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June 01: TCM's 15 Most Overlooked Classic Directors of Hollywood Films

TCM recognizes those directors of films that deserve to be acknowledged for their talent behind the camera, but may not be as renown as some of their peers. Each made significant contributions to the art of filmmaking in their own right. While many enjoyed successful careers, their contributions have often been overlooked or undeservedly forgotten.

TOP 15 LIST QUICK LINKS:

Jack Arnold Frank Borzage Clarence Brown John Cromwell Allan Dwan

John Farrow Edmund Goulding Henry King Gregory La Cava Mitchell Leisen

Fred Niblo Robert Rossen Robert Stevenson W. S. Van Dyke Sam Wood

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1. Jack Arnold

A monster from the prehistoric past watches a beautiful woman swim above him, then mirrors her movements in a nightmare pas de deux.... A miniature man slips through the openings in a window screen to face the wonders of the universe...These are two of the most enduring images of the '50s, thanks to the work of Jack Arnold. While other directors saw the new wave of science fiction films as little more than kid's stuff, he turned it into cinematic poetry. By treating films like The Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man seriously, he inspired a generation of filmmakers who would grow up to create big-budget blockbusters inspired by his low-budget work at Universal Pictures.

Arnold came to Hollywood after years of shooting documentaries and quickly found his niche when he turned It Came From Outer Space into a box office winner. He also made it one of the few films shot in 3-D to use the process artistically. The success of that film and The Creature From the Black Lagoon made him the studio's top science fiction director and may explain why Universal let him delve into metaphysics with The Incredible Shrinking Man, a more thoughtful film than most of the decade's supposedly serious fare.

As part of the studio production system, Arnold worked on a variety of films, bringing his narrative and visual sense to Westerns, thrillers and the unconsciously hysterical juvenile delinquency exposé High School Confidential. His career barely lasted beyond the decline of the studio system. The surprise hit The Mouse That Roared, the film that made Peter Sellers an international star, brought him offers to direct TV comedies. When CBS hired him as a producer-director assigned to salvage failing series, he used his talent for making outlandish plot ideas work by finding the right comic style for Gilligan's Island and turning it into one of the nework's biggest hits.

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2. Frank Borzage

Frank Borzage was ranked among Hollywood's top directors during the transition to sound, even winning the first Oscar for Best Director for Seventh Heaven. One of the first American directors to mirror the stylistic innovations of the German Expressionists, he used deep focus, unsettling camera angles and a richly detailed mise-en-scene to place his stars in a harsh reality they ultimately had to rise above. That approach turned Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell into one of the top romantic teams of their day, and helped shape the images of stars like as Gary Cooper, Margaret Sullavan and Marlene Dietrich.

Although often dismissed as a sentimental dreamer, Borzage tempered his love stories with a healthy respect for the facts of life. His leading couples fought to find happiness despite war wounds (My Lucky Star) the Depression (A Man's Castle) and the rise of Naziism (The Mortal Storm). Even his last great film, Moonrise, set its love-story against a background of small-town corruption.

By the '40s, Borzage was a has-been, a victim of changing tastes, the loss of some of his earliest work and his own personal demons. After a disastrous divorce, he turned to alcoholism just as he started having trouble finding suitable projects. Even then, there were moments when his sense of romance managed to show through, as when the young Lon McCallister and stage legend Katharine Cornell do a scene from Romeo and Juliet in Stage Door Canteen, or Victor Mature creates a safe haven for his war bride in China Doll.

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3. Clarence Brown

There really were two Clarence Browns. One was MGM's premier director of lavish star vehicles. The other excelled at small-town stories grounded in the simplest family values. Far from being contradictions, these two extremes in his filmography make him the definitive MGM studio director. They're a perfect match for studio head Louis B. Mayer's paradoxical devotion to glamour on the one hand and the American family on the other.

As an actor's director, Brown was second only to George Cukor. After consulting with his leading players, he built his films around their performances. He helped make Greta Garbo a star in Flesh and the Devil, brought her into talkies with Annie Christie, then filmed one of her best performances, as Anna Karenina. Little wonder she often referred to him as her favorite director. He worked the same magic with Clark Gable in A Free Soul and Joan Crawford in Letty Lynton, and his knack for framing great performances reaches back to the silent days with gems like The Goose Woman and The Eagle.

