Background
William K. Howard was born 16 June 1899 in St. Marys, Ohio, United States.
William K. Howard was born 16 June 1899 in St. Marys, Ohio, United States.
After war service, Howard worked on the sales side for Vitagraph and Universal, and then became an assistant director. During the 1920s, he was with Fox, Paramount, De Mille, and Fox again. But in 1934 he joined MGM for a year. After a brief spell at Paramount he went to England to make the patriotic Tudor epic, Fire Over England, and an Edgar Wallace adaptation, The Squeaker. On returning to America, he found it hard to get back into first features. He moved from one studio to another and only Johnny Come Lately, with Cagney, was as important as his earlier work.
In fact, Howard made several good pictures, so that the decline is all the stranger. As a director of silents, he was generally confined to the athletic adventures ol Richard Talmadge and Rod La Roeque. But with sound he became much more polished. Clive Brook made an authoritative Sherlock Holmes, while The First Year was a successful Janet Gaynor/Charles Farrell film. The Power and the Glory, from a Preston Sturges script, was an ambitious study of a tycoon, sometimes regarded as a forerunner of Kane. Evelyn Prentice and Mary Burns, Fugitive were both glossy melodramas, but The Princess Comes Across is his best, set on a finer, with Carole Lombard as a fake princess. A more elevated, but just as contrived view of royalty made Fire Over England a very entertaining picture.