Harry Beaumont (1888-1966) is not a well-known name, despite having directed the first feature-length musical and a winner of the best picture Academy Award. Originally an actor, he turned to film directing in 1916.
In 1923 Beaumont directed The Gold Diggers, a play which was also the source of Warners’ Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). Perhaps his most notable achievement outside musicals was Metro’s Our Dancing Daughters (1928), which had a synchronized score.
Irving Thalberg must have considered Beaumont a safe pair of hands when assigning him to The Broadway Melody, an ambitious and not inexpensive project. His reputation today is as a journeyman director grinding out assignments, but Richard Barrios points out, in A Song in the Dark (1995), that Beaumont was present at every script conference. Studio records indicate that his contribution to the picture’s dialogue was greater than that of the credited James Gleason.
In 1930 Beaumont directed three further musicals for MGM, Lord Byron of Broadway (brought in to beef up William Nigh’s work), Children of Pleasure and The Florodora Girl, before moving on to other things. Never more than a journeyman director, Beaumont carved himself a small, if often overlooked, niche in cinema history with The Broadway Melody,
