Edward H. Griffith
Edward H. Griffith ( born August 23, 1888 in Lynchburg, Virginia; † March 3, 1975 in South Laguna, California ) was an American film director and film producer.
Life
After a career as a reporter for various newspapers Edward H. Griffith in 1915 came as a screenwriter to Edison Film Company, where he soon also in some short films directed. He had with the advent of sound film, when he led the directed the feature film debut of Ann Harding, a popular Broadway actress for the company Pathe His breakthrough. The light comedy was a success with the critics and at the box office and made from Griffith alongside Paul L. Stein of the resident director of the studio, which merged to RKO soon.
One of the greatest successes of the time included two film adaptation of Philip Barry pieces, each with Ann Harding in the lead roles: Holiday and The Animal Kingdom, for the producer David O. Selznick, the Gala Premiere newly opened Roxy in New York City arranged, then the largest and magnificent theater in the United States. Griffith later moved with Selznick to MGM, where he one of her best roles in Another Language was Helen Hayes and Joan Crawford with the melodrama No More Ladies perhaps created the typical example for the studio look: bright illumination and gliding camera movements by Oliver T. Marsh, dazzling costumes by Gilbert Adrian, perfect staging of the stars and opulent scenes by Cedric Gibbons. Less successful was he to revitalize with trying the stagnant career of Ann Harding by Biography of a Bachelor Girl. The strict censorship rules took the slightly frivolous story every bite and after the flop had to switch to Griffith 20th Century Fox, where he was instructed by studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck to make of Loretta Young and Tyrone Power, a canvas perfect couple. The two stars shooting three films directed by Griffith, all in elegant scene set romances with partially polished dialogues. The critics especially liked Café Metropole and praised the work of Griffith partially exuberant. So Louella O. Parsons wrote on May 27, 1937 even:
Griffith, who was then in the same breath as George Cukor and Robert Z. Leonard as one of the leading women directors of the city, moved to the Grace Moore Romance I'll Take Romance 1939 Paramount where he no less than six films with Madeleine Carroll and screenwriter Virginia Van Upp realized in the team. Carroll was in the studio as lethargic and difficult, so most of the other Contracting directors refused to cooperate with her. The two initially turned romantic comedies with Fred MacMurray as a partner, first with Virginia, the story of a young woman who has to decide between false friends and true love, to Griffith tried in more dramatic stories. The film was shot in Technicolor and was a fairly good success at the box office. Since Carroll during the filming of an affair with the supporting actor Sterling Hayden, then still billed as Stirling Hayden began, passage of the originally planned MacMurray was replaced by Hayden in the next production Bahama. The film chronicles the adventures of a young woman who has to fight against Voodoo and other horrors in order to find true happiness.
It should be the last success for Griffith, who soon after retired from the film business and forgot almost died in 1975.