Sam Wood

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Samuel "Sam" Grosvenor Wood (born July 10, 1883 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † September 22, 1949 in Hollywood , California ) was an American film director and producer. Between 1920 and 1949 he was a director responsible for more than 80 productions.

Life

After starting out in the oil business and as a real estate agent, Sam Wood worked with mixed success as a theater actor. In 1915 he came to Hollywood for silent film , where he initially found employment as assistant director to the then famous Cecil B. DeMille . From 1920 onwards Wood made independent films as a director and shot successfully with stars such as Wallace Reid and Gloria Swanson . From the end of the 1920s he worked primarily for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , and the director made the transition to sound film during this time without any problems. In 1929 Wood tried unsuccessfully to save the runaway filming of Erich von Stroheim's unfinished masterpiece Queen Kelly . Wood shot a particularly large number of comedies in the 1930s, most famous of which were Scandal in the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Race (1937) with the Marx Brothers . Although Wood and Groucho Marx disliked each other, the two comedies Woods-directed are generally considered to be among the best of the Marx Brothers' films.

Wood was also able to establish himself as a director of more serious films. Between 1940 and 1944 he was nominated three times for the Oscar for best director. In 1939 he directed the drama Goodbye, Mr. Chips , based on the novel by James Hilton , in which a dying teacher looks back on his life. The film was successful with both critics and audiences. Also in 1939 Wood became one of the three directors of the classic film Gone With the Wind when he was temporarily used as a substitute for the sick Victor Fleming . Wood's collaboration on Gone with the Wind was not mentioned in the opening credits. In the early 1940s, he made some of his most successful films, such as the comedy Mary and the Millionaire (1941) or the lavish drama Kings Row (1942), the latter he personally rated as his best work. His film adaptation of the life of Lou Gehrig , The Big Throw (1942) with Gary Cooper in the lead role, is considered the "exemplary baseball biography" at all. Woods Ernest Hemingway film adaptation For Whom the Hour Takes was nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1944. Three actors - Robert Donat , Ginger Rogers , Katina Paxinou - won the Oscar under Woods' direction, eight more were nominated.

Politically, he was considered a conservative Republican and served as the first president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals . According to his daughter, Wood's life in the last years of his life was marked by an exaggerated fear of communist influence. At the beginning of the McCarthy era in the late 1940s, Wood tried to banish the communist filmmakers he suspected from Hollywood and was already mistaking simple liberals for communists and foreign spies.

In the course of his career he has worked as a director in more than 80 productions. He also accompanied several films as a producer. Sam Wood died suddenly of a heart attack in 1949 at the age of 66 and his last film, The Last of Fort Gamble , was not released until four months after his death. He left behind his wife Clara L. Roush, with whom he had been married since 1908 and had two children. Posthumously, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 .

Awards

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Commons : Sam Wood  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sam Wood at Allmovie
  2. ↑ Sam Wood ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at movie time @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.film-zeit.de
  3. ↑ Sam Wood at the Los Angeles Times
  4. ↑ Sam Wood at Allmovie
  5. ↑ Larry Ceplair, Steven Englund: The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 . University of California Press, 1983, ISBN 978-0-520-04886-7 ( google.de [accessed July 7, 2020]).
  6. ^ Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan and the Fear of Hollywood Communism. Retrieved July 7, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Wood, Sam
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wood, Samuel Grosvenor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film director
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia
DATE OF DEATH September 22, 1949
Place of death Hollywood