But it was in simple family dramas that he made the camera sing. Brown used his own New England childhood as background for his work on Ah, Wilderness! The animal co-stars of National Velvet and The Yearling were framed as lovingly as leading players Elizabeth Taylor and Gregory Peck. Arguably his best film was Intruder in the Dust, shot on location in original author William Faulkner's Mississippi. This early attempt to deal realistically with racism failed at the box office but pointed to Hollywood's increasing reliance on socially relevant issues and location shooting in years to come.

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4. John Cromwell

More noted for taste and restraint than dazzling camera work, John Cromwell may be best remembered as the David O. Selznick director who didn't work on any of the independent producer's great blockbusters. Yet he was clearly one of Selznick's favorite directors, from their earliest days at Paramount Pictures, and was the first he hired when he started his own production company with Little Lord Fauntleroy. Though not the flashiest Selznick pictures, films like The Prisoner of Zenda and Since You Went Away are among the most intelligent and emotionally resonant.

A theatre veteran when he came to Hollywood in the early days of talking pictures, Cromwell was often considered the go-to man for film adaptations of stage plays. In fact, he often treated the camera as if it were the audience at a live production, achieving dramatic effects by positioning and moving actors rather than through rapid cutting or dazzling angles. That he did it particularly well is reflected in his special talent for capturing the balance of power in a script, from family politics in The Silver Cord and The Enchanted Cottage to international relations in Anna and the King of Siam.

Drawing on his experience as an actor, he also excelled at building performances, shepherding Bette Davis through her career-defining work in Of Human Bondage and helping make Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. a swashbuckling star in The Prisoner of Zenda. And though his work was refined, he never shied away from big emotional moments. Rather, he helped actresses like Davis, Eleanor Parker in Caged and Kim Stanley in The Goddess build to shattering emotional outbursts among the finest moments in screen history. Those performances alone earn him a place as one of Hollywood's greatest.

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5. Allan Dwan

Allan Dwan may be the most prolific director the majority of film fans have never heard of. By his estimate, he made more than 400 features and almost 1,000 shorts, most of them lost. His career spanned the studio era. He started working in film in 1909, just a few months after D.W. Griffith, and made his last picture in 1961 as the great studios were being dismantled. In the teens, he used his own personality to shape Douglas Fairbanks' screen image. Decades later, Peter Bogdanovich, whose interviews with him were published as Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer, used his stories as the basis for his film Nickelodeon.

But there was more to Dwan's career than longevity. An engineer by training, his technical innovations included the crane shot and the camera dolly. He quickly learned the grammar of film, mostly from Griffith, whose films he studied carefully. What he didn't learn, he invented to match his own innate story sense. By the late teens, he had developed an effortless technique that could turn even the least promising script into sheer pictorial art and make audiences feel for the most wooden actors.

Dwan's greatest triumphs came in the silent days, when he injected humor into the aswashbuckling thrills of Douglas Fairbanks films like Robin Hood and made Gloria Swanson a superstar in hits like Zaza and Manhandled. But even after the coming of sound pushed him into a long string of B movies, he had momentary returns to the spotlight. When he directed Shirley Temple in Heidi, he not only restored her flagging box-office, but also gave her one of her least cloying vehicles. At Republic, he took a break from low-budget Westerns to helm one of their rare A pictures, leading John Wayne to his first Oscar nomination in Sands of Iwo Jima. Even on his last picture, the sci fi/gangster film The Most Dangerous Man Alive, he got maximum cinematic effects while shooting in just over a week, proving that his mastery of the medium knew no limitations.

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6. John Farrow

John Farrow took a unique route to directing, which seems oddly appropriate for a man who kept himself aloof from the Hollywood scene. He came to filmmaking as a technical advisor on nautical films after years of naval service around the globe and then moved into screenwriting. His background in both areas would inform most of his directing career, during which he combined a talent for fast-paced action with a wit and literacy rare for the movie capital. Although married within the business (he met MGM star Maureen O'Sullivan while writing Tarzan Escapes), he kept his personal life separate. A devout Catholic, he was more likely to have priests at his dinner table than fellow filmmakers and in later years devoted as much energy to writing about his faith as he did to making movies.

