified fortitude, and would be understood by the silent film audience). Tourneur believed that this telegraphic shorthand needed to be replaced. The new Soviet cinema would show the way towards a greater psychological realism with the development of montage.
Tourneur's film production unit had coalesced by 1915, and included Clarence Brown, the future six-time Oscar-nominated director who served as his assistant director and editor; director of photography John van den Broek and art director Ben Carré. The Tourneur unit produced a series of popular movies that successfully utilized both the new language of film--including close-ups and parallel action--and new technology, such as tracking shots and special effects. While Tourneur's work spanned many genres, a leitmotif in his oeuvre was the romantic skullduggery women were the victim of, or sometimes the perpetrator of, in the pursuit of love and happiness. Today we'd call the women victims of sexual harassment; in the 1910s, underhanded or unscrupulous predatory behavior was generally considered part of the exigencies of love, though Tourneur saw through the obfuscating facade. Reportedly, among directors, only the pictures of D.W. Griffith and Thomas H. Ince were more popular than the films of Maurice Tourneur. In an interview published in the July 3, 1915, issue of "The New York Clipper", Tourneur expressed the opinion that Griffith was supreme among movie directors. He also believed that the motion picture was the most significant development for education since the invention of the printing press. Still, he was obsessed with story--he stated that "nearly everything worthwhile in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem." Tourneur believed that the cinema needed to develop a new kind of author, a writer who would more naturalistically portray human nature and move the movies away from the simplistic Manichean machinations of plot towards a portrayal of human motivations and interactions that more closely caught the true balance of good and bad in human beings. He stated that "nearly everything worth while in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem."
The Tourneur oeuvre consistently displayed first-rate visuals that compensated for some of the dramatic weaknesses of the early narrative film, hampered as it was by dialogue constrained by the limitations of intertitles, and by a certain overwrought telegraphic performance style closer to elocution than what we now appreciate as acting. In many early films the narrative can be unintelligible to a modern audience, due to a lack of intertitles, as this style was expected to, and did, convey information to the contemporary audience, an audience more experienced with pantomime due to the need of performers and filmmakers to reach an audience that spoke a babble of languages. However, the demands of movies for this kind of signaling hampered its development as a mature medium of artistic expression. When Tourneur tried to bring the sophistication of Henrik Ibsen to the screen with A Doll's House (1918), it proved an aesthetic and box-office failure. As one critic noted, the felicities of Ibsen's drama could only be conveyed by language itself and the modulations of the human voice, not by stage business.
In the July 1918 edition of "Photoplay Magazine", Tourneur stated his contrary credo: "There is an odious fallacy that a great many people still believe, in regard to the moving picture. It is almost as widespread as that the cinema is in its infancy [Tourneur dated the invention of the motion picture to Eadweard Muybridge's experiments with multiple-exposure photography in 1878]. By that I mean the belief that we must give the public what it wants. To me, that is absurd. As absurd as if the fashion dictators should attempt to suit women's wishes in costumes. In reality, the opposite is the case, is it not?" Tourneur believed that the filmmaker's taste and preferences were essential to the creation of a motion picture, just as in the legitimate theater, the craft and art the director and actors applied to a written play infused it with life and meaning. The play was not the thing, Tourneur stated; one can always sit at home and read a play. It is the staging of the play that creates meaning, and it is the director's control over the photoplay that makes it an art rather than just a piece of commerce.
Tourneur rebelled against the prevalent attitude in the movie industry that the audience would automatically reject more poetic works. He believed that what was then called The Great War had infused the mass audience with a certain spirituality. Tourneur had faith that the audience would accept higher-quality, more intellectual works, and that the mass-market lowest-common-denominator paradigm of the film industry was false. However, he could make exceptions to his opposition to pandering to the audience; in an earlier interview published in the May 18, 1918, edition of "Exhibitors Trade Review", he believed that filmmakers had a patriotic duty to soothe the anxieties of the wartime audience.
"It is part of our duty as purveyors of entertainment to the great majority, to see to it that the public gets wholesome, optimistic and, if possible, amusing entertainment. It is up to the screen to sustain the spirits of the nation. Let us keep away from the morbid and gruesome and throw the tremendous power of the photoplay into the civilized world's war for democracy." But of course, this was parcel to his opinion that the motion picture had a great didactic function, and could be used to educate an audience (a generation later Tourneur would be confronted with the anxieties of quite a different audience, that of Occupied France).
"Directing motion pictures is merely capturing life," Tourneur stated in a piece he wrote on the art of directing for "Variety" (December 27, 1918). A director, as auteur, was born, not made. A movie director could not be trained, as a successful director had been born with the instincts to create a photoplay (a contemporary term Tourneur despised and urged the industry to jettison in favor of something new and more accurate to describe the motion picture). "Directing a picture presupposes the possession of dramatic instinct and artistic perception in the man entrusted with the transfer to the screen of the play of an author," he wrote.
The photoplay had developed into quite a different form from the staged play of the legitimate theater, and thus a different set of narrative tools was required to make a successful movie. The director had to work within the limits of movies, which were short in length, thus limiting his options for both creating and presenting drama. A director had to be an expert in finding, and using, some detail, that in the short period of time allowed him, would elucidate the characters, the conflicts, and themes of his film. Thus, the director had to be a great observer of human nature and character in order to master his medium.
