Allan Dwan

Allan Dwan (1920)

Allan Dwan (born April 3, 1885 in Toronto , Ontario as Joseph Aloysius Dwan , † December 28, 1981 in Woodland Hills , California ) was an American director , producer and screenwriter .

Life

Born in Canada, Dwan moved with his family to the USA at a young age, where he also grew up. After graduating from school, he studied electrical engineering and worked for some time as an electrical engineer in Chicago for a company that produced mercury vapor lamps . One of the first customers was the film company Essany , for which he wrote several scripts.

Finally, he changed his profession completely and worked as a screenwriter from 1909, first in Chicago, then in New York and from 1911 in Hollywood . Soon he was also directing and between 1911 and 1918 he was responsible for over 205 films, with the duration rarely exceeding 15 minutes. During this time, Dwan was, so to speak, a “girl for everything” as a director, editor, screenwriter and occasionally an extra in personal union. In doing so, he acquired in-depth knowledge of both technical aspects and dramaturgy and acting. As a pioneer in the field, he was the inventor of the dolly shot in 1915 , in which the camera is mounted on wheels and follows the movements of the actor. He first used the technique in the film David Harum , in which he filmed a stroll by actor William H. Crane. In the same year, Griffith was responsible for solving a technical problem that DW Griffith had while filming Intolerance : Dwan mounted the moving tracking shot on a crane and thus gained even more opportunities to vary the shots in the long shot. Dwan was responsible for some of Mary Pickford's early successes at Famous Players, and Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish at Triangle. Since 1916 he has been shooting with his good friend Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and has also directed several successful films for Gloria Swanson at Paramount .

With the advent of talkies, Dwan's career took off quickly, and when he returned from England in 1934, he found himself mostly in B-movies. Only the commercial and artistic success of two films with Shirley Temple , Heidi and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm , helped to get him back on the list of sought-after directors. In later years, Dwan was intrigued by the professionalism and acting skills of Temple, who produced some of their best performances under his direction. He was then allowed to stage the monumental film Suez with Tyrone Power and Loretta Young for 20th Century Fox , only to fall back to the level of second-rate productions shortly afterwards. It wasn't until the mid-1940s that his career recovered and he began his successful collaboration with Republic Pictures , where he made films such as You Were Our Comrade , Montana Belle and Western Tennessee's Partner . He worked until the early 1960s as a director of mostly smaller westerns or war films, then he retired into private life.

During his twenty years as a beauty judge, Dwan, as a sought-after bachelor, had selected no fewer than 10,000 women and girls from the hundreds of thousands who stood for his competitions.

In his retirement, Dwan was rediscovered by younger filmmakers such as Peter Bogdanovich , the latter of whom wrote the biography The Last Pioneer about him in 1971 . Dwan's career is considered to be interesting from a film scholarly point of view, as it spanned 400 films from the early days of cinema to the end of classic Hollywood. Allan Dwan received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Lifetime Achievement for his contributions to American cinema .

Filmography (selection)

• 1918: A Modern Musketeer
• 1922: Robin Hood
• 1923: Zaza, the girl from the Varieté (Zaza)
• 1924: Manhandled
• 1925: Stage Struck
• 1929: The Iron Mask (The Iron Mask)
• 1929: East Side - West Side
• 1929: Gold hunter in California (Tide of Empire)
• 1934: Hollywood Party
• 1936: Dangerous cargo (human cargo)
• 1937: Heidi
• 1938: Suez
• 1938: Shirley on Wave 303 (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm)
• 1940: Young People
• 1942: Friendly Enemies
• 1944: Up in Mabel's Room
• 1945: Getting Gertie's Garter
• 1945: Help, I'm a Millionaire (Brewster's Millions)
• 1947: I Can Only Give My Heart One Time (Northwest Outpost)
• 1949: You were our comrade (Sands of Iwo Jima)
• 1951: Thunder across the Pacific
• 1952: The most beautiful of Montana (Montana Belle)
• 1953: On the death over (The Woman They almost lynched) - also production
• 1953: Company Panthersprung (Flight Nurse)
• 1954: Queen of the Mountains (Cattle Queen of Montana)
• 1954: City of the Damned (Silver Lode)
• 1954: Where the wind dies (Passion)
• 1955: Escape to Burma
• 1955: Pirate's Blood (Pearl of the South Pacific)
• 1955: Street of Crime (Slightly Scarlet)
• 1956: Teufelskommando - Marine Corps "Panther Cat" strikes (Hold back the Night)
• 1956: Fist of Death (Tennessee's partner)
• 1957: A Guy Like Dynamite (The Restless Breed)
• 1957: Escape to Mexico (The River's Edge)
• 1961: The Most Dangerous Man Alive

literature

• Peter Bogdanovich : Allan Dwan. The Last Pioneer. Praeger, New York 1971, Studio Vista, London 1971. (Almost completely contained in German in: Peter Bogdanovich: Who has turned it? (Arte Edition). Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-251-00463-8 , p . 57–154)
• Kevin Brownlow : pioneers of film. From silent films to Hollywood. (OT: The Parade's Gone by ... ). Series of publications by the German Film Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Stroemfeld, Basel and Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-87877-386-2 .
• Giorgio Gosetti (Ed.): Allan Dwan. The name beneath the title. Lindau, Turin 2002, ISBN 978-88-7180-353-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The man with 10,000 women. Illustrated Film Week 1926, accessed on May 10, 2020 . 
2. ^ Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios | MoMA. Retrieved June 3, 2020 . 

Web links

• Allan Dwan in the Internet Movie Database (English)