Gordon Douglas

Gordon Douglas (born December 15, 1907, New York City, New York, U.S.—died September 29, 1993, Los Angeles, California) was an American filmmaker who was noted for his versatility; he directed popular Our Gang shorts before launching a feature-film career that included musicals, westerns, film noirs, and crime dramas.

Early work

Douglas acted onstage as a child. He made his way to Hollywood just as sound pictures were taking hold and ended up at Hal Roach’s studio. In 1930 he appeared in the first of numerous comedy shorts, often uncredited. Five years later he turned to directing, and he soon gained attention for his work on the popular Our Gang (also known as Little Rascals) series, which centred on the antics of a group of children that included Spanky, Alfalfa, and Buckwheat. Douglas helmed more than 30 Our Gang shorts, including the Academy Award-winning Bored of Education (1936). He also codirected the Our Gang feature General Spanky (1936), which was set during the American Civil War. Douglas’s first solo feature was Zenobia (1939), a comedy starring Oliver Hardy. He next directed Saps at Sea (1940), one of Laurel and Hardy’s best late vehicles. In 1941 Douglas took a break from directing to cowrite Topper Returns.

In 1942 Douglas left Roach for RKO, where he was put to work on a series of films inspired by a popular radio show about a colourful character named Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve. Douglas’s other RKO credits included the mysteries A Night of Adventure (1944) and The Falcon in Hollywood (1944), the horror movie Zombies on Broadway (1945), and First Yank into Tokyo (1945), a World War II drama about a U.S. pilot (played by Tom Neal) who infiltrates a Japanese POW camp. In the melodrama San Quentin (1946), Lawrence Tierney played an ex-convict who is tasked with finding a violent prison escapee. In 1948 Douglas turned to musicals with If You Knew Susie, which starred Eddie Cantor in his last credited appearance on the big screen.

After moving to Columbia in 1948, Douglas continued to show his versatility. He directed the film noir Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), with Dennis O’Keefe; the swashbucklers The Black Arrow (1948) and Fortunes of Captain Blood (1950), both of which starred Louis Hayward; and the western The Nevadan (1950), with Randolph Scott. Douglas’s other films from 1950 included a violent adaptation of Horace McCoy’s hard-boiled novel Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, with James Cagney as a psychopathic gangster who escapes from prison, and The Great Missouri Raid, another telling of the James and Younger brothers’ criminal exploits.

Warner Brothers

In the early 1950s Douglas moved to Warner Brothers, where he worked for more than a decade. His first film with the studio was the formulaic cavalry-versus-Indians picture Only the Valiant (1951), with Gregory Peck and Barbara Payton. Other films from 1951 were Come Fill the Cup—about alcoholism, featuring Cagney and a memorable performance by Gig Young—and the red-baiting drama I Was a Communist for the FBI, with Frank Lovejoy as an undercover agent who infiltrates the Communist Party. Strangely, the latter film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary.

Mara Maru (1952) was a treasure-hunt adventure starring the aging Errol Flynn, while the biopic The Iron Mistress (1952) recounts the exploits of Jim Bowie (Alan Ladd) before he became a hero in the Texas Revolution. In 1953 Douglas directed She’s Back on Broadway, a musical drama with Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran, and The Charge at Feather River, a 3-D western starring Guy Madison and Vera Miles. The following year Douglas made his first foray into science fiction with Them!, a critical and commercial success. Arguably the best of the “giant atomic-mutant creature” movies of the 1950s, it became a sci-fi classic and is widely considered Douglas’s best work.

In 1954 Douglas returned to musicals with Young at Heart, a remake of Michael Curtiz’s Four Daughters (1938). The film starred Frank Sinatra and Doris Day and featured a number of notable songs, including “Someone to Watch over Me,” “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” and “Just One of Those Things.” The McConnell Story (1955) was a workmanlike biopic of the famed American pilot Joseph C. McConnell, with Ladd in the title role and June Allyson as his wife. While the latter film proved popular with moviegoers, the same could not be said of Sincerely Yours (1955), a musical starring Liberace as a wealthy pianist who loses his hearing. The movie was a box-office failure, and Douglas wisely stuck with westerns and war movies for the next few years. His credits from this period included The Big Land (1957), with Ladd; Bombers B-52 (1957), with Natalie Wood and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.; Fort Dobbs (1958); and The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958), a loose remake of Kiss of Death (1947) that featured future producer Robert Evans in an over-the-top performance as a vicious killer. Douglas closed out the 1950s with Yellowstone Kelly (1959), a solid western starring Clint Walker, and the well-regarded action film Up Periscope (1959), in which James Garner portrayed a navy frogman during World War II. One of Douglas’s last films at Warner Brothers was The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961), a drama starring Angie Dickinson as a missionary in the strife-ridden Belgian Congo.

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Later films

Douglas made movies for another 20 years, but his best work was behind him. Of his last two dozen pictures—which were for various studios—only a handful were of note. After directing Elvis Presley in Follow That Dream (1962), he helmed Call Me Bwana (1963), an unfunny Bob Hope comedy, brightened somewhat by the presence of Anita Ekberg and Edie Adams. The entertaining Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) was the last film featuring the “Rat Pack”—Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra, who sang “My Kind of Town.” After the solid western Rio Conchos (1964), Douglas directed Carroll Baker in Sylvia and the sensationalistic biopic Harlow (both 1965).

Douglas’s 1966 remake of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), with Ann-Margret and Bing Crosby, paled in comparison to the original, and Way…Way Out (1966) was a charmless Jerry Lewis vehicle. Douglas later made three hard-boiled Sinatra films: Tony Rome (1967) and its sequel Lady in Cement (1968) and (arguably the best of the trio) The Detective (1968), which featured the notable cast of Robert Duvall, Lee Remick, Ralph Meeker, and Jack Klugman.

Douglas’s credits from the 1970s included They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970), a sequel to In the Heat of the Night (1967), with Sidney Poitier as detective Virgil Tibbs, and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off (1973), a blaxploitation entry featuring Jim Brown and Ed McMahon. His final movie, Viva Knievel! (1978), starred motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel as himself. Douglas retired thereafter. Although he produced a number of notable movies, Douglas was also self-aware enough to know that much of his work was mere Hollywood product. He once remarked, “Don’t try to watch all the films I’ve directed; it would turn you off movies forever.”