Background
David Miller was born on 28 November 1909 in Paterson, New Jersey, United States.
David Miller was born on 28 November 1909 in Paterson, New Jersey, United States.
Miller began as an editor with Columbia in 1940 and moved on to MGM where he made a number of shorts. His work as a director was very inconsistent: thus an initial, stolid Western that neglects every opportunity evident to a director like Arthur Penn and that was made bv MGM to thwart Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw; a second. Lonely Are the Brave, that is one of the most original accounts of the modernization of the West. Nor is it easy to equate the benevolence of Captain Newman M.D. with the romance of Back Street, the rampant melodrama of Esther Costello, much less the Republic period Flying Tigers, which has John Wayne aiding Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese, or Love Happy, the last of the true Marx Brothers movies, with Groucho homing in on Marilvn Monroe.
But Miller has two very effective suspense films to his credit—Sudden Fear and Midnight Lace. Both involve a woman increasingly aware of her peril, with a sure sense of shadowy interiors and editing, an ability to build tension, and better- than-average threatened performances from Joan Crawford and Doris Day. Miller was a lightweight, but he had enough good moments to excuse The Opposite Sex. a declawed remake of Cukor's The Women.