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For the last two months, Quentin Tarantino‘s New Beverly Cinema has recreated its past as adult movie theater the Eros, with programming devoted largely to porno classics (“Behind the Green Door,” the “Emmanuelle” series) and adult-oriented auteur fare (“Summer With Monika,” “Last Tango in Paris”). In April, however, the revival house will return to its usual, more varied programming with classic matinees (“Casablanca,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark”), midnight cult favorites (“Tenebrae,” “Shadow of the Vampire”), the return of the Saturday morning Cartoon Club, and screenings of Tarantino’s own “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” and “Reservoir Dogs.”
Most notably, in April, both the New Beverly and the “Video Archives Cinema Club” screening room at Tarantino’s Vista Theater will host a wide-ranging retrospective devoted to director William Beaudine. One of the most prolific Hollywood directors (he directed somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 movies, plus hundreds of hours of episodic television), Beaudine is nevertheless unknown to most contemporary viewers — and was even a bit of a blind spot for omnivorous cinephile Tarantino until relatively recently.
As Tarantino said on the newest episode of the Pure Cinema Podcast, he took a deep dive into Beaudine’s work not long ago after reading a pair of books on the director, watching a couple of Beaudine’s features each night for weeks. Tarantino quickly learned that the unfortunate mythology around Beaudine that had emerged in the 1980s as a result of Harry and Michael Medved’s brainless but popular book “The Golden Turkey Awards” was completely inaccurate — that while the Medved brothers had chosen to focus on a few weak efforts in order to support their poorly argued claim that Beaudine was one of the worst directors of all time, Beaudine in fact was a director of great skill and taste, especially when it came to comedy.
Beaudine began his career at Biograph as a teenager, assisting silent-film pioneer D.W. Griffith and other filmmakers before becoming a director himself. By the end of the silent era, Beaudine was one of the top directors in Hollywood, having made movies for Warners, Metro, and other studios; among his more popular films were a pair of Mary Pickford classics (“Little Annie Rooney” and “Sparrows”) and the W. Somerset Maugham adaptation “The Canadian.” (All three of these features will screen as part of Tarantino’s series.)
Beaudine had no trouble making the transition from silent film to the sound era, sliding comfortably into a run of comedies that included the W.C. Fields classic “The Old Fashioned Way” in 1934. The success of that movie led to work in England, where Beaudine worked with British comedy star Will Hay. Unfortunately, when he returned to the U.S. a few years later, Beaudine found that whatever momentum his career had generated in Hollywood was now completely gone — in his absence, the industry had assumed he was retired and moved on. Beaudine tried to get work at the studios where he had thrived in the 1920s and 1930s, but aside from a couple of “Torchy Blaine” pictures at Warner Bros., there weren’t any takers.
Beaudine got a lifeline in the 1940s when he began working at Poverty Row studios like Monogram Pictures, where he cranked out more than a hundred low-budget B-pictures and sequels (he directed over 20 “Bowery Boys” movies as well as entries in the “Charlie Chan” and “Shadow” series). The studios might not have been interested in him anymore, but the independent producers knew what they had in Beaudine: a guy who could generate quality on tight schedules and minuscule budgets. That reputation served Beaudine in television as well, where he helmed everything from “The Green Hornet” and “Lassie” to Walt Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club,” a gig that led to a rare late-period studio feature for Beaudine in 1960 when Disney hired him to direct the Western “Ten Who Dared.”
Beaudine’s final two films were the bizarre Western-horror hybrids “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” and “Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter” in 1966, and they provided easy low-hanging fruit for lazy critics to dismiss Beaudine in spite of his obvious gifts as a craftsman and ability to apply them to a diverse array of styles and genres. The retrospective series at the New Beverly and Vista gives Beaudine the respect he has always deserved but rarely gotten, with celluloid presentations of several of his silent films (with live musical accompaniment), some ultra-rare features that have never been officially available on home video (“Misbehaving Ladies,” “Heart to Heart”), and cult favorites like “The Ape Man” and the irresistibly titled “Bela Lugosi Meets the Brooklyn Gorilla.”
Tarantino’s program is the most extensive retrospective ever devoted to Beaudine in the U.S. — and possibly the world — and it speaks to Beaudine’s productivity that the series represents only a fraction of his output. But as a cross-section of films that represent what made Beaudine significant, the retrospective covers a generous amount of ground and serves as the perfect starting point for further study.
Quentin Tarantino‘s William Beaudine retrospective will run at the New Beverly Cinema and Vista Theatre this April.
English (US) ·