Optimistic about the future, and relishing the opportunity to define the new medium, Tourneur created his own production company in 1918. He felt that American silent film actors were superior to their European counterparts. He believed that "America's Sweetheart," Mary Pickford, the Toronto native whom he directed in two hit films in 1917, was the world's best screen actress. He also touted stage actress Elsie Ferguson, his Nora Helmer, as a brilliant artist; they made four films together in 1917 and 1918. For her part Ferguson, who hated movies and had to be coaxed into them by generous offers from Paramount-Artcraft head Jesse L. Lasky, said that Tourneur was her favorite director, and that she was lucky to have had him direct her first film.
Tourneur became increasingly antagonistic to the star system that was becoming more important to the industry, and he resisted studio efforts to rein in directors (and their profligate spending) by the imposition of the central production system, in which formerly dominant directors had to answer to producers over aesthetic choices as well as budgets. At this point in his career his success at the box office gave him leeway to push the frontiers of his art. In addition to making popular movies, Tourneur became one of the most respected directors in America, but he experienced some trouble when he began to become more aesthetically enthusiastic.
Tourneur's heavily stylized The Blue Bird (1918), which featured unusual sets and costumes, was a precursor of the expressionist German cinema, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) (the Rejane company had put on the first production of "L'oisueau bleu" in 1911, the year its author, Maurice Maeterlinck, won the Nobel Prize and Tourneur left the legitimate stage for the soundstage. In 1924 Tourneur wrote an article about the superiority of film to the theater. "[M]otion pictures have reached greater artistic heights than the stage and will continue on--years in advance of the stage," he wrote). Another heavily stylized film, Prunella (1918), was as critically acclaimed as "The Blue Bird," but both failed at the box office, as the movie industry was not as able to support artistic visions as was the theater. Due to these economic considerations, Tourneur went back to a naturalistic style.
Tourneur scorned what he called "machine-made" commercial pictures, but he had to acknowledge the tyranny of the box-office. He believed that the failure of "Prunella" was the result of its rejection by provincial exhibitors, who did not believe their audiences would go for such "high-brow" fare. Lacking an advertising budget and marketing monies that would enable it to be showcased with a first-rate orchestral accompaniment, the picture failed, cold-bloodedly murdered by the philistine exhibitors. Tourneur believed that Griffith's hit Broken Blossoms (1919) would have failed, too, if he had not been backed by advertising and marketing muscle. He also believed that Cecil B. DeMille's Male and Female (1919), his adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play "The Admirable Crichton," would have flopped it he hadn't vulgarized it. He also scored Griffith for giving in to the exigencies of the marketplace by pandering to the audience and turning his back on art.
It was around this time that he gave up on his idea that movies should be used to educate the masses. In an interview published in November 1920, Tourneur told Truman B. Handy of "Motion Picture" that the forte of film was amusement: "I do not believe in using the screen as a way of teaching; we have the pulpit and the college. It may be a means of propaganda, but I do not intend to use it as such. Never!" His faith would be sorely tested under the Nazis 20 years later.
"I would rather starve and make good pictures," he wrote in 1920, "if I knew they were going to be shown, but to starve and make pictures which are thrown in the ashcan is above anybody's strength. As long as the public taste will oblige us to make what is very justly called machine-made stories, we can only bow and give them what they want."
Story, again, was essential if one was to subvert the exhibitors' and distributors' expectations of the box office and create something better than the "machine-made" moving picture. Tourneur had an affinity for literary adaptations, and his career collection of adaptations included Joseph Conrad's Victory (1919), Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1920), James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and R.D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1922). He would later make a French version of Ben Jonson's play Volpone (1941).
By 1922 he came to the opinion that the future of the American film industry lay in Hollywood, not New York, though not without regret. In a February 1922 "Photoplay" article weighing the merits of California versus New York as a production locale, Tourneur came out in favor of California, since artistry was no longer a part of the moviemaking equation. To be intellectually stimulated and remain artistically fresh, New York would be the preferable production center, Tourneur declared. New York, like London, Paris and Vienna, stimulated the filmmaker toward developing fresh ideas and more ambitious projects. However, "[f]rom the material standpoint of facilities, costs, climate and the like there is no comparison; Los Angeles is vastly superior."
The next year he shot The Christian (1923), an adaptation of Hall Caine's novel, in Hollywood for Samuel Goldwyn, but within a few years he decided not to share his future with that of the West Coast. Though he apparently had no problems with the mercurial Goldwyn (who would bedevil William Wyler a decade later), the American movie industry had evolved into a business of which he disapproved. It was in Hollywood, under such men as Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck and Hal B. Wallis, that the central producer and production chief became the dominant force in the film industry from the mid-'20s through the early 1950s. Hollywood became a place where directors were often pulled off one picture in the middle of a shoot to shoot scenes in another picture, shuffled around like the hired hands that they had become in the increasingly centralized industry.
Tourneur denounced the industry's reliance on realism in a February 4, 1923, interview with "The New York Telegraph" in a plea for a more artistic, impressionistic approach to making motion pictures. He felt that film finally had had succeeded in being able to convey psychological effects, and had even surpassed the stage in that respect, as it could use picture and montage to quickly convey a mental state that it would take "countless words" to put over in the theater. Tourneur believed that due to the literalness of the camera lens, which did not have the mediating eye of the visual artist, the movies had been too focused on action. However, film could be made into a plastic art that was manipulated by the director to bring out "the psychology of the drama--the mental action of the characters."
He elaborated: "The screen is a better medium than the dramatic stage for getting over psychological effects. We can drive ideas across. For instance, what better way is there to express corruption than to show a close-up of the check with which a man has bribed . . . The Goldwyn company agreed with me that you can get more to the spectators by showing a banging shutter, by indicating the howling of the wind, or the shrieking of a woman, than by numberless words. Motion pictures, first of all, should be impressionistic."
