Background
Sidney Franklin was born on 21 March 1893 in San Francisco, California, United States.
Sidney Franklin was born on 21 March 1893 in San Francisco, California, United States.
From 1914, Franklin and his brother, Chester, codirected comedy shorts, films for children, and several Norma Talmadge pictures. In his twenty- year career as a solo director, Franklin worked with most of the leading actresses of the period in placid romances: Mary Pickford in Heart o' the Hills and The Hoodlum; Norma Talmadge in Smilin’ Through; Constance Talmadge in East Is West, The Primitive Lover, Didctj, Her Night of Romance, Learning to Love, Her Sister from Paris, The Duchess of Buffalo. Beverly of Graustark, and Quality Street. His polite and meretri-cious handling of the ladies brought him to Irving Thalbergs attention and in 1928 he joined MGM to direct Norma Shearer in The Actress (based on Pinero's Trelawney of the Wells). He worked with her again on The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, and directed Garbo in Wild Orchids and Ruth Chatterton in The Lady of Scandal. As so often with Thalberg’s choices, Franklin was a colorless director. Such a paragon spent several years as a producer nursing The Yearling (46)—directed by Brown and fastidiously overbred.
Nevertheless, Franklin did duty on several major MGM films, directing Shearer in Private Lives and the inane Barretts of Wimpole Street. and struggling to make Paul Muni, Luise Rainer, and a million coffee-ground locusts interesting in The Good Earth. That was bevond his customary territory, and the necessary assistance of four oth-ers, as well as the death of his patron, Thalberg, may have persuaded him to abandon direction. He came back only in 1957—by some nostalgic quirk—to try again with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Whereas he had made it earlier with a mogul’s lady, so the remake had Jennifer Jones on the sofa and Selznick in attendance.
As if to show his respect for Thalberg, Franklin became a producer of respectable dullness: respectful of conventional stars, tidv stories, and production values. His films glow with comforting assurances and cheerfully evade harshness. The war in Mrs. Miniver, for instance, is merely a threat to a bland American household; Greer Garson was the epitome of Franklins polite lady. He produced On Borrowed Time (39, Harold S. Buequet); Waterloo Bridge (40, Mervyn Le Roy); Mrs. Miniver (42, William Wyler); Random Harvest (42, Le Roy); Madame Curie (43, Le Roy); The White Cliffs of Dover (44, Brown); Homecoming (48, Le Roy); Command Decision (49. Wood); The Miniver Story (50, H. C. Potter); The Story of Three Loves (53, Gottfried Reinhardt and Vincente Minnelli); and Young Bess (53. George Sidney).
In addition, he gets a solo credit on Bambi (42, David Hand), thanking him for his “inspired collaboration.”
Quotes from others about the person
This comment from Clarence Brown may suggest the source of Franklins reputation: “Too good; he overemphasized goodness. He was beyond perfection in his work.”