Farrow's films were tightly paced, but never at the expense of the script or the finer points of acting. As a result, even his low-budget films still seem finely nuanced and provided career boosts for up and coming stars like Ann Sheridan and George Sanders, the latter working with Farrow on the first of five films as jewel thief turned detective, the Saint. Farrow also got more out of action stars like Alan Ladd (whom he starred effectively in Two Years Before the Mast among other films) than most directors. He also had a gift for finding the comedy inherent in his characters, creating surprisingly light moments in even his most serious films and, in the case of His Kind of Woman, beefing up the role of a ham actor played by Vincent Price until it overshadowed the tale of a deported gangster trying to get back into the U.S.
Wake Island. When film noir arrived in the post-War era, the genre fit his talents perfectly, allowing him to create memorable galleries of threatening, eccentric characters for films like The Night Has a Thousand Eyes and The Big Clock.

With studio production slowing down in the '50s, Farrow focused more on writing, winning his only Oscar for co-writing Around the World in 80 Days). But he still managed to bring his personal style to the 3-D John Wayne Western Hondo and the jungle potboiler Back from Eternity, a remake of his own Five Came Back. He tried to make the transition to the post-studio era as director of John Paul Jones, producer Samuel Bronston's first international epic shot in Spain. But for all his efforts it failed at the box office, a sign that the days of nuanced, character-driven productions like his were over.

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7. Edmund Goulding

Edmund Goulding was one of Hollywood's true Renaissance men. In addition to directing, he worked as actor, producer, writer and songwriter and even was called on to share his expertise in costumes, makeup and hair. Little wonder he was an expert at directing polished, sophisticated entertainments, particularly romantic dramas. He was a perfect fit at MGM, then helped upgrade the production styles at Warner Bros. and 20th Century-Fox.

As a writer, Goulding invented the backstage musical with The Broadway Melody, MGM's first Best Picture Oscar-winner, while as director he helmed the first great all-star drama, Grand Hotel, the studio's second Oscar-winner. And after two decades of sophisticated romance, he showed the rest of Hollywood how noir film noir could be with Nightmare Alley, the surprisingly harsh tale of sideshow sharpie Tyrone Power's rise and fall. Too bleak to make it at the box office, the film is now viewed as one of the high points of his career.

Emotion was Goulding's medium. He brought out the vulnerability in even his most wooden male stars (the only director who ever got more out of George Brent was William Wyler) and turned his female stars into the queens of the screen. With his sense of pacing, however, he never let his stars wallow in suffering for its own sake. From Gloria Swanson in The Trespasser to Bette Davis in Dark Victory, and Gene Tieney in The Razor's Edge, his divas triumphed over adversity with style and wit.

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8. Henry King

If Henry King's entire directing career had consisted of his incredible three-decade stay at Fox, he would be considered one of the most reliable directors of Hollywood's golden age. Before that, however, he directed more than 60 silent features ranked among the best ever made. In fact, despite the quality of many of his sound films, his career at Fox was really a shadow of his greatest triumph, the silent classic Tol'able David.

The tale of a rural Southern boy's (Richard Barthelmess) coming of age brought to the fore two recurring elements in King's films: His love of America's past and his placement of characters within landscapes that shape their lives. In particular, it allowed him to use movement within the frame to define his characters, something he did so effectively he won special praise from Russian director Vsevolod Pudovkin in his pioneering work of film theory, Film Technique and Film Acting.

Few directors could have topped themselves after an accomplishment like that, but King never stopped trying. As Fox's top studio director, he brought his taste for simple American stories to accomplished works like In Old Chicago, Jesse James and I'd Climb the Highest Mountain. He even made a hit out of The Song of Bernadette, partly by treating the film's European peasants as if they were American farmers, and partly by turning the religious tale into a rite of passage for rising star Jennifer Jones. King came closest to topping his past achievements when he moved out of his comfort zone with two surprisingly complex psychological films starring Gregory Peck. The World War II aviation film Twelve O'Clock High captured the complexities of wartime command while the film The Gunfighter brought a new depth to the Western. Only the end of the studio system could thwart him. But even in late failed films like The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night, he creates moments and characters with surprising resonance. The lifeworn characters played by Errol Flynn in the former and Jason Robards in the latter could almost be cynical comments on a world that has lost its innocence since Tol'able David fought to become a man.