Later that year, in the July 1st edition of the same newspaper, Tourneur declared that the great motion pictures would be produced by the next generation, now that the pioneers had developed a new mode of expression. He stated his belief that the director, and not the producer, should be fully responsible for a motion picture production. "To relieve him of any of these responsibilities and to compel him to confine his efforts to adapting himself to the ideas of a half-dozen 'experts' will strike at the very foundation of successful pictures." He predicted that the meddling of producers would doom motion pictures' popularity with the mass audience as it would result in inferior movies that the movie-goers would reject.
It was just the type of interference that Tourneur warned about in 1923 that led to his quitting the American film industry. The last film he directed in the US was The Mysterious Island (1929), which he abandoned soon after the commencement of principal photography. Tourneur would not work under MGM's assigned production supervisor, so he quit the picture and repatriated himself to his native France in 1926, to make movies there and in Germany.
Tourneur was not welcomed back to France, since he was viewed as a draft dodger by many in a country in which 11% of the population had been killed or wounded in The Great War (Charles Chaplin had been similarly criticized by British hawks). During a visit to his homeland in 1921, some French journalists demanded that Tourneur not be allowed to return to the US. Jean-Louis Crozet of the periodical "Comoedia" denounced Tourneur for having spent 1914-18 in America, and thus avoiding military service in World War I, which claimed the lives of approximately 1.4 million French soldiers. Crozet accused the director of cowardice for having emigrated to America to "[save] his life, while so many of his compatriots lost theirs."
Tourneur made his second movie in Germany after leaving the US, The Ship of Lost Men (1929) ("Ship of Lost Men"), which starred Marlene Dietrich in one of her first important roles. His son Jacques--who would go on to become an important director in the US in the 1940s--served as Tourneur's assistant and editor on the film. Jacques would continue to assist his father on his shoots until the mid-'30s.
Divorced from his first wife in 1923, Maurice married actress Louise Lagrange (1898-1979), whom he met while shooting L'homme mystérieux (1933). During the Nazi occupation of France (1940-44) times were tough for French filmmakers who wouldn't collaborate with the Germans, and things were no different for Tourneur, the man who vowed in 1920 that he would never make propaganda films. Even the "sitzkrieg", or Phony War, period of September 1, 1939, to May 9, 1940, disrupted the cinema as actors and craftsmen were called up for military service. Tourneur's shooting of "Volpone" was interrupted, and did not resume production until March 23, 1940, less than two months before the Nazi invasion of May 10th. On June 22nd the brief Battle of France came to an end when World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain asked the Germans for an armistice. Part of the peace accord mandated the partition of France, with the northern part to remain under German domination and the capital of the new government, headed by Petain, to be in Vichy. Vichy France, as the collaborationist government was known, also was to obey Germany in matters of cultural and racial policy.
On November 2, 1940, new regulations for the French movie industry were issued. All movie professionals were required to carry an identity card, except for Jews, who were not allowed one. At the end of the year 'Jean Renoir' (I)' emigrated to the US and was given a contract by 20th Century-Fox. The great actor Jean Gabin also made it to America and a contract with Universal, appearing in his first American film, Moontide (1942), opposite Ida Lupino in 1942.
French movie theaters were required to show Nazi propaganda movies, in accordance with Germany's policies towards all occupied countries. In 1940 Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan turned Lion Feuchtwanger's novel "Jew Suss" into a vicious anti-Semitic German-language film, the notorious Jud Süß (1940), the climax of which justifies pogroms against the Jewish people. When the film was released in Paris on February 14, 1941, the reaction of the French audience was very positive. On June 30 of that year the great French filmmaker Abel Gance was arraigned before the head of the French movie industry for the "crime" of being Jewish, and was required to prove his Aryan origins. He fled to Spain, not returning from exile until late 1945.
In September 1941 German censorship was enforced over French movies, and on the last day of the year, the Propaganda Division issued six new statutes, one of which banned Jews from the movie industry. The power to "green-light" French movies was reserved for the German High Command, and a new studio was created, Continental Productions, which was a subsidiary of Germany's state-owned UFA, headed by the German Alfred Greven and financed by French capital. The company, a.k.a. Continental Films, became the most important French movie production company during the Occupation.
By January 1942 film receipts were up by 68% over the previous year. A month later Jews and foreigners were forbidden from working in the film industry under a pseudonym, and on October 15th all American and English films were banned in France. French cartoons began to become popular early that year, possibly a sign of escapism, or of the indigenous industry's desire not to make propaganda for the enemy, and of the audience's desire not to be exposed to it. In 1943, fearing an Allied invasion from England, the Germans banned the filming of movies on the French coast. On January 15, 1944, reacting to the release of Vautrin the Thief (1943), the newspaper "Le Pilori" denounced beloved French character actor Michel Simon as a Jew, and wrote, "The cinema has condemned us to seeing the base, disgusting, revolting face that Michel Simon gives to 'Vautrin'." However, the mood in France, as the Allied invasion grew more imminent, began to change.
