Movies - William Beaudine

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William Beaudine (January 15 1892 - March 18 1970) was an American film actor and director.

Born in New York City, he began his career as an actor in 1909 with American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. In 1915, he was hired as an actor as well as a director by the Kalem Company. He was an assistant to director D.W. Griffith on the films The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. By the time he was 23, Beaudine had directed his first picture, a short called Almost a King (1915).

Beaudine was one of a number of experienced directors who were brought to England from Hollywood in the 1930s to work on what were in all other respects very British productions; others included Raoul Walsh and Allan Dwan. There, he directed four films starring Will Hay including Boys Will Be Boys
(1935).

Beaudine worked as a director of silent films for Goldwyn (before MGM), Metro (also before MGM), First National Pictures, Principal, and Warner Brothers. In 1926, he made Sparrows, the story of orphans imprisoned in a swamp farm, starring America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford. Beaudine had at least thirty pictures to his credit before the sound era even began. He ground out movies for Fox, Warners, Paramount, Universal, and Gaumont-British, several every year until World War II. By 1940, Beaumont found himself on Poverty Row, working for Monogram and PRC on Desperate Cargo (1941), Gallant Lady (1942), and The Ape Man (1943). By the end of the decade, he had made 60 movies. His paced slowly somewhat in the 1950s, when he made only 23 movies, including Ghost Chasers (1951), Roar of the Crowd (1953), and Paris Playboys (1954), most of them for Allied Artists. By the Sixties, Beaudine was busy directing episodes of Lassie for television and directed very few pictures.

He was sometimes called "One Shot", supposedly for his propensity to shoot just one take, regardless of the problems found in that one take (actors flubbing their lines, special effects going haywire and the like). Beaudine returned permanently to America in 1937. Both before and after his brief British period he turned out low-budget American films in remarkable numbers and in a wide variety of genres, although most active in directing western films: he began with biography early in the century and was active in film and TV production almost up until his death in 1970.

He is also remembered for directing Mom and Dad
, a 1945 exploitation film produced by Kroger Babb, which was not released until 1957. His last two films, both released in 1966, were the horror-westerns Billy the Kid vs Dracula (with John Carradine) and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.

Beaudine died in 1970 in California and was interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.

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