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9. Gregory La Cava

Best known for a handful of sophisticated comedies he made in the 1930s, Gregory La Cava had an ironic viewpoint that often captured the good and bad in characters and both the serious and ridiculous elements of the same situations. He may have been too far ahead of his time, more in-synch with modern filmmakers like Robert Altman and The Coen Brothers than with such classic directors as Frank Capra and Leo McCarey.

La Cava came by his sense of the absurd from years of work as a cartoonist, which led him to animation, working with Walter Lantz on silent Krazy Kat and Katzenjammer Kids shorts. He moved to Hollywood to get into live action films, eventually directing two of W.C. Fields' best silents, So's Your Old Man and Running Wild. Their similar senses of humor and off-screen friendship led Fields to call in La Cava to shoot uncredited scenes whenever the comic felt himself stuck with an incompatible director. With the coming of sound, La Cava found his ideal genre, the screwball comedy, a form he brought to full flower with My Man Godfrey. Starring Carole Lombard as a daffy heiress with a daffier family and William Powell as the perfect gentleman's gentleman, it is often hailed as the definitive film of this genre.

With his unique outlook on life, La Cava frequently re-wrote his scripts, encouraging actors to improvise or, as he did with his "dramedy" about aspiring actresses, Stage Door, inserting what he overheard his actors saying off-set. Stage Door brought him an Oscar nomination and the New York Film Critics Award, but his fast and easy way with scripts did not always endear him to producers. Neither did his drinking. Eventually those two problems made him untouchable in Hollywood, a very serious ending to the career of one of the screen's most light-hearted comic directors.

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10. Mitchell Leisen

Mitchell Leisen brought a feminist vision and a designer's eye to his best films, most of them romantic dramas and sophisticated comedies. As Paramount's top director in the late '30s and early '40s, he had the misfortune of falling between Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, two comparisons few could live up to. Further damaging his reputation were the complaints by Wilder and Preston Sturges that he had butchered their scripts for films like Midnight and Easy Living, respectively (though others would credit him for turning both films into box office winners and minor classics).

Coming to the movies as a costumer and art director, Leisen took a special interest in those areas on all his films. His mentor, Cecil B. DeMille, brought him to Paramount to work on The Sign of the Cross, which led to his first directing job. He quickly established himself as a master of screwball comedy with films like Hands Across the Table, Easy Living and Midnight, and as a wizard at getting performances out of female stars like Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Arthur.

As lush and glamorous as his films were, they also presented a subversive view of gender. Leisen's women are often stronger and more capable than his men without ever losing their allure. And when his scripts failed to live up to his visual sense -- as in Lady in the Dark and Frenchman's Creek -- the disparity between design excellence and empty writing read as camp long before Divine started wearing eye liner. Leisen's dramatic side was best represented by two films with Olivia de Havilland. In Hold Back the Dawn she first proved her worth as a romantic leading lady, while To Each His Own, a surprisingly intelligent tale of maternal sacrifice, brought her her first Oscar. That film was Leisen's last unqualified success, as changing times, particularly the decline of the studio system, and his romantic break-up with choreographer Billy Daniels led to his decline. By the late '50s, he had turned to television, eventually retiring from directing altogether to run an interior decorating firm, thus keeping at least one of his greatest passions alive.

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11. Fred Niblo

Sometimes one's place in history is simply a question of being in the right place at the right time. That was certainly the case for Fred Niblo. He was one of the directors brought into the new MGM by Louis B. Mayer, for whom he had directed Ramon Novarro in The Red Lily. When the new studio hit its first crisis -- the location shoot of Ben-Hur in Rome was turning into a costly disaster -- they moved the production back to their home base in Culver City and replaced star George Walsh. They also replaced director Charles Brabin with the more action-oriented Niblo, giving him the chance to helm one of MGM's first great blockbusters. Ben-Hur was testament to Hollywood production at its grandest, the costliest film made to that time and the third highest-grossing silent movie. Beyond that, it demonstrated a rare combination of epic sweep and personal drama with its tale of a Hebrew prince searching for his faith.