The Committee for the Liberation of the Cinema was an active element of the Maquis, which was the name given to the Resistance, publishing an underground newspaper, "L'Ecran francais". The Committee organized resistance within the film industry controlled by the Nazis and their collaborators, and coordinated insurrections and the "liberation" of many filmmaking facilities during the time of the Allied invasion of France, which began on June 6th. On July 18, 1944, "L'Ecran francais" published an article "Toward a Cinema with Clean Hands", declaring that collaborators with the Germans would not be tolerated in the liberated French film industry (in 1946 actor Robert Le Vigan was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor, and all his belongings were confiscated, for openly collaborating with the Germans and broadcasting anti-Semitic propaganda on the radio. The French made a distinction between those who had to cooperate with the Germans due to economic considerations and those who intellectually cooperated with the Nazis and propagated their ideology).
Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944, three days after film curator and cinema buff Henri Langlois held the first showing of Gone with the Wind (1939) in Paris at his Cinematheque française. The movie theaters of Paris had not yet been opened, but that didn't stop Langlois; at that point, his regular exhibition of movies had been suspended for a year. Marcel Carné's classic Children of Paradise (1945), shot during the Occupation, had its gala premiere on March 9, 1945. It originally had been scheduled to be shot at the Victorine studios in Nice in mid-August 1943, but the production was interrupted when the company was ordered back to Paris after the Allied invasion of Sicily. On April 14, 1945, all the theaters and entertainment venues in Paris were shut for the day to pay respect to the late US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died two days earlier.
During the Occupation the Germans had encouraged French filmmakers to maintain their high production standards in order to create more effective propaganda and to create superior product to soothe the anxieties of French movie-goers. However, those who were less cooperative had to get along with less. While Tourneur continued to direct under the Occupation, he was forced to use the ends of reels of raw film stock to shoot his pictures.
Maurice Tourneur is a character in Bertrand Tavernier's 2002 film about the French film industry under Vichy, Safe Conduct (2002) ("Safe Conduct"), the title of which refers both to the after-curfew pass filmmakers were issued due to the odd shooting hours of the film industry and also to the movie business' laissez-faire atmosphere during the occupation, which included hiding and utilizing Jewish film professionals who, of course, could not be credited. The film's story deals with French screenwriter Jean Aurenche, a rogue who did not want to work for the Nazis, and Jean Devaivre, an assistant director involved with the Resistance. Tavernier was inspired to make his three-hour epic by the experiences of his father René Tavernier, an editor and screenwriter confronted with the same dilemma as Jean Aurenche, characterized by his son as, "[W]hat can you write in a period of such censorship under a regime you despise?"
Tavernier believes that Americans can understand the dilemma if they equate French filmmakers during the Nazi occupation with American filmmakers under McCarthyism. Of the question, "'[H]ow can you work for a German company without compromising yourself?' It's very simple. I say to the American critic, just replace the German element with Senator McCarthy [Red-baiting Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy] and everything will be clear!"
The great paradox of the French film industry under the Occupation, which thrived despite the wartime shortages and terror directed by the Nazis towards the French population, is that French filmmakers working for the German-financed and -controlled Continental, the most powerful studio in France, maintained a good deal of independence. Unlike newspapers and book publishing and radio broadcasting, which were tightly controlled, the Germans allowed French filmmakers more latitude in order to create entertaining movies to distract the French populace. Thus, many French filmmakers were able to incorporate allegories and parables alluding to the Occupation. According to Tavernier, of the approximately 30 feature films made at Continental between 1940 and 1944, most have a kind of integrity that belies their ostensible ends as Nazi and Pétainist propaganda. "That's the first act of resistance," he claims.
Aurenche and René Tavernier hated Vichy and the indigenous intellectual collaborators with the regime, and Aurenche allegedly used coding in his Continental screenplays to defy the Nazis (director Martin Scorsese, citing the American directors of the 1940s and 1950s, calls this process "smuggling," introducing themes on the sly beneath the ken of studio owners and censors). Bernard Tavernier believes it was the directors, and not the screenwriters, who should be blamed for the sins of the Vichy cinema and the postwar, pre-Nouvelle vague bourgeois cinema, although that statement seems to indicate some kind of counter-Oedipal complex. His argument about McCarthyism smacks of a relevance that many Americans might find dismaying, as the French screenwriters of Vichy he lionizes were defying a foreign power, whereas many of the American screenwriters initially persecuted by McCarthyism were secret members of the Communist Party, accused of putting in coded messages for a foreign power with which the United States was locked in a Cold War.
Actually, the real nexus of the two groups' experiences can be summed up by the dilemma that Robert Sklar, in his book "Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American Movies," posits as a struggle "over issues that had agitated American culture ever since movies first appeared: Whom makes the product? Who runs the show? Who decides what the show should say?" It was a battle Tourneur joined in America, and then quit in 1926 when the machine-made movie philistines won the war.
Maurice Tourneur and other cine-artists in America, wanting a more artistic, expressionistic type of film that would offer something beyond the simple lowest-common-denominator cultural dualities of good and evil that the money-men insisted was all that the box office could bear, had to resort to "smuggling" in their own themes, their own bits of telling detail that would illuminate the psychological motivations of characters and audience alike. Vichy France and McCarthyite America were no different in kind (if not degree) in that the money-men, the producers, had always constrained the creative people, who resulted to subterfuges to make the films they wanted, whether in Paris or Hollywood. Even Sergei Eisenstein, the great Soviet filmmaker, survived the terrors of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union only to have his soul crushed again and again by a tyranny that makes the regimes of the classic Hollywood mogul much lamented by the creative talent laughable in comparison.
