|
Feeling lucky? Want to search any of my partnershops yourself for more, better results? (commissions earned) |
The links below will take you just there!!!
|
|
|
Rarely is a director viewed as differently by the different fractions of
cineasts as William Witney: For mainstream-critics and -movielovers he doesn't even seem to
exist, while B-movie afficionadoes (including Quentin Tarantino by the
way) claim he has practically invented action cinema as we know and love
it today. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in-between: William
Witney has been an incredibly productive movie director in his time, but
his output was mainly genre fodder of the B-variety. His films and
serials, always focusing on action, had a certain polish and tended to
feature greatly staged, filmed and edited action, and he is credited with
taking the traditional fight-scene to the next level, yet his way of
moviemaking wasn't something that he developed overnightbut slowly
assembled during his formative years doing second unit work at Mascot
[Mascot history - click here],
where he learned his trade - which however does not mean that he wasn't a
versatile, inventive action director all the same, it just puts the
man into a proper context ...
Early Life, Early Career
William Witney was born in Lawton Oklahoma in 1915, but his family soon
moved to California, where he visited Coronado High School. Originally, he
was planning to join the Navy later in life, but in 1933, while already
preparing for his entrance exams for the US Naval Academy, he paid a visit
to his sister and her husband Colbert Clark in Hollywood - a visit that
should have a big effect on 18-year old Witney.
Clark, you see,
was working as writer, producer and director for Mascot
Pictures at the time, a studio that despite being relatively
small, was one of the leading serial producers in the 1930's [Mascot
history - click here]. Among others, Clark was responsible for
The Three Musketeers
(1933, Colbert Clark, Armand Schaefer) starring a young John Wayne [John
Wayne in the 1930's - click here], The
Whispering Shadow (1933, Colbert Clark, Albert Herman) starring
Bela Lugosi [Bela Lugosi bio -
click here], and Fighting
with Kit Carson (1933, Colbert Clark, Armand Schaefer) starring
Johnny Mack Brown. In Fighting
with Kit Carson, Witney got a job as an extra, and he quickly fell
in love with the filmmaking process, and (apparently) especially the way
serials were made at Mascot
- which at the time was responsible for some of the most exciting
serials and was pretty much the first company that turned the making of
serials (and action flicks as such) into sort of a science.
After
Fighting with Kit
Carson, Witney's plans to join the Navy were quickly forgotten as
he found employment with Mascot
in various functions, from messenger boy and bit part player to editor and, most
importantly, assistant director. In that capacity, he worked also worked
on the serial Phantom
Empire (1935, Otto Brower, B.Reeves Eason) starring Gene Autry, by
now regarded a sci fi classic and Mascot's
most successful serial as it is.
When in 1935, Mascot, Monogram,
Liberty, Majestic, Chesterfield/Invincible
and the film developing outfit Consolidated Film Laboratories
joined forces to form Republic
[Republic history - click
here],
Witney stayed on board, and continued doing assistant directiing work on The
Vigilantes are Coming (1936, Ray Taylor, Mack V.Wright) and the
classic Dick Tracy
(1937, Alan James, Ray Taylor) starring Ralph Byrd (and which Witney also
edited), besides working as script supervisor on serials like Darkest
Africa (1936, Joseph Kane, B.Reeves Eason) starring real-life wild
animal trainer Clyde Beatty, a today unfortunately largely forgotten
jungle-chapterplay. Working as diligently as William Witney did, it was
only a matter of time before opportunity would strike, but when it struck,
it was unexpected still ...
William Witney, Serial
Director
Originally, William Witney was merely hired to do second unit work on
the 1937 Western serial The
Painted Stallion starring Ray Crash Corrigan [Ray
Crash Corrigan bio - click here] and Hoot Gibson, which was to
be directed by veterans Alan James and Ray Taylor, but according to
reports, Taylor's well-known drinking problem got out of hands during the
filming of The Painted
Stallion - so much so that he was unable to finish his part of the
assignment and young Witney was called in to replace him ... and at only
21 years of age, William Witney reportedly became the youngest director of
Hollywood, a record he held for quite a time.
Now with three
directors involved, and two of them being veterans, it's hard to actually
tell the impact Witney's participation had on The Painted
Stallion, but the bosses of Republic
were obviously impressed enough by the young man's work to give him
another assignment pretty much straight away: S.O.S. Coast Guard (1937), a
serial for which he was once again teamed up with Alan James and which
starred Ralph Byrd and Bela Lugosi [Bela
Lugosi bio - click here]. Following that, Witney made his
first feature film, Trigger Trio (1937), an entry into Republic's
Three
Mesquiteers-series, which is remarkable first and foremost
because it's the only one starring Ralph Byrd (replacing Bob Livingston,
who had to bail out due to health reasons).
