James Cruze

James Cruze (born March 27, 1884, Ogden, Utah, U.S.—died August 3, 1942, Los Angeles, California) was an American film director and actor who was a giant in the days of silent films but became a minor figure after the advent of sound.

(Read Lillian Gish’s 1929 Britannica essay on silent film.)

Cruze was born to Mormon parents and reputedly partly of Ute Indian origin. He left Utah for San Francisco in 1900 and gravitated to the stage. (Some sources claim that he sold medicaments—“snake oil,” in the parlance of the day—in traveling medicine shows as a teenager.) He joined director David Belasco’s acting company in 1906. In 1910 Cruze began his career as a screen actor. He joined the Thanhouser Company in New Rochelle, New York, in 1911 and soon became one of the studio’s leading stars. His first film as a director was the comedy short From Wash to Washington (1914). He was fired by Thanhouser in 1915 and went west to Hollywood. He started acting at Famous Players–Lasky (later Paramount) in 1917 and switched to directing the next year.

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Over the next 10 years Cruze (who used the name James Bosen offstage) made 48 of his 73 feature films at Famous Players–Lasky/Paramount. His first was Too Many Millions (1918), which starred the popular star Wallace Reid, with whom he made 13 more films prior to Reid’s death in 1923. He also made five Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle comedies, two of which, The Fast Freight (1922) and Leap Year (1924), were shelved and only released abroad years after the scandal that derailed Arbuckle’s career. The Covered Wagon (1923), about a wagon train traveling to Oregon, was the first epic western. Filmed on location in Utah and Nevada with painstaking attention to historical detail, the film was an enormous financial success, and Cruze became one of the highest-paid directors in Hollywood. However, two subsequent big-budget historical films, The Pony Express (1925) and Old Ironsides (1926), were not as successful, and Old Ironsides, about the USS Constitution’s battles against Barbary pirates, was an especially costly failure. He was released by Paramount and formed his own production company, James Cruze Productions, which started making films in 1928. But going independent may have cost him the opportunity to make the transition to sound with the resources of a major studio, and he ultimately relinquished the status he had earned through the 1920s. (Many of Cruze’s silent films were subsequently lost, and few exist today.)

Cruze’s sound pictures—such as The Great Gabbo (1929), which starred Erich von Stroheim as an insane ventriloquist—offer little evidence of what his skills may have been at his prime. James Cruze Productions folded in 1931, but in 1932 Cruze scored with Washington Merry-Go-Round, a political drama starring Lee Tracy as an idealistic congressman. He also directed one of the episodes in Paramount’s all-star showcase If I Had a Million (1932). I Cover the Waterfront (1933) was Cruze’s most important pre-Production Code picture; it starred Ben Lyon as a reporter who, while investigating a case involving smuggled Chinese immigrants, falls in love with the smuggler’s daughter (Claudette Colbert).

At Fox, Cruze directed Mr. Skitch (1933) and David Harum (1934), pleasant diversions starring Will Rogers. Two-Fisted (1935) featured Tracy as a prizefighter. The expensive epic Sutter’s Gold (1936), made for Universal, had Edward Arnold as settler John Sutter and proved a box-office failure. Cruze’s last four efforts—The Wrong Road (1937), Prison Nurse (1938), Gangs of New York (1938; with a script by Samuel Fuller), and Come On, Leathernecks! (1938)—were programmatic features made for Republic, which was considered a mere picture mill among film studios, illustrating how far his once-lofty stature had slipped.