Edgar J MacGregor (1878-1957) was an actor who became a highly-successful theatre director, usually on Broadway, from 1910 through to the late 1940s. His successes included Good News (1927), Funny Face (1927), DuBarry Was a Lady (1939), Panama Hattie (1939) and several editions of Earl Carroll’s Vanities.
MacGregor’s screen career was less auspicious. He travelled to Hollywood in 1930 to work on the screen version of Good News, co-directing with Nick Grinde. He never directed another film.
Harry A Grinde (1893-1979) was a vaudeville performer who found work as a director at MGM in the late twenties. From then until 1945 he directed around sixty generally low budget features for a variety of studios.
Early on, Metro occasionally used Grinde to work in partnership with tyro directors who had joined the studio directly from theatre work. For example, he co-directed The Bishop Murder Case (1930) with Broadway director David Burton.
Another such was Good News, which Grinde co-directed with Edgar J MacGregor, director of the original broadway production.
Grinde did not direct any additional musicals at Metro, being far more at home with westerns and thrillers, though he did, out of left field, write the screenplay for Babes in Toyland.
Charles J Brabin (1882-1957) emigrated from Liverpool to New York in 1900 and found work as a stage actor. In 1908 he joined the Edison company, first as an actor, and later taking up writing and directing.
Brabin directed for a variety of studios throughout the silent era, generally with success. The major exception was MGM’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1924) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Brabin began shooting the film in Italy, with George Walsh playing the title character. Irving Thalberg did not like the rushes that were being sent back to Hollywood, and decided to replace both Brabin and Shaw with, respectively, Fred Niblo and Ramon Novarro.
It would seem no long-term grudges were held on either side, as Brabin did work subsequently for the studio, including on two musicals, Call of the Flesh and Stage Mother. He also had considerable success for MGM with The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).
Charles Brabin was married to screen star Theda Bara for 34 years, until her death, one of the most successful of Hollywood marriages.
Robert Howard Ober (1881-1950) was an actor with considerable stage experience when he started taking screen roles in the early 1920s. His most notable appearance was as John Gilbert’s brother in King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925).
Although he never directed a film, Ober does appear to have been assigned some directorial tasks by MGM, one of which was to shoot retakes for In Gay Madrid after Robert Z Leonard had moved on to his next film.
Most of the names synonymous with silent film comedy are performers: Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. But they are joined by two producer-directors: Mack Sennett and Harold Eugene Roach (1892-1992).
Roach began working as an extra in Hollywood in 1912, and produced his first comedy shorts in 1915, in partnership with his friend Harold Lloyd. He worked with Lloyd until 1923, and went on to establish the Laurel and Hardy team. Roach wrote, produced and sometimes directed hundreds of comedy shorts and features.
In 1928, the Hal Roach studio began releasing its films through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which is how he became connected with its early musical pictures. In 1930, MGM wanted to add comic relief to The Rogue Song, so Roach directed additional sequences featuring Stan and Ollie as members of Lawrence Tibbetts band of outlaws.
In 1933, the Hal Roach Studio and MGM co-produced The Devil’s Brother, a Laurel and Hardy musical that Roach directed. He also worked as an uncredited director on Swiss Miss and The Bohemian Girl (which he co-wrote), and produced Babes in Toyland and Nobody’s Baby.
Edward Sedgwick Jr (1889-1953) was a colleague and friend of Buster Keaton and, like him, started working in a family vaudeville act at a young age. He acted in his first comedy short in 1914, and started directing in 1920. Sedgwick’s first directorial assignment was making episodes of a serial based on the French Fantômas character.
Although is today associated with Keaton and comedy, Sedgwick worked in a variety of genres during the 1920s, including many westerns. He also did uncredited work on Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925).
Sedgwick joined MGM in 1926, and went on to direct most of Keaton’s films at the studio, including his first talking picture, Free and Easy.
Some years later Sedgwick did uncredited work on Easy to Wed and Excuse My Dust.
Andrew Sarris summarized the career of Malcolm St Clair (1897-1952) thus: his silent films fizzed and his sound films fizzled, it was as simple and tragic as that.
St Clair was an important writer-director of the silent era, primarily in the field of comedy. Starting out as an actor-writer-director with Mack Sennett, he went on to co-direct a couple of shorts with Buster Keaton, from whom he learned a great deal about comedy technique. St Clair also made a series of more sophisticated comedies at Paramount in the mid-twenties, including the original adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), co-written by Anita Loos herself.
As Sarris suggests, the quality of St Clair’s pictures declined with the advent of sound, though he continued to work until 1948. One of his early sound films was the MGM musical Montana Moon, which he produced and directed.
One of St Clair’s more interesting later assignments was directing the silent era comedy sequences for Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), including restaging some of his earlier work.
Emil Kreuske (1881-1955) was a silent film actor-turned-director and occasional writer, which probably makes him a Poverty Row auteur. He was essentially a ‘B’ movie director, which makes it all the more surprising that he spent a period at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which officially never made ‘B’ pictures.
Nigh generally made action and adventure stories, and it was a moment of madness when producer Harry Rapf assigned him to direct a musical, Lord Byron of Broadway. He soon regretted it. According to one of the film’s stars, Marion Shilling, Rapf had just lost heavily in the stock market crash when he watched Nigh’s footage. Appalled by what he saw, he yanked Nigh from the project and brought in Harry Beaumont to undertake substantial retakes. But Nigh was accorded a co-director credit, which was quite unusual at MGM. He made no further musicals for the studio and was back on Poverty Row for his next picture.