However, it was
Witney's next serial, Zorro Rides Again (1937), that would be a
turning point (of sorts) in his career - though not so much for its
inherent quality (though it was a great Western-action serial for sure)
but for its co-director: John English. In John English - like Witney a
relative newcomer to the directing chair -, William Witney had found the
(plot-oriented) Yang to his action-oriented Yin. Pretty much from day one their
collaboration worked like a charm: While English would be busy directing
dialogue scenes and the like - pretty much everything that helped to move
the narrative as such along -, Witney was in charge of the action - the
raison d'être of any good serial - and handled the stunts ... and because
the two men were such a great team, the shift from one man's work to the
others and back was pretty much seamless. (It has to be noted here:
Witney and English were not the first directors to handle serials in
tandem, this was actually common practice since pretty much the early
1930's - and especially at Mascot
- it was just that Witney and English worked together especially well.)
|
|
|
Republic
was of course quick to discover that with Witney and English, they had
created a dream-team, so it took the company no time to bring them back to
direct another (Western-)serial, The Lone Ranger - with Lee Powell
as the titular character and Chief Thundercloud as Tonto - in 1938. The
Fighting Devil Dogs (1938) followed hot on its heels, a science
fiction/war serial featuring Lee Powell and Bruce Bennett alias Herman
Brix, as did the Dick
Tracy-sequels Dick Tracy Returns (1938), Dick
Tracy's G-Men (1939) and Dick Tracy vs Crime Inc (1941)
starring Ralph Ryrd, the Lone
Ranger-sequel The Lone Ranger Rides Again (1939), again
with Chief Thundercloud as Tonto, but Robert Livingston taking over as the
title character, the Zorro-sequel
Zorro's Fighting Legion (1939) with Reed Hadley in the lead, the
crime serial Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939), with Charles
Quigley, Herman Brix and David Sharpe as a trio of heroic circus
daredevils, Drums
of Fu Manchu (1940), the jungle serials Hawk of the Wilderness
(1939), starring Herman Brix, and Jungle
Girl (1941) based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs and starring Frances
Gifford, the Western-serial Adventures of Red Ryder (1940) starring
Don 'Red' Barry, and the sci-fi serial Mysterious Doctor Satan
(1940) - and that's to name just a few of the serials Witney and John
English did with each other ...
Arguably though, the best
effort to come out of the Witney-English team-up is Adventures
of Captain Marvel (1941), which bears the title of being the first
live-action depiction of a comicbook superhero on the silver screen ever. Based on a
comicbook then published by Fawcett
Comics, the serial featuring a teen boy (Frank Coghlan jr) who
turns into superhuman Captain Marvel (Tom Tyler [Tom
Tyler bio - click here]) might be a tad silly plotwise (at
least for non-comic-readers), but its ingenuity is its simplicity - even
more so than with most other serials: The plot of Adventures
of Captain Marvel is extremely easy do understand - but its also
the perfect hanger for an amazing number of action scenes, most of which
easily combine suspense and tension with great stunts. Adventures
of Captain Marvel was actually so well-made and influential that
the Turkish superhero/supervillain film Kilink
Istanbul'da/Kilink
in Istanbul (Yilmaz Atadeniz) from 1967 uses the decades-old serial as a
virtual blueprint.
Also, it was a late boost to the career of B-Western
hero Tom Tyler ... Basically,
William Witney's many collaborations with John English were so rewarding because with English handling the plot
elements, Witney could concetrate on developing the action sequences to
their fullest effect - and his approach to action and especially fight
scenes was rather unusual for the time: While in the fight scenes of most
contemporary films, you just saw the opponents throwing themselves onto each
other throwing punches left and right in one long take, with nobody
taking control over the actual
look of their fight on film, Witney took a few hints
from master musical choreographer Busby Berkely and actually broke his
fights into more than one set-up, this way giving the whole scene a more
cinematic rhythm and flow, while at the same time giving his stuntmen time
to recover between physically demanding scenes - which in the long wun
meant getting more out
of them without straining them more. Plus, as a director, he could this
way always concentrate on just one aspect of the action without having to
worry about the full sequence - and as a consequence, his fights
became more comprehensible to the audience but also more exciting, because
filming action like he did, it was much easier for him to include certain stunts and feature
them to their fullest effect. Only eventually did directing action the
Witney way become Hollywood standard ...
