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Allan Dwan was a Canadian-born American film director, producer, and screenwriter who worked in Hollywood from 1911 to 1961. He directed many stars such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, and Shirley Temple, and was one of the last surviving pioneers of cinema.
Allan Dwan was born on 3 April 1885 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was a director and writer, known for Bound in Morocco (1918), A Perfect Crime (1921) and Panthea (1917). He was married to Marie Shelton and Pauline Bush. He died on 28 December 1981 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.
- January 1, 1
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- January 1, 1
- Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA
- Overview
- Early life and the silent era
- Dwan’s talkies
- Last films
- Legacy
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
Allan Dwan (born April 3, 1885, Toronto, Ontario, Canada—died December 28, 1981, Woodland Hills, California, U.S.) American director with more than 400 known feature films and short productions to his credit. Along with the more-celebrated Cecil B. DeMille, Dwan was one of the few directors who made the transition from the days of the one-reelers i...
As a young man, Dwan moved with his family from Toronto to Chicago and subsequently earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. In 1909 he took a job in Chicago with the Cooper Hewitt Electric Company as a lighting engineer, a profession that soon brought him into contact with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. He began moonlighting for Essanay as a writer and was soon hired as a story editor. Moving to the American Film Manufacturing Company in 1911, he was given an opportunity to direct when, according to some accounts, the director of a California production went on a drinking binge, leaving the company stranded. Dwan asked the actors to tell him what he was supposed to do as the director. They did, and he continued doing it for the better part of five decades.
In 1911–13 Dwan turned out as many as 250 one-reelers for American Film—westerns, comedies, even documentaries, all written, edited, and produced by him. Few of these still exist. In 1913 he signed with the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, but within a year he moved to the Famous Players Company in New York, and a year after that he was working with D.W. Griffith at the Triangle Film Corporation. Dwan is credited with introducing the dolly shot—he used a moving automobile to film actor William H. Crane’s stroll in David Harum (1915)—and with inventing the equipment used for the crane shots in Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).
Dwan made his first talking picture, The Far Call, in 1929. Except for two years in England (1932–34), he remained until 1940 at Fox, where he worked mainly on B-films—such as Black Sheep (1935), from Dwan’s own story, about a professional gambler helping a young man being fleeced by a female jewel thief, and the western Frontier Marshal (1939), about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. However, Dwan made several A-films, most notably three films featuring the extremely popular child star Shirley Temple (Heidi [1937], Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm [1938], and Young People [1940]) and the historical epic Suez (1938), about the building of the Suez Canal.
After leaving Fox, Dwan made a string of comedies as a freelance director beginning with Trail of the Vigilantes (1940), a comic western, and Look Who’s Laughing (1941), which featured the popular radio stars Edgar Bergen (along with his ventriloquist’s dummy Charlie McCarthy) and Jim and Marian Jordan, who played their characters Fibber McGee and Molly, as well as Lucille Ball. Starting in 1944, Dwan made four comedies for United Artists, all starring Dennis O’Keefe, including Brewster’s Millions (1945), the often-filmed story about a man who learns that he stands to inherit $7 million if he is able to first spend $1 million over the next month.
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Moving to RKO Radio Pictures, Dwan made for producer Benedict Bogeaus’s Filmcrest Productions 10 films, among which are some of his most acclaimed. Silver Lode (1954) was a noirish western that served as an allegory about McCarthyism: the town named in the title turns on beloved citizen Dan Ballard (John Payne) after he is framed for murder by mars...
After his retirement, Dwan lived in obscurity until interest in his career was revived among film critics and historians by two books: British film historian Kevin Brownlow’s study of silent-era Hollywood, The Parade’s Gone By (1968), which devoted a chapter to his reminiscences, and American film critic and director Peter Bogdanovich’s extensive i...
Learn about Allan Dwan, one of the most prolific and versatile directors in Hollywood history, who made over 400 films from the silent era to the 1950s. Explore his early career, his innovations, his collaborations with stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Shirley Temple, and his later works.
- Michael Barson
Allan Dwan was born on 3 April 1885 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was a director and writer, known for Bound in Morocco (1918), A Perfect Crime (1921) and Panthea (1917). He was married to Marie Shelton and Pauline Bush. He died on 28 December 1981 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.
- April 3, 1885
- December 28, 1981
Jun 5, 2013 · Dwan’s films offer a distinctively thick cross-section of society, bringing all strata, from grandees to grifters, together in his stories and in his turbulent, overflowing images.
The 27th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato, the acclaimed festival of film restoration held in Bologna, Italy (29 June–6 July, 2013) allowed audiences the opportunity to re-evaluate the work of Canadian-born, American film pioneer, Allan Dwan (1885–1981).
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Dec 23, 1981 · Allan Dwan, who during his half-century career directed such stars as Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Shirley Temple and John Wayne, died of heart failure Monday at the Motion...
