Norman Foster
- Byname of:
- Norman Foster Hoeffer
- Died:
- July 7, 1976, Santa Monica, California (aged 72)
Norman Foster (born December 13, 1903, Richmond, Indiana, U.S.—died July 7, 1976, Santa Monica, California) was an American film and television director best known for many of the Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan mystery films of the 1930s and ’40s and the popular Disney television shows about frontiersman Davy Crockett in 1954–55.
Foster began his show-business career as a stage actor in the 1920s. He began acting in motion pictures in 1929 and appeared in films such as Skyscraper Souls (1932) and Rafter Romance (1933).
Foster decided to step behind the camera, and he went to work for Twentieth Century-Fox directing B-film mysteries. His first effort was I Cover Chinatown (1936), which was followed in short order by six films (1937–39) in the popular Mr. Moto series starring Peter Lorre (Think Fast, Mr. Moto; Thank You, Mr. Moto; Mysterious Mr. Moto; Mr. Moto Takes a Chance; Mr. Moto’s Last Warning; Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation) and three films (1939–40) in the Charlie Chan series starring Sidney Toler (Charlie Chan in Reno, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, Charlie Chan in Panama).
Foster directed location footage in Mexico in 1941 for a segment of an anthology film about South America, It’s All True, that was to be produced by Orson Welles’s Mercury Productions for RKO. (It’s All True was never completed, but a documentary about the project containing a version of a segment Welles shot was released in 1993.) He was then hired to direct Welles’s next production, Journey into Fear (1943), an espionage yarn adapted from a complicated Eric Ambler novel. It starred Mercury players Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, and Welles. How much of the picture Welles actually directed without credit has been a matter of dispute. Welles later claimed that the rushed production meant that some scenes were directed by “whoever was nearest the camera” but that Foster was the director. However, in its visual style the film resembles those of Welles more than any of Foster’s other pictures.
Beginning in 1944 Foster then shot four Spanish-language films in Mexico. He returned to Hollywood in 1948 with the charming western romance Rachel and the Stranger, starring Loretta Young and Robert Mitchum, and the bleak noir Kiss the Blood off My Hands, starring Burt Lancaster and Joan Fontaine. Tell It to the Judge (1949) and Father Is a Bachelor (1950) were light romantic comedies, but Woman on the Run (1950) was a proficient thriller starring Ann Sheridan and Dennis O’Keefe, and Navajo (1952) was a low-budget semidocumentary.
After a brief stop at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Foster went to work for Disney in 1954, making live-action shows for television, including five programs about the adventures of Davy Crockett—which spurred a national craze for the character—and The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca (1959). Foster continued to work largely in television, directing episodes of such popular series as Zorro, The Loretta Young Show, and Batman. Although he made a handful of pictures in the 1960s and ’70s, such as the coming-of-age saga Indian Paint (1965), few received national theatrical release. He received posthumous acclaim for his return to acting as Billy Boyle, the beleaguered assistant to director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), in Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind (filmed from 1970 to 1976, released in 2018).
