Background
Lloyd Bacon was born on 4 December 1890 in San Jose, California, United States.
Lloyd Bacon was born on 4 December 1890 in San Jose, California, United States.
Bacon was a stage actor who worked with Chaplin and became a director of shorts with Sennett in 1921. That led him into a seventeen-year spell as director at Warners before, in 1944, he moved on to Fox. It was not a career of special character, but through his long period at Warners he was associated with several notable musicals: Jolson in The Singing Fool; the classic backstage setting of 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, which have a special tough sentiment and a clutch of good performances; and Gold Diggers of 1937, which has some of Busby Berkeley’s most floral dance patterns.
Marked Woman is a good story of attempts to break prostitution racketeering, with Bette Davis as the informer and Bogart as the prosecutor.
He also handled that unlikely Western, The Oklahoma Kid. in which Bogart and Cagney make very implausible hoods in tengallon hats, and two of Edward G. Robinson’s comedy thrillers: A Slight Case of Murder and Brother Orchid. His Fox years are much duller, but his last three films were made at RKO.