Andrew Sarris, with acerbic accuracy, described George Cooper Stevens (1904-75) as “a minor director with major virtues before A Place in the Sun and a major director with minor virtues after”. Although I would place the watershed with The More the Merrier (1943), his last great comedy. The Second World War and his filming at the death camps seemed to leave Stevens with nothing to laugh about.
Stevens started as an assistant cameraman at the Hal Roach Studio when he was seventeen, and was a cinematographer within a few years. He shot many of the Laurel and Hardy shorts, famously introducing panchromatic film in order to shoot Stan Laurel’s pale blue eyes.
Turning to direction, Stevens’s first picture was Ladies Last (1930), and he went on to make many other shorts and over thirty features. Highlights included Annie Oakley (1935), Gunga Din (1939), Woman of the Year (1942) and Shane (1953).
Stevens made his sole contribution to MGM musicals when he directed the Laurel and Hardy sequences for Hollywood Party.