(Having said all that, please
don't make the mistake to compare Witney's action sequences with today's
extravaganzas of spitfire editing -
remember, Witney was doing his stuff at the beginning of a development
which had come to full bloom only decades later.)
In 1941, after an amazingly industrious 4 years of
working together - in all, they made 17 serials with each other from 1937
to 1941- the collaboration of William Witney and John English came to an
end. Still, Witney was quick to push on, either on his own - Spy
Smasher (1942), King of the Mounties (1942), Perils of Nyoka
(1942), the sequel to Jungle
Girl - or in tandem with other directors - G-Men vs the Black Dragon (1943,
with Spencer Gordon Bennet).
... and it looked like Witney could go on like
this virtually forever - when he was drafted to serve in World War II,
serving as a combat photographer in the Navy ...
William Witney, Western Director
It wasn't that William Witney served in the Navy especially long, he
was drafted in 1943 and returned in 1945, but the few years he had spent
away, the movie business had started to change. The audience's inerest in
serials was already on the decline while Republic
[Republic history - click here]
- a company that could not afford a standstill just because its best
serial director had gone to war - has developed a more formulaic way of
serial-making without Witney, one that did not fit Witney's interests too
well, as the formula depended more on standard plots and routine action
than on extraordinary setpieces and the like - and thus in 1946,
William Witney made just one more serial, the sci-fi-thriller
The Crimson Ghost
(co-directed with Fred C. Brannon) starring Charles
Quigley, Linda Stirling and Clayton Moore, before moving over to feature
filmmaking, mostly of the (B-)Western variety.
Republic
of course knew that a talented director like William Witney was someone to
better be kept, so he was handed over the Roy Rogers-series of Westerns [Roy
Rogers bio - click here], one of the cash cows of the studio, starting with Roll On Texas Moon
(1946), as the series was growing a little stale under its previous series director, Frank
McDonald.
(Incidently,
Witney's old partner John English had previously also handled a few Roy
Rogers-films.)
Witney is often credited with giving the Roy Rogers series a darker,
edgier look, but this change was only gradual. True, Witney abandoned
Rogers' fanciest cowboy outfits and did tone down the Western-revue
format, but then again, he couldn't change the series formula around
completely, and after all, the series was about a singing cowboy who was
too good to be true and whose horse was usually second-billed on the
posters (and thus had to have a big enough role). Sure, some of Witney's
Rogers-Westerns like Heldorado (1946) still managed to pack a punch, but
when the series started its colour-period with Apache Rose in 1947,
serious efforts to make Western movies more and more gave way to camp,
reaching its peak probably in 1950's all-star Western Trail of Robin Hood,
Rogers' last colour Western (within his series) incidently. Still, at
least the action always looked great in the Roy Rogers-films, and thus it
comes as little surprise that Rogers called Witney his favourite director
...
During his days with Roy Rogers, William Witney strayed from
the series all too rarely (just for a few documentaries of Republic's
Land of Opportunity-series), but just like his romance with
the serial, his affiliation with Roy Rogers had to come to an end
eventually - which was in 1951, with Pals of the Golden West,
incidently also the last-ever Western Roy Rogers made for Republic.
Rogers'
decision to leave Republic
and B-Westerns behind was a wise one actually, because in the early
1950's, the B- or series-Western was quickly falling out of favour with
the audiences who were just becoming accustomed to television which
delivered Western entertainment for freethey would have to pay for at the theatre (and thus, Rogers
got his own TV-show before long).
After
Roy Rogers' departure from Republic,
Witney stayed aboard and soon the company teamed him up with another
singing cowboy, Rex Allen, who had also been in Trail of Robin Hood,
and with whom Witney made in all 9 consecutive Westerns, from Colorado
Sundown in 1952 to Shadows of Tombstone in 1953, only
interrupted by the (disapointing) comedy The WAC from Walla Walla.
The Rex Allen films were still competently made, but nothing to get too
exciting about either, and it soon was evident that the B-picture of old
was coming to an end. Sure, Witney kept making B-pictures for the next few
years, everything from Westerns to crime dramas to action flicks, and for
Republic,
too, but eventually, he went to where his audience has gone ...
television.
