William Augustus Wellman was an American film director notable for his work in crime, adventure and action genre films, often focusing on aviation themes, a particular passion. He also directed several well-regarded satirical comedies. Beginning his film career as an actor, he went on to direct over 80 films, at times co-credited as producer and consultant.
Background
Wellman's father, Arthur Gouverneur Wellman, was a New England Brahmin of English-Welsh-Scottish and Irish descent. William was a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Puritan Thomas Wellman who immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony about 1640. William was a great-great-great grandson of Francis Lewis of New York, one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. His much beloved mother was an Irish immigrant named Cecilia McCarthy.
Education
Wellman was expelled from Newton High School in Newtonville, Massachusetts, for dropping a stink bomb on the principal's head. Ironically, his mother was a probation officer who was asked to address Congress on the subject of juvenile delinquency. Wellman worked as a salesman and then at a lumber yard, before ending up playing professional ice hockey, which is where he was first seen by Douglas Fairbanks, who suggested that with Wellman's good looks he could become a film actor.
Career
By 1923 Wellman was directing B-film westerns for the Fox Film Corporation (later Twentieth Century-Fox), and in 1926 he signed with Paramount. His third picture for that studio was Wings (1927), a World War I aviation drama written by former pilot John Monk Saunders and starring Clara Bow, Richard Arlen, and Charles (“Buddy”) Rogers (Gary Cooper also had a small part). It shared what was in effect the first Academy Award for best picture with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise. Wings reflected Wellman’s lifelong interest in aviation and his war experience while setting standards for documentary-like realism with its remarkable aerial camerawork and spectacular staging of airborne combat. Wellman and Saunders collaborated again on The Legion of the Condemned (1928), a tale about the Lafayette Escadrille that featured Cooper. For most of his career Wellman would work often and fast; as a result, many of his films were workmanlike and unremarkable, including his first partial sound film, Beggars of Life (1928), and the succession of underworld dramas and romances that followed during the late 1920s.
In 1931 Wellman moved to Warner Brothers, where he directed 15 motion pictures over the next three years, including his next significant effort, The Public Enemy (1931), a genre-defining gangster saga that became one of the year’s biggest hits and launched James Cagney on the road to stardom. The Public Enemy had much to do with the establishment of the film Production Code in response to its realistic depiction of disreputable characters and callous violence, not least when Cagney’s cocky tough guy famously smashes a grapefruit into the face of a woman, played by Mae Clarke. Wellman’s next two films starred his favourite actress, Barbara Stanwyck, who played a fearless nurse who stands up to a gangster (Clark Gable) in Night Nurse (1931) and then played the lead in So Big (1932), a truncated version of Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. For the remainder of the early 1930s, Wellman made a series of melodramas—with some aerial adventure mixed in—before turning to the pre-Code gem Wild Boys of the Road (1933), a message film in the best Warner Brothers tradition about three Great Depression-ravaged kids who take to the road in search of a better life.
Having made seven films for Warner Brothers in 1933, Wellman ended his association with the studio and began a very successful period as a freelancer. Among his films from the mid-1930s were The Call of the Wild (1935), a major box-office success that starred Gable as the Yukon-conquering hero of Jack London’s novel of the same name; The President Vanishes (1934), a cautionary political tale that is memorable chiefly for providing Rosalind Russell’s first screen appearance; and the love story Small Town Girl (1936), which teamed Robert Taylor and Janet Gaynor.
Wellman embarked on his most creative period with A Star Is Born (1937), producer David O. Selznick’s remake of the George Cukor-directed What Price Hollywood? (1932). Wellman collaborated with Robert Carson and Alan Campbell on the story, which won an Academy Award for best original story. Wellman also received a nomination for best director; stars Gaynor and Fredric March were nominated for the best acting awards; and the screenplay and film also received nominations. Just as outstanding in its own right was Nothing Sacred (1937), a scathing screwball comedy that featured what some believe to be Carole Lombard’s best performance and a surprisingly modern screenplay by Ben Hecht about media manipulation. Wellman returned to the skies with Men with Wings (1938), a Technicolor account of the early days of aviation, written by Wellman and Carson.
