Allan Dwan

Allan Dwan (born April 3, 1885, Toronto, Ontario, Canada—died December 28, 1981, Woodland Hills, California, U.S.) was an American director with more than 400 known feature films and short productions to his credit. Along with the more-celebrated Cecil B. DeMille, Dwan was one of the few directors who made the transition from the days of the one-reelers in the 1910s through the glory days of the studio system in the 1930s and ’40s and into its decline in the 1950s.

Early life and the silent era

As a young man, Dwan moved with his family from Toronto to Chicago and subsequently earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. In 1909 he took a job in Chicago with the Cooper Hewitt Electric Company as a lighting engineer, a profession that soon brought him into contact with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. He began moonlighting for Essanay as a writer and was soon hired as a story editor. Moving to the American Film Manufacturing Company in 1911, he was given an opportunity to direct when, according to some accounts, the director of a California production went on a drinking binge, leaving the company stranded. Dwan asked the actors to tell him what he was supposed to do as the director. They did, and he continued doing it for the better part of five decades.

In 1911–13 Dwan turned out as many as 250 one-reelers for American Film—westerns, comedies, even documentaries, all written, edited, and produced by him. Few of these still exist. In 1913 he signed with the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, but within a year he moved to the Famous Players Company in New York, and a year after that he was working with D.W. Griffith at the Triangle Film Corporation. Dwan is credited with introducing the dolly shot—he used a moving automobile to film actor William H. Crane’s stroll in David Harum (1915)—and with inventing the equipment used for the crane shots in Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

Nearly as significant as those innovations were the 11 films Dwan then made with Douglas Fairbanks, beginning with The Habit of Happiness (1916) and culminating with the epic swashbuckler Robin Hood (1922). In 1923 Dwan was signed by Paramount Pictures Corporation, where over the next few years he directed seven pictures starring Gloria Swanson, including Zaza (1923), Manhandled (1924), and Stage Struck (1925). They both left Paramount in 1926 at the peak of their popularity, and neither would ride so high again. Dwan moved to Fox (after 1935, Twentieth Century-Fox), but prestige came only with occasional outside productions, such as The Iron Mask (1929), which reunited him with Fairbanks, and Tide of Empire (1929), a big-budget western with synchronized sound made at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Dwan’s talkies

Dwan made his first talking picture, The Far Call, in 1929. Except for two years in England (1932–34), he remained until 1940 at Fox, where he worked mainly on B-films—such as Black Sheep (1935), from Dwan’s own story, about a professional gambler helping a young man being fleeced by a female jewel thief, and the western Frontier Marshal (1939), about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. However, Dwan made several A-films, most notably three films featuring the extremely popular child star Shirley Temple (Heidi [1937], Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm [1938], and Young People [1940]) and the historical epic Suez (1938), about the building of the Suez Canal.

After leaving Fox, Dwan made a string of comedies as a freelance director beginning with Trail of the Vigilantes (1940), a comic western, and Look Who’s Laughing (1941), which featured the popular radio stars Edgar Bergen (along with his ventriloquist’s dummy Charlie McCarthy) and Jim and Marian Jordan, who played their characters Fibber McGee and Molly, as well as Lucille Ball. Starting in 1944, Dwan made four comedies for United Artists, all starring Dennis O’Keefe, including Brewster’s Millions (1945), the often-filmed story about a man who learns that he stands to inherit $7 million if he is able to first spend $1 million over the next month.

In 1946 Dwan signed an exclusive contract with Republic Studios, where he made one of his greatest commercial successes, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), a major production with John Wayne as a hard-boiled Marine sergeant fighting in World War II who has to train his recruits to be tough enough to take Mount Suribachi. The film earned Wayne his first Oscar nomination.

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Last films

Moving to RKO Radio Pictures, Dwan made for producer Benedict Bogeaus’s Filmcrest Productions 10 films, among which are some of his most acclaimed. Silver Lode (1954) was a noirish western that served as an allegory about McCarthyism: the town named in the title turns on beloved citizen Dan Ballard (John Payne) after he is framed for murder by marshall Ned McCarty (Dan Duryea). Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) starred Barbara Stanwyck, who, as Sierra Nevada Jones, out-toughs land-grabbers, Indians, and even helpful Ronald Reagan by a wide margin. Slightly Scarlet (1956) was an adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, about sisters navigating the politics of a corrupt town. The River’s Edge (1957) gave Ray Milland one of his best late roles, as a bank robber trying to make it into Mexico with a suitcase of stolen cash. Last came Most Dangerous Man Alive, completed in 1958 and released in 1961, a science-fiction–thriller hybrid about a gangster made indestructible after exposure to an atomic explosion.

Legacy

After his retirement, Dwan lived in obscurity until interest in his career was revived among film critics and historians by two books: British film historian Kevin Brownlow’s study of silent-era Hollywood, The Parade’s Gone By (1968), which devoted a chapter to his reminiscences, and American film critic and director Peter Bogdanovich’s extensive interview Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (1971). When compared with other lauded directors such as John Ford or Howard Hawks, Dwan has no obvious towering masterpiece among his films to compare with The Searchers (1956) or Bringing Up Baby (1938). His movies also often eschewed the startling visual flourishes that distinguished directors such as Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock. However, he cultivated an unadorned style that led to many well-crafted films in a variety of genres over a career that spanned almost 50 years. To many film critics and historians, Dwan’s films show the high levels of quality that could be achieved within the relative simplicity of classic Hollywood film style.