The Wizard of Oz FAQ by David J. Hogan

Author:David J. Hogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: film
Publisher: Applause
Published: 2014-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

In Focus: Richard Thorpe (1896–1991)

Over the many years of the studio system, Hollywood saw plenty of directors like Richard Thorpe. These were filmmakers who began with B-pictures, where they learned how to frame a shot and tell a story with reasonable competence. They worked quickly and with professional craft, inspiring no one among the cast and crew but getting the pictures done on schedule, or earlier. From an industry standpoint, this kind of filmmaker was as valuable as gold. The business has always been about product, and these directors cranked out a lot of it. Most of them, like Phil Rosen (Phantom of Chinatown), George Blair (The Ghost Goes Wild), Lee “Roll ’em” Sholem (Jungle Man-Eaters), and William “One-Shot” Beaudine (Broadway Big Shot), bounced from studio to studio and among independent producers, picking up great numbers of minor assignments. Many eventually made their way to episodic television, where their careers were greatly prolonged. A very few had the luck and political instincts to become installed as staff directors at a major studio. Those who managed the transition worked with better budgets and bigger stars than most of their similarly talented contemporaries.

Richard Thorpe was one of those.

He began his professional career as an actor and entertainer in vaudeville and the legitimate stage. Between 1921 and 1924, he worked as an actor in a handful of B-movies and directed his first, Rough Ridin’, in 1924, when he was twenty-eight. Throughout the remainder of the silent era, and into the early 1930s, he directed dozens of budget westerns, many featuring cowboy star Buddy Roosevelt, for Chesterfield, Tiffany, and other Poverty Row production companies.

In 1935, Thorpe came on staff at MGM, where he remained for the next twenty-nine years and some seventy movies. He became a brisk, able filmmaker who was confident with increasingly large budgets and important stars. The suspenseful and well-crafted Night Must Fall (1937) is one of Thorpe’s pre-Oz highlights. Others are Tarzan Escapes (1936), Double Wedding (Powell & Loy; 1937), and The Crowd Roars (Robert Taylor; 1938).

Thorpe’s Oz assignment was a testament to his professionalism, but he and the material weren’t a congenial fit. It’s important to note that as far as Louis B. Mayer and the rest of the industry were concerned, Thorpe’s heave-ho from The Wizard of Oz was not a slap at the director’s competence, or a suggestion that he couldn’t stand—commercially—with any of his contemporaries. Oz just wasn’t his cup of tea. Well, that was all right. Thorpe had already proved himself. No harm was done to his career.

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