William Witney, Television Director
As noted above, the move to
television was only a logical one for a B-movie director like William
Witney. True, especially, in the 1950's, when television really exploded
in America, many a bigtime director wouldn't touch the new medium with a
stick, risking to tarnish his reputation ... but despite all his
accomplishments, Witney wasn't a bigtimer, despite his merits and talents,
filmmaking was basically a 9-to-5 job for him, and he had to go where the
money was.
Fortunately for Witney, his mother company Republic
[Republic history - click here]
moved to television as well in the mid-1950's, and launched a Western-series, Stories
of the Century, in 1954. The series was centered about Jim
Davis as railroad detective Matt Clark, who met a different character from American history
(mostly outlaws to keep things moving) every
episode (and it didn't matter much that in an actual historical context,
some of the episodes had to be set apart as much as 40 years). Witney, who directed
30 of the series 39 episodes, gave the show some polish and action
setpieces, and massive Western stock footage from the vast Republic-film
library helped give it scope. The series Stories
of the Century was well-recieved by contemporary audiences and
in 1955, it actually won an Emmy for Best Western or Adventure
Series. And even nowadays, the series stands the test of time much
better than most Western series from back then, simply because veteran
that he was, Witney focused on action much more than his contemporaries.
After
Stories
of the Century had come to an end, Republic
was quick to assign William Witney to another television series, The
Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu (1956), a series based on Sax
Rohmer's supervillain Witney had previously handled in 1940's Drums
of Fu Manchu - but unfortunately, the TV-series pales in
comparison to the serial, mainly because as a cost-cutting measure, Republic
toned down the action of the show to feature more on plot - not a good
idea, since the plots were usually less than great.
Though Republic
was one of the first studios to open itself up to television productions,
it did not fare too well in this business in the long run, and it soon
switched from television production as such to merely renting out studio
space, and slowly but surely drove down feature production as well, until
it ceased film production (not distribution) in 1959 altogether.
Witney,
who had been with Republic
since its birth in 1935 (and had been with one of the studio's founding
company's, Mascot,
before that), stayed on with the company until the very end, though in the
mid-1950's, he abandoned all exclusivity and worked for other companies as
well ... and while Republic
had its problems making content for television, Witney didn't, and over the
years, he directed episodes of many a well-known and not so well-known series,
including Rescue 8 and Special Agent 7 (both
1958), Lassie (1959), Disney's Zorro (1958
- '59) staring Guy Williams - another character Witney had previously
handled in serials -, Sky King (1959) starring Kirby Grant, State
Trooper (1959) starring Rod Cameron, Frontier Doctor
(1958 - '59) starring Rex Allen, whom he knew well from his B-Western days,
Mike Hammer (1959) starring Darren McGavin, M Squad
(1960), Overland Trail (1960), The Tall Man
(1961), Tales of Wells Fargo (1961 - '62), Laramie
(1960 - '63), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1964), Wagon
Train (1963 - '65), The Wild Wild West (1965), Branded
(1966), Daniel Boone (1966 - '67) starring Fess Parker,
Bonanza (1961 - '67), Hondo (1967) starring Ralph
Taeger, Tarzan (1967 - '68) starring Ron Ely, The High
Chaparral (1967 - '68), The Virginian (1962 - '69), The
Cowboys (1974) and Kodiak (1974) starring Clint
Walker ... among others.
Comeback (of sorts) at AIP
In the 1950's, the B-picture of old (B as in accompanying an
A-movie) was quickly becoming a dieing breed, and thus, traditional
B-companies like Republic
[Republic history - click here]
saw themselves faced with all kinds of difficulties ... but there were
other companies that found out that there was still a market out there for
quickly and cheaply produced genre fare: The teenage crowd which would
rather escape home for some hours to experience some cheap thrills in a
movie targeted directly at them than to spend time with the family
in front of the television. And the company that understood that way
better than all others was of course AIP,
the company that helped invent drive-in cinema.
AIP-films
of the mid- to late 1950's might have been cheap and pulpy, but they were
also quick-moving and featured plenty of action to keep their young
audience interested - and in their way, they were not all that different
from the cheaply made but breathtakingly paced serials William Witney had
made some 15 to 20 years earlier. Good thing then that Witney was still
around! The point about Witney was that he was probably much less than
any other director married to a certain genre, he was neither a
serial-director as such nor a B-Western-director, his strength was dynamic
action, and while the audience's tastes may change, action is something
that never goes out of style, especially well-handled action. And with
AIP,
Witney once again had a studio behind him that knew what the audience
wanted, and thus gave Witney scripts that would attract the teenage crowd
and he could just do his stuff with.