In Vichy France a filmmaker could be tortured or shot for not hewing to the Nazi line; while it is true that many an uncooperative leftist wound up in jail for defying the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, the damage for those who did not defy but did not cooperate was mostly limited to the loss of high-paying jobs and the psychological torment of being abandoned by friends and losing one's career. However, the challenge to both Vichy screenwriter and Hollywood screenwriter in what Lillian Hellman called the "Scoundrel Time" was the same: If one could not compromise, if one could not tailor one's beliefs to fit the fashion of the times, one could not work. So, in this sense, there is a similarity as suggested by Tavernier, but like many paradoxes of Anglo-French relations, Tavernier's argument doesn't completely add up; it does, however, help elucidate the tough spot and paradoxical milieu that movie-makers like Maurice Tourneur found themselves in. The Devaivre character, in Tavernier's film, has to take over directing a movie from Tourneur when the director goes into shock upon hearing that his wife has been taken prisoner by the Germans.
In 1942 Maurice Tourneur directed his first French horror film, a genre in which his son Jacques thrived in the US during the war. Carnival of Sinners (1943) (released as "Carnival of Sinners" in the US and "The Devil's Hand" in the UK) is an adaptation of Gérard de Nerval's 1832 short story "La main enchantée" ("The Enchanted Hand"). The film is about a failed artist's pact with the Devil, a Faustian dilemma that would have resonated with audiences in Occupied France. The artist, Roland, buys the severed though-still-alive left hand of a man, a grisly talisman owned by the Devil himself, from the restaurateur Mélisse, who informs Roland that in the future, he can only sell off the charm at a loss.
Under the threat of eternal damnation, Roland seals his Faust-pact, with the proviso from the Devil that Roland can return the charm--at a price. The catch is, the longer he keeps the charm, the higher the price is, as it doubles each day. Tourneur cast a frail and harmless-looking actor as his Mephistopheles, a man who looks like a small-town bailiff and effectively doubles as a Vichy civil servant. Despite the unprepossessing look of the Devil, Tourneur created a sense of fear by emphasizing the consequences of the Faust-pact rather than the Devil's power. Tourneur had become a master of psychological filmmaking.
Roland becomes a great success, but at the cost of his individual identity as the charm makes him a different person. In a meeting with previous "owners" of the hand, Roland discovers that he is the last in a succession of men who took advantage of the charm, which links him to a history that ostensibly is not his own, but in fact is. The hand binds him to the first owner, a monk who refused to use his artistic talents for the glory of god, and it is under the monk's name, Maximus Léo, that Roland creates the art that ensures his fame and fortune, with the caveat that the expression of the hand is not his own.
He is done in by the vanity and greed of his mistress, when she purloins money from his safe to buy herself a luxury, money that he intended to use to payoff the Devil. He no longer will be able to buy his way out of the Faust-pact, and save his soul. At the end of the story, he is the one who now owns the hand and must pay the debt for all the previous owners who attempted to profit from it. Although he resents his fate, he must bear the responsibility for his collaboration with the Devil, and for the collaborations of the others who came before him. (Vichy government propaganda held that the French people brought on the Occupation themselves to make them accept it as their just desserts.)
Despite the travails of Occupied France and the German-dominated industry, Tourneur managed to create a classic psychological horror film. If Martin Scorsese and Tavernier's theme of smuggling is correct, then "La Main du diable" and other horror films made during the Occupation used the genre to smuggle unacceptable themes past the censors. French films made during the Occupation never directly refer to the military and political situation, but they do convey the anxiety and paranoia, indeed, the horror and fear of losing one's soul via collaboration, felt by the Occupied French.
In the July 3, 1915. "New York Clipper" interview, it was reported that "M. Tourneur's ambition is to produce strong and appealing detective stories. He believes they interest the greatest number of people." Tourneur's movie-making career continued until 1949, when he lost a leg in a car accident. His interests were painting in oils and watercolors and reading. After his forced retirement from the cinema due to his disability, he occupied himself by translating English-language detective novels into French.
Maurice Tourneur died on August 4, 1961, in Paris, and was interred in the City of Lights' Père Lachaise Cemetery. As a filmmaker, posterity has praised Tourneur for the subtlety and lingering moods of his movies, particularly those in the mystery and fantasy genres. He was one of the few American directors to create a new aesthetic, which exerted a strong influence on Josef von Sternberg. His use of rectangular compositions in Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) inspired Fritz Lang's The Spiders - Episode 1: The Golden Sea (1919), and may also have influenced the Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu.
Hollywood director Clarence Brown, who graduated from the University of Tennessee at age 19 with a double degree in engineering, credited Tourneur with making him a filmmaker. Within a few months of being hired, he was editing Tourneur's films, and by 1917 he was shooting parts of Tourneur's films (uncredited) himself. He learned from his mentor the power of lighting and composition, although he developed a more sympathetic approach to directing actors than his teacher. Brown told cinema historian Kevin Brownlow, "Tourneur was my God. I owe him every thing I've got in the world. For me, he was the greatest man who ever lived. If it hadn't been for him, I'd still be fixing automobiles." Brownlow reported that Brown had tears in his eyes when he made this confession.
The United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry, established to help preserve American films deemed "culturally significant," has two Tourneur films on its list, The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and The Last of the Mohicans (1920).1920 The last of mohicans- 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.1920 The last of mohicans- Producer
- Director
- Production Designer
Described by film producer Michael Deeley as "the very best eye in the business", director Ridley Scott was born on November 30, 1937 in South Shields, Tyne and Wear. His father was an officer in the Royal Engineers and the family followed him as his career posted him throughout the United Kingdom and Europe before they eventually returned to Teesside. Scott wanted to join the British Army (his elder brother Frank had already joined the Merchant Navy) but his father encouraged him to develop his artistic talents instead and so he went to West Hartlepool College of Art and then London's Royal College of Art where he helped found the film department.