Beau Geste (1939) was a spectacular remake of the 1926 silent film based on the novel of the same name by Percival C. Wren. Cooper, Ray Milland, and Robert Preston starred as brothers who stake their honour against the cruelty of their Foreign Legion commander (Brian Donlevy, in a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor). Wellman’s follow-up was The Light That Failed (1939), a sensitive adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling story that starred Ronald Colman and Ida Lupino.
After stumbling with the whimsical Reaching for the Sun (1941), Wellman had greater success with the comedy Roxie Hart (1942), which many decades later would be the basis for the Broadway musical and film (2002) Chicago. A string of largely unexceptional motion pictures preceded the next entry in Wellman’s film canon, the Academy Award-nominated The Ox-Bow Incident (1943; known as Strange Incident in Britain), a powerful indictment of mob rule based on Walter van Tilburg Clark’s 1940 novel of the same name. Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, and Harry Morgan starred in that dark, claustrophobic western about the lynching of innocent men that follows a rush to judgment. The murder mystery Lady of Burlesque (1943), Buffalo Bill (1944), which featured Joel McCrea as the Wild West’s most flamboyant showman, and the action film This Man’s Navy (1945) followed.
Wellman then directed The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), which is regarded by many critics as one of the best motion pictures about World War II. Robert Mitchum earned an Academy Award nomination for best actor for his portrayal of a battle-weary infantry captain, and Burgess Meredith gave a memorable performance as war correspondent Ernie Pyle, on whose coverage of the U.S. Army’s Italian campaign the film is based. Gallant Journey (1946) permitted Wellman another foray into the roots of aviation; Magic Town (1947), a satire of Middle America written by longtime Frank Capra collaborator Robert Riskin, featured James Stewart as a pollster who locates the average American town; and The Iron Curtain (1948) was a Cold War drama about Russian espionage in Canada. Arguably more accomplished than all three of those films was Yellow Sky (1948), an exciting western in which Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark faced off.
Wellman next moved to Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Despite the fact that he and the studio proved to be an awkward pairing, Wellman still managed to make several notable films under its aegis, not least Battleground (1949), an account of the Battle of the Bulge during World War II that was a major box-office hit. The film brought Wellman an Academy Award nomination for best director.
The Happy Years (1950) was turn-of-the-20th-century Americana about a boy’s prep school, and in The Next Voice You Hear (1950), God decides to talk to the United States over the radio. Across the Wide Missouri (1951), an expensive Technicolor western with Gable, was a more-typical Wellman undertaking. Wellman then directed a segment of It’s a Big Country: An American Anthology (1951) and made Westward the Women (1951) from a story written by Capra. My Man and I (1952), a melodramatic romance, and Island in the Sky (1953), a World War II aviation drama that starred John Wayne, set the stage for Wellman’s next big hit, The High and the Mighty (1954). That prototypical airplane disaster movie featured a cast that included Wayne, Robert Stack, Claire Trevor, and Jan Sterling. Academy Award nominations went to Sterling and Trevor (both for best supporting actress) as well as to Wellman (best director).
The ambitious, arty Track of the Cat (1954), starring Mitchum, was a moody psychological western in which Wellman used colour cinematography but limited his palette almost exclusively to black, white, gray, and brown. Blood Alley (1955) pitted Wayne and Lauren Bacall against Chinese communists, and Good-bye, My Lady (1956) was a sentimental film about a young boy and his dog set in the American South.
As his career wound to a close, Wellman returned to his roots with the combat films Darby’s Rangers, which was set during World War II, and Lafayette Escadrille (both 1958), the latter his most-autobiographical film, dealing with his own flying unit during World War I. Over his prolific career Wellman put his name on scores of films, many of which were unmemorable; however, when he was at his best, his films were regarded as highly as those of any of his famous contemporaries.
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Connections
Wellman revealed near the end of his life that he had married a French woman named Renee during his time in The Lafayette Flying Corps. She was killed in a bombing raid during the war. He was married four times in the U.S.:
Helene Chadwick: married (1918–1923) separated after a month; later divorced
Margery Chapin (daughter of Frederic Chapin): married (1925–1926); together for a short time; adopted Robert Emmett Tansey's daughter, Gloria.
Marjorie Crawford: married (1930–1933) divorced
Dorothy "Dottie" Coonan: married (March 20, 1934–1975); