John Farrow

John Farrow (born February 10, 1904, Sydney, Australia—died January 27, 1963, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) Australian-born director and writer whose diverse film credits included film noirs, westerns, and historical adventures.

Early life and work

Farrow traveled the world as a sailor before becoming a Hollywood screenwriter in the late 1920s. He helped pen the scripts for such films as Ladies of the Mob (1928), The Wolf Song (1929), and Tarzan Escapes (1936; uncredited). It was on the latter movie that Farrow met Maureen O’Sullivan, whom he wed in 1936. The following year Farrow began his directorial career at Warner Brothers with three B-films: West of Shanghai, starring Boris Karloff as a Chinese warlord; She Loved a Fireman, with Ann Sheridan; and Men in Exile. In 1938 he helmed The Invisible Menace (again starring Karloff) and two Sheridan vehicles—Little Miss Thoroughbred and Broadway Musketeers—along with the Kay Francis tearjerker My Bill.

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After Women in the Wind (1939), in which Francis portrayed an airplane pilot competing in a transcontinental race, Farrow moved to RKO. He remained busy in 1939, directing five B-films: Full Confession, an Informer (1935) knockoff with Victor McLaglen; The Saint Strikes Back, the first in the series to star George Sanders; Five Came Back, a jungle-survival melodrama with Lucille Ball, Chester Morris, and John Carradine; Reno with Richard Dix; and Sorority House, an Anne Shirley drama written by Dalton Trumbo.

Films of the 1940s

Farrow opened the 1940s with two films: Married and in Love was a clever tale about infidelity, but A Bill of Divorcement was a so-so remake of the 1932 movie by George Cukor, with Maureen O’Hara and Adolphe Menjou in the roles played by Katharine Hepburn and John Barrymore, respectively. Farrow had his biggest hit at Paramount with the patriotic Wake Island (1942), starring Brian Donlevy, Robert Preston, and William Bendix. It received an Academy Award nomination for best picture and earned Farrow his only nomination for best director. Other films set during World War II included Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942) with Paul Muni; China (1943), a thriller about war profiteers (Alan Ladd and Bendix) who battle Japanese invaders while helping a teacher (Loretta Young) and her students; and The Hitler Gang (1944), a biopic of the Nazi leader. You Came Along (1945) featured Robert Cummings as a war hero who goes on a bond-selling tour.

Farrow then made a pair of period action films: Two Years Before the Mast (1946) cast Ladd as the son of a shipping magnate who is forced to work on one of his father’s vessels, and California (1947) starred Ray Milland as an unlikely wagon master, with Barbara Stanwyck at his side. In Easy Come, Easy Go, Barry Fitzgerald portrayed a racetrack frequenter who does not want his daughter (Diana Lynn) to marry a sailor (Sonny Tufts), and William Holden was an airplane pilot in the melodrama Blaze of Noon (both 1947). In 1947 Farrow also reteamed with Ladd on the crime drama Calcutta. The following year he directed the classic film noir The Big Clock, an adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s novel that starred Milland as an editor who is desperately trying to outwit his scheming boss (Charles Laughton). Ladd later starred in Beyond Glory (1948), portraying an army captain on trial at West Point.

In 1948 Farrow helmed an effectively eerie adaptation of the novel Night Has a Thousand Eyes by George Hopley (pseudonym of Cornell Woolrich), with Edward G. Robinson as a clairvoyant who meets a tragic end. Alias Nick Beal (1949) was one of Farrow’s best films; Milland was cast against type as the devil, who tries to corrupt an honest politician (Thomas Mitchell). The subject matter was likely of special interest to Farrow, who had converted to Roman Catholicism; he later wrote a biography of Sir Thomas More (1954). Farrow closed out the decade with the comedy Red, Hot and Blue (1949), starring Betty Hutton as an aspiring actress and Victor Mature as a gangster.

Films of the 1950s

In 1950 Farrow directed Copper Canyon, a western featuring Milland and Hedy Lamarr, and Where Danger Lives, in which Robert Mitchum played a doctor led astray by a mentally unstable woman (Faith Domergue). Mitchum also appeared in His Kind of Woman (1951), with Jane Russell; Farrow played the overplotted story half for laughs, producing an enjoyable parody of Mitchum’s hit film noir Out of the Past (1947). Submarine Command (1951) had Holden trying to adjust to peacetime life in the military, and Ride, Vaquero! (1953) was an offbeat western starring Ava Gardner. Other films from 1953 were Plunder of the Sun, an adventure featuring Glenn Ford as an insurance adjuster unwittingly involved in antiquities smuggling, and Botany Bay, in which Ladd portrayed a medical student who is wrongly convicted of robbery and sent to Australia on a convict ship. In 1953 Farrow also directed Hondo, which was shot in 3-D and adapted from a Louis L’Amour novel. It featured John Wayne as a cavalry scout trying to save a widow (Geraldine Page) and her son from the Apache. A Bullet Is Waiting (1954) was a western with Rory Calhoun and Jean Simmons, and The Sea Chase (1955) featured the peculiar teaming of John Wayne and Lana Turner and asked audiences to accept Wayne as a German ship captain.

Farrow took time off from directing to coscript the adventure-comedy Around the World in 80 Days (1956), for which he won his only Oscar. He then remade Five Came Back as Back from Eternity (1956), with Anita Ekberg as the romantic interest. The Unholy Wife (1957) was a rather uninspired noir in which blonde bombshell Diana Dors was cast as a bored wife who tries to kill her husband (Rod Steiger) in order to be with a rodeo rider (Tom Tryon). John Paul Jones (1959), with Robert Stack as the naval hero, was Farrow’s last film before retiring.