Ben-Hur was hardly Niblo's only claim to greatness. His first films were short travel pieces he shot on a theatrical tour of Australia with first wife Josie Cohan. He finally moved into the movies by aping brother-in-law George M. Cohan as a jack of all trades, directing, writing and starring in the film version of Cohan's Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. When his first wife died, he married co-star Enid Bennett, whom he would direct in more than 20 films, mostly for producer Thomas Ince's company.

Niblo's reputation as an action director was born when Douglas Fairbanks hired him to direct The Mark of Zorro, followed by The Three Musketeers. He also turned Rudoph Valentino into the world's greatest matador in Blood and Sand. After taking over Ben-Hur, he also replaced Greta Garbo's mentor, Mauritz Stiller, on the Swedish star's second U.S. film, The Temptress. But when sound came in, Niblo had little opportunity to adjust to the new medium. His first talkie Redemption, was so bad star John Gilbert begged the studio not to release it. His second, Way Out West, is less notable for any directorial touches than for William Haines' risque ad-libs in his first sound film. Niblo left MGM but did little better on his own. After an attempt to rebuild his career in England, he left the movies, returning briefly as a character actor before his death in 1948.

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12. Robert Rossen

Although his youthful involvement with the Communist party would prove his undoing, Robert Rossen possessed a passion for social justice that gave him a unique perspective on the facts of social and economic life. In his all-too-brief career as a director, he created a series of vivid masculine landscapes, setting his best films in such male arenas as sports and politics to depict the struggle between success and integrity. His leading men were a group of fiery rebels: John Garfield in Body and Soul, Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men, Paul Newman in The Hustler. But he also gave each striking, surprisingly self-determined female counterparts like Lili Palmer's sculptor in the first, Mercedes McCambridge's political advisor in the second and Piper Laurie's prostitute in the third.

Rossen started his career as a writer at Warner Bros., where he was instrumental in setting the conventions of the socially relevant gangster film with scripts for Dust Be My Destiny and The Roaring Twenties. When Garfield, for whom he had written frequently, set up his own production company, he hired Rossen to direct Body and Soul. The tale of young boxer rising from poverty but sacrificing his values along the way set the key plot elements for boxing films to follow. With its vividly directed and photographed fight scenes, it remains for many the definitive screen treatment of the sport.

When Rossen won the Best Picture Oscar for All the King's Men, his career seemed assured. Then his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee put him on the blacklist. Although he went back to name names a few years later his career momentum had ended. He scored a dazzling comeback with The Hustler, the film that did for pool what Body and Soul had done for boxing. Poor health compounded by stress brought his career to an early end, but the iconic images he created in his few great films have outlasted the work of many a more long-lived director.

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13. Robert Stevenson

When Walt Disney's live action productions took off with audiences in the late '50s, he could thank one man for his box-office success -- Robert Stevenson. A veteran of the first flowering of sound film in England and Hollywood's golden age, Stevenson brought a painter's eye and a strong sense of narrative to his work. Unlike many directors of children's films, he also had a keen appreciation for how children thought. He thrilled a generation of baby boomers with the adventures of Johnny Tremain, sent them home crying after Old Yeller and presented his audience with the perfect surrogate parent in the person of Mary Poppins, making Julie Andrews a movie star in the process.

Stevenson's interest in film grew out of graduate studies in psychology, and he started as a writer in the early days of talking cinema. Michael Balcon, one of the founders of England's Gainsborough films, mentored him through a series of high-quality pictures, most notably Tudor Rose and the Paul Robeson version of King Solomon's Mines. Impressed with his work, David O. Selznick brought him to Hollywood under contract, though he never assigned him to any of his own films, loaning him to other studios instead. Stevenson was part of the package Selznick loaned to 20th Century-Fox to film Jane Eyre. Although co-star Orson Welles influenced the production a great deal, there are also elements of the film's baroque visual style that echo Stevenson's World War II espionage drama Joan of Paris.