In 1962, he joined the BBC as a trainee set designer working on several high profile series. He attended a trainee director's course while he was there and his first directing job was on an episode of the popular BBC police series Z Cars (1962), Error of Judgement (1965). More TV work followed until, frustrated by the poor financial rewards at the BBC, he went into advertising. With his younger brother, Tony Scott, he formed the advertising production company RSA (Ridley Scott Associates) in 1967 and spent the next 10 years making some of the best known and best loved TV adverts ever shown on British television, including a series of ads for Hovis bread set to the music of Dvorak's New World Symphony which are still talked about today ("'e were a great baker were our dad.")
He began working with producer David Puttnam in the 1970s developing ideas for feature films. Their first joint endeavor, The Duellists (1977) won the Jury Prize for Best First Work at Cannes in 1977 and was nominated for the Palm d'Or, more than successfully launching Scott's feature film career. The success of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) inspired Scott's interest in making science fiction and he accepted the offer to direct Dan O'Bannon's low budget science fiction horror movie Alien (1979), a critical and commercial success that firmly established his worldwide reputation as a movie director.
Blade Runner (1982) followed in 1982 to, at best, a lukewarm reception from public and critics but in the years that followed, its reputation grew - and Scott's with it - as one of the most important sci-fi movies ever made. Scott's next major project was back in the advertising world where he created another of the most talked-about advertising spots in broadcast history when his "1984"-inspired ad for the new Apple Macintosh computer was aired during the Super Bowl on January 22, 1984. Scott's movie career has seen a few flops (notably Legend (1985) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)), but with successes like Thelma & Louise (1991), Gladiator (2000) and Black Hawk Down (2001) to offset them, his reputation remains solidly intact.
Ridley Scott was awarded Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire at the 2003 Queen's New Year Honours for his "substantial contribution to the British film industry". On July 3, 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship in 2018. BAFTA described him as "a visionary director, one of the great British film-makers whose work has made an indelible mark on the history of cinema. Forty years since his directorial debut, his films continue to cross the boundaries of style and genre, engaging audiences and inspiring the next generation of film talent."1977 The Duellists
1992 1492: Conquest of Paradise
2000 Gladiator
2010 Robin Hood- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Robert Reiner was born in New York City, to Estelle Reiner (née Lebost) and Emmy-winning actor, comedian, writer, and producer Carl Reiner.
As a child, his father was his role model, as Carl Reiner created and starred in The Dick Van Dyke Show. Estelle was also an inspiration for him to become a director; her experience as a singer helped him understand how music was used in a scene. Rob often felt pressured about measuring up to his father's successful streak, with twelve Emmys and other prestigious awards.
When Rob graduated high school, his parents advised him to participate in Summer Theatre. Reiner got a job as an apprentice in the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania. He went on to UCLA Film School to further his education. Reiner felt he still wasn't successful even having a recurring role on one of the biggest shows in the country, All in the Family. He began his directing career with the Oscar-nominated films This Is Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, and The Princess Bride.
In 1987, with these successful box-office movies under his belt, Reiner founded his own production company, Castle Rock Entertainment; along with Martin Shafer, Andrew Scheinman, Glenn Padnick, and Alan Horn. Under Castle Rock Entertainment, he went to direct Oscar-nominated films When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men. Reiner has credited former co-star Carroll O'Connor in helping him get into the directing business, showing Reiner the ropes.
Reiner is known as a political activist, co-founding the American Foundation For Equal Rights, a group that was an advisory for same-sex-marriage. He has spoken at several rallies on several topics, an advocate for social change regarding such issues as domestic violence and tobacco use.
Reiner made cameo appearances on television shows 30 Rock, The Simpsons, and Hannah Montana, and in films The First Wives Club, Bullets Over Broadway, Primary Colors, and Throw Momma From The Train, among many others.1986 Stand by me
1987 The princess bride- Director
- Producer
- Actor
British-born A. Edward ("Eddie") Sutherland started in vaudeville and acted in films from 1914 at Keystone (he was one of the original Keystone Kops). He became a director in 1925, first with Paramount (1925-31), then at United Artists (1931-32), again with Paramount (1933, 1935-37), then Universal (1940-41) and RKO (1942). He hit his stride in the 1930s and 1940s with a string of well-received comedies starring Laurel & Hardy and W.C. Fields, but his Abie's Irish Rose (1946), an adaptation of the often-filmed stage play, which he also produced, was such a critical and financial disaster that he could not find work as a director in Hollywood again. In the 1950s he went to Britain and ended his career directing episodic television.1932 Mr. Robinson Crusoe- Director
- Producer
- Actor
Albert Parker was born on 11 May 1885 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Blind Man's Bluff (1936), The Branded Woman (1920) and The Black Pirate (1926). He was married to Margaret Greene and Margaret Johnston. He died on 10 August 1974 in London, England, UK.1926 The Black Pirate- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Richard firmly established his credentials with such epics as The Vikings (1958) , 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Barabbas (1961) and also proved to be a master of intimate drama with Compulsion (1959) , which won Cannes Festival awards for the male stars. He won an Academy Award for one of his earliest films - a documentary Design for Death (1947) . In 1947 the rapidly rising director met Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman who hired him for their first film together So This Is New York (1948) , One of his most memorable accomplishments 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) which grossed well over $25 million since it's release in 1953.1954 20000 Leagues Under the Sea
1958 The Vikings
1977 Crossed Swords
1984 Conan the Destroyer- Director
- Additional Crew
- Actor
William Keighley's professional career spanned three distinct mediums: the theatre, motion pictures and, finally, radio. Initially trained as a stage actor and Broadway director, he arrived in Hollywood shortly after the advent of sound, landing a job with Warner Brothers (where he spent most of his career) as an assistant director and dialog director before helming his first film there in 1932. Keighley's gangster films of the period, such as 'G' Men (1935) and Bullets or Ballots (1936), are models of the kind of fast-paced, tightly made, exciting films that Warner's specialized in--and which kept the cash flowing in during the studio's devastating losses of the period. Interestingly, although his career is closely associated with the meteoric ascent of James Cagney, the two men did not particularly care for each other, as Cagney was somewhat put off by what he felt were Keighley's phony European affectations (something the director acquired during his tenure on Broadway in the early 1920s and which would carry over into his later career in radio). However, much like the working relationship between Errol Flynn and director Michael Curtiz (although far less volatile), both Cagney and Keighley did some of their best work together.