Witney's first few films
for AIP,
The Bonnie Parker Story,
The Cool and the Crazy (both
1958) and Paratroop Command (1959), were amazingly energetic films
as a result, that added the necessary drive to their teen-oriented
scripts, and while they are nowadays largely forgotten, they are still
prime examples of drive-in features as they ought to be, be it of
the juvenile delinquency/gang flick (The Cool and the Crazy), the
period gangster movie (The Bonnie Parker Story) or the war
film variety (Paratroop Command).
In fact these films were so good that Republic
asked their erstwhile regular director back to make two JD-films for the
company starring the charismatic lead of his AIP-films,
Richard Bakalyan - the two films in question being Juvenile Jungle
and Young and Wild (both 1958).
With a later assignement
for Witney though, AIP
proved to have less of a lucky hand: The Jules Verne-adaptation Master
of the World (1961) starring Vincent Price [Vincent
Price bio - click here] and a young Charles Bronson
was a big budget production by AIP-standards,
but Witney's personal style somehow got lost between the period sets and
costumes, intentionally old-fashioned dialogue and its retro-futuristic
gadget-laden source-material.
Fade-Out
From
the early 1960's onwards, Witney's theatrical output gradually declined
(while he continued going strong on television - see above). First, he
hooked up with 20th
Century Fox for a few films - the crime dramas Valley of the
Redwoods and The Secret of the Purple Reef (both 1960), the
Westerns The Long Rope (1961), and Apache Rifles (1964), and
the crime-espionage hybrid The Cat Burglar (1961). Many
of these films were produced by Gene Corman, who also produced Witney's
rather ill-adviced take on the beach party-genre for Paramount, The Girls on the
Beach (1965), featuring performances by the Beach Boys, the Crickets
and Lesley Gore - while Witney was an incredibly versatile and dynamic
director, teen comedy in beach settings was clearly not his cup of tea.
For
Columbia, Witney made two Westerns starring Audie Murphy, who also played
the lead in Apache Rifles: Arizona Raiders (1965) (this one
also features a late performance by Buster Crabbe [Buster
Crabbe bio - click here]) and 40 Guns to Apache Pass
(1967), while Gene Corman and his brother Roger [Roger
Corman bio - click here] produced the US-Mexican I Escaped
from Devil's Island (1973), a violent prison movie that showed that
Witney, by now aged 58, was anything but old school yet.
However,
the real surprise in Witney's filmography came 2 years later (with Witney
being 60 by then): The Gene Corman/New
World production Darktown
Strutters (1975), an incredibly and enjoyably wacky mix of
blaxploitation, biker flick, musical and pure surrealism that marries a black
biker chicks vs white supremacists-plot to song and dance-routines
and Keystone
Cops-like comedy ... and the outcome is one of the weirdest films
there is, simply put, and also great entertainment that has (despite being
firmly rooted in the 1970's) aged incredibly well.
Darktown
Strutters would have been a great coda to William Witney's career,
as it shows one of the innovators of the action genre still at the top of
his game after almost 40 years in the business.
However, Witney made one
last, little-known film in 1982, the Western Showdown at Eagle Gap
(in which he also played a small role by the way). Showdown at Eagle
Gap unfortunately was little more than a routine genre film
indistinguishable from films by other directors, made at a time when
Westerns were going out of fashion. Still, after a 45-year career that
started with the Western-serial The Painted
Stallion and included many more Westerns along the way, maybe it's
only fitting that Witney's last film before retirement would be a Western
as well ... William Witney enjoyed a long retirement, he died
in 2002 after complications from a stroke just months away from his 87th
birthday. During his retirement, he has written two books, In a Door,
Into a Fight, Out a Door, Into a Chase, about his days as a serial
filmmaker, and Trigger Remembered, about Roy Rogers' famed movie-horse
[Roy
Rogers bio - click here]. With William Witney, the
filmworld has lost not only an innovator, but also a man who knew how to
direct simply exciting material, and when watching for example his
serial-work for Republic,
one can't help but notice how fresh (within limits) his work has remained
to this day while comparable work by other directors often looks
incredibly dated, and even in today's highly kinetic cinema, a drive like
William Witney's seems amiss most of the time, which often makes today's
multi million Dollar action extravaganzas much staler than anything Witney
has done on a limited budget ...
|