Late in life, Canadian-born Joseph Aloysius Dwan (1885-1981) estimated that he had directed over a thousand films in his fifty-year career. Undoubtedly many of his early efforts are lost forever, and the AFI is able to identify only a (still impressive) 430 feature films on which he worked as director. Historian Peter Bogdanovitch rightly claimed that no one would ever again have a career like that of Allan Dwan.
Dwan’s directing career started in 1911 when he stepped in to replace a drunken colleague, and he claimed to have carried a gun in the early days, to repel heavies sent by the Motion Picture Patents Company. A trained engineer, Dwan helped D W Griffith build the famous camera crane with an elevator for the Babylon sequence in Intolerance (1916).
During the silent period, Dwan worked successfully with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson. Later, he worked several times with Shirley Temple, and directed John Wayne to critical acclaim in The Sand of Iwo Jima (1949).
Dwan’s career was memorable, his contribution to MGM musicals was less so. He helped bring some structure to the mess that was Hollywood Party by directing the framing sequences that establish the film’s events as Jimmy Durante’s dream.
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