Keighley also directed comedies, the best of which is The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941). He was assigned by Warners to its prestigious Technicolor epic The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Flynn (although initially it was to be with a wildly miscast Cagney in the lead!), but following several weeks of shooting he was replaced by Curtiz (although receiving co-director credit) when studio executives thought that he was taking too long, they weren't satisfied with the film's pace and the costly epic--the most expensive picture in Warners history up to that time--was not going in the direction they thought it should. Keighley's film output declined in the late 1940s and early 1950s, roughly coinciding with his newfound interest as a radio host (his aristocratic voice was ideal for the medium) and his films met with less success, although he did turn out a crackerjack crime drama, The Street with No Name (1948). He retired from directing after his last film, The Master of Ballantrae (1953)--a beautifully shot but somewhat lumbering swashbuckler with an out-of-shape Errol Flynn--and he and his wife, actress Genevieve Tobin, moved to Paris, France, after he left CBS Radio in 1955.1937 The Prince and the Pauper
1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood
1953 The Master of Ballantrae- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Wilhelm Dieterle was the youngest of nine children of parents Jacob and Berthe Dieterle. They lived in poverty, and when he was old enough to work, young Wilhelm earned money as a carpenter and a scrap dealer. He dreamed of better things, though, and theater caught his eye as a teen. By the age of 16 he had joined a traveling theater company. He was ambitious and handsome, both of which opened the door to leading romantic roles in theater productions. Though he had acted in his first film in 1913, it was six more years before he made another one. In that year he was noticed by producer/director/designer/impresario Max Reinhardt, the most influential proponent of expressionism in theater; while in Berlin, Reinhardt hired him as an actor for his productions. Dieterle resumed German film acting in 1920, becoming a popular and successful romantic lead and featured character actor in the mix of German expressionist/Gothic and nature/romanticism genres that imbued much of German cinema in the silent era. He was interested in directing even more than acting, however, and he had the iconic Reinhardt to provide inspiration. Dieterle had acted in nearly 20 movies before he also began directing in 1923, his first female lead being a young Marlene Dietrich.
With his wife Charlotte Hagenbruch he started his own film production . He was said to have tired of acting; he appeared in nearly 50 films over the course of his career, mainly in the 1920s, and in several of his films he also functioned as director. As an actor he worked with some of the greatest names in German film, such as directors Paul Leni (in Waxworks (1924) [Waxworks]) and F.W. Murnau (in Faust (1926)) and actors Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings. By 1930, however, he had emigrated to the US--now rechristened as William Dieterle--with an offer from Warner Brothers to direct their German-language versions of the studio's popular hits for the German market. In that capacity he made Those Who Dance (1930), The Way of All Men (1930) and Die heilige Flamme (1931) (aka "The Holy Flames"). He even stood before the camera for another of these, Dämon des Meeres (1931) (aka "Demon of the Sea", a version of "Moby Dick") in 1931, in which he played Capt. Ahab. The film was directed by another European who was soon to become one of Warners' most successful directors: the Hungarian Michael Curtiz.
Having taken to the Hollywood brand of filmmaking with ease--helped by his own brilliance in defining and executing the telling of a story--into 1931, he was soon promoted to directing some of Warners' "regular" films (his first, The Last Flight (1931), is now regarded as a masterwork) and he wold average directing six pictures a year for the studio through 1934. In that year Reinhardt came to the US, the Nazi threat finally having driven him off the Continent. He arrived with a flourish, ready to stage William Shakespeare's "A Midsummers Night's Dream"--an extravaganza at the Hollywood Bowl that would become legend. It was impressive enough to interest the execs of Warner Bros. They opted for a film version in 1935 with the great Reinhardt--even studio boss Jack L. Warner knew who he was--reunited with his disciple, Dieterle, as co-director. Reinhardt knew nothing about Hollywood and had to learn via Dieterle's diplomacy the differences between the overemphasis of stage and the subtlety of the camera. He learned from other directors as well about the realities of making films, in particular ratchet down the tendency that stage directors had to let their actors perform "too" much. It was all for naught, however, as the film was a major box-office flop, but it was one of the great moments in the evolution of film. Dieterle would direct Paul Muni for Warners in three first-rate bio movies: The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Juarez (1939) and all received Oscar nominations. After that Dieterle moved on to do The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) at RKO with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. This was one of Dieterle's best efforts, both in its romantic style and the great dark scenes of the Parisian medieval underworld with dramatic minimal lighting that gave vent to his expressionist roots.
Through the 1940s Dieterle moved around among Hollywood's studios, turning out vigorously wrought pictures, such as his two 1940 bios with Edward G. Robinson at Warner's. He became associated with independent producer David O. Selznick and actor Joseph Cotten, first with his direction of I'll Be Seeing You (1944). His romantic fires as a director had been restoked, as it were, and kept burning in the subsequent series of films with them which included the wonderful acting talents of Selznick's soon-to-be-wife (1949), Jennifer Jones: Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946)--for which he shared directing but not credit with King Vidor--and the ethereal Portrait of Jennie (1948). "Jennie" was one of Dieterle's masterpieces, bringing into play a fusion of all his artistic fonts. The romantic fantasy with edges of darkness from the novel by Robert Nathan was just the vehicle to challenge Dieterle. His use of light and dark and gauzed--at one point the textured field of a painting canvas--backdrops conveyed the dreamlike state and netherworld atmosphere of the story of lovers from different times. Certainly the film influenced others to follow with similar themes.
Through the 1950s Dieterle's work--two more with Joseph Cotten--though sturdily in the director's hands, came off like good Hollywood fare, but were inspired more by the films' tight shooting schedules than by any artistic pretensions. His output during that decade was small, and that was partly due to bane of McCarthyism. He was never blacklisted as such, but his film Blockade (1938) was too libertarian to keep him completely away from the shadow of suspicion as a "socialist" / "communist" sympathizer. In 1958 he returned to Germany and directed a few films there and in Italy before retiring in 1965.
Though regrettably not as well known as his German and European directorial compatriots in Hollywood, he had great artistic style and worked with much energy in providing some of Hollywood's and the world's crown jewels of cinematic art.1937 The Prince and the Pauper- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Art Department
Henry Hathaway, son of a stage actress and manager, started his career as a child actor in westerns directed by Allan Dwan. His movie career was interrupted by World War I. After his discharge he briefly tried a career in finance but returned to Hollywood to work as an assistant director under such directors as Frank Lloyd, Paul Bern, Josef von Sternberg and Victor Fleming, whom Hathaway credited for his eventual success. In 1932 he directed his first picture, Heritage of the Desert (1932), a western. His approach has been described as uncomplicated and straightforward, while at the same time noted for their striking visual effects and unusual locations. He had a reputation as being difficult on actors, but stars such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe benefited under his direction. Although Hathaway was a highly successful and reliable director working within the Hollywood studio system, his work has received little attention from critics.1935 The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
1954 Prince Valiant- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Anthony (Tony), started as a club promoter in London in the early eighties and financed his first short 'rock-a-bye baby' by holding an event at Le'quipe Anglaise, where all the door money went to finance the film. In fact, when it was finished it was the clubs owner Shariffi who showed it to producer Micheal White (Rocky horror show) who was so impressed, he gave Tony a one way ticket to L.A.saying don't come back until you have made it. Tony didn't return for eight years.
in L.A. Tony famously met the producer of 'Waxwork', Staffan Ahrenberg, when he crashed into the back of his car in the motel they were both staying at on Fairfax. Tony, broke at the time, talked Staffan into letting him pay for the damage by writing him a script for $3000 only. Staffan agreed, but wouldn't pay a penny until it was delivered. Tony wrote it in three days. Waxwork.
The script then did the rounds getting turned down by every studio, until an independent, Vestron was the only one left. They turned it down two days before Christmas. it was over the vacation that their friend, producer Mark Burg (Saw), said he couldn't believe that Dan Ireland (the head of the studio) wouldn't have loved it. It turns out he hadn't read it, it never made it past the readers.
The first day after the vacation, Mark sent 'Waxwork' to Dan himself, the rest, as they say, is horror movie history.1997 Prince Valiant- Producer
- Director
- Writer
John Boorman attended Catholic school (Salesian Order) although his family was not, in fact, Roman Catholic. His first job was for a dry-cleaner. Later, he worked as a critic for a women's journal and for a radio station until he entered the television business, working for the BBC in Bristol. There, he started as assistant but worked later as director on documentaries, such as The Newcomers (1964). His friendship with Lee Marvin allowed him to work in Hollywood (e.g. Point Blank (1967) and Hell in the Pacific (1968)) from where he returned to the UK (e.g. Leo the Last (1970), Zardoz (1974) or Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)). He became famous for Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest (1985) and his autobiographic story Hope and Glory (1987) where he tells his own experiences as a child after World War II and which brought him another Academy Award Nomination after Deliverance (1972).1972 Deliverance
1981 Excalibur
1985 The Emerald Forest- Director
- Writer
- Actor
After working in vaudeville, on the stage and in early movies, Richard Thorpe launched his directing career in 1923. After directing dozens of low-budget comedies and westerns, his talents were recognized in the mid-'30s when he went to work for MGM. Studio chief Louis B. Mayer valued efficiency in his directors, and Thorpe prided himself on bringing a production in under budget--that would be key to his remarkable longevity in Hollywood. He had no particular style, directing mechanically on the premise of keeping the camera rolling until an actor blew a line--or a scene suffered a mechanical malfunction--and then going back and completing it with a close-up or reaction shot. Mechanical or not, his technique worked. Though he never directed any blockbusters, he was solid and dependable, directing hundreds of movies of all genres for over four decades. He retired in 1967.1952 Ivanhoe
1953 Knights of the Round Table
1955 Quentin Durward