After leaving Selznick, Stevenson moved to RKO, where he had done most of his loan-outs. Under Howard Hughes, the studio was turning out mostly programmers, but the studio also distributed Disney's films, which eventually brought Stevenson into the Disney fold. His sense of pace and narrative helped him create kiddie films that adults could stomach, leading to big box office with films like The Absent-Minded Professor and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones. And when it came time for Disney to make a big live-action (mostly) musical, Stevenson won the assignment, turning Mary Poppins into the top box-office film of its year and winning his only Oscar nomination. Stevenson would continue with Disney through his retirement, giving parents a good excuse to take their children to such deft family fare as The Love Bug and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

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14. W. S. Van Dyke

W. S. Van Dyke's reputation for working quickly won him the nickname "One Shot Woody," but it also has blinded critics to his many gifts and accomplishments. Far from economy for its own sake, his rapid shooting style reflected a devil-may-care view of life that informed most of his films, which often moved as quickly as he had shot them. As a result, he succeeded where others had failed in making light opera a popular obsession with his six Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy musicals. And when he brought his special touch to The Thin Man, he redefined the image of marriage in the movies, trading lachrymose sentiment for high comedy.

Romantic teams were a specialty of Van Dyke's. In addition to directing most of the MacDonald-Eddy musicals, he spotted the chemistry between William Powell and Myrna Loy on his Manhattan Melodrama and convinced Mayer to re-team them for The Thin Man. Working swiftly and incorporating his stars' improvisations he created a new image of marriage on-screen: a witty, wise-cracking couple who faced the world (and a room full of murder suspects) together while trading well-meaning insults. Marriage would never be the same.

An actor from the age of three, Van Dyke also worked as a lumberjack, miner and soldier of fortune before breaking into movies. During the silent era, he specialized in action films. He joined MGM to handle Westerns, but when documentarian Robert Flaherty walked off White Shadows on the South Seas, Van Dyke stepped in to turn the studio's first sound film into a box-office and critical winner. That brought him the chance to spend seven grueling months in Africa shooting Trader Horn. Then he got to incorporate his unused location footage from that picture in the studio's first Tarzan film. With his legendary light touch, he laced the jungle epic with enough romantic comedy to make Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan stars. He would work the same magic for MacDonald and Eddy on Naughty Marietta, Spencer Tracy in San Francisco and Margaret O'Brien in his last film, Journey for Margaret.

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15. Sam Wood

Sam Wood is a major exception to the auteur theory, a director whose work is more defined by his collaborators than his own personality. That was no small accomplishment. Many directors with more personal style have fallen down when forced to accommodate somebody else's vision. Initially, Wood's greatest talent was stepping back and letting actors like Gloria Swanson, Wallace Reid and The Marx Bros. work their magic, without any sense of personal directorial style to get between them and the audience. Visually, the most impressive of his early films was Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which Sidney Franklin had started planning before moving from directing to producing.

Then Wood met production designer William Cameron Menzies while filling in for an ailing Victor Fleming on Gone With the Wind. Their partnership would produce some of the most visually striking films of the '40s. On their six films together, Menzies supervised all elements of design, including camera angles and composition. The result was a series of films in which camera placement heightened the drama created by the director's astute work with actors. It was Menzies who came up with the picture frames as a cinematic equivalent for the graveyard scene in Our Town and the idea to have Ronald Reagan turn his head into a shadow when he discovers his legs have been amputated in Kings Row. But Wood got to draw out acclaimed performances from Martha Scott in the former and Reagan in the latter. Even with a less than promising script, as in the Victorian melodrama Ivy, the two presented a visual conception so strong it enhanced Joan Fontaine's surprisingly villainous performance and made the film more effective than it would have been in other hands.

Menzies was far from Wood's only solid collaborator. After a failed attempt at acting, he apprenticed under Cecil B. De Mille, which led to a contract at Paramount, where he took over the films of Gloria Swanson and Wallace Reid after they had finished their work with the master. During his early years at MGM, Irving Thalberg put him in charge of the Marx Bros. The director who never got their jokes managed to give them their two biggest box-office successes, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. Late in his career, Wood made four films with Gary Cooper, including Pride of the Yankees and For Whom the Bell Tolls, both designed by Menzies. With their straightforward view of heroism, those four films are probably the least critical depictions of Cooper's image as the strong, silent American. Yet the power of his image, as captured by the ultra-conservative Wood, probably makes them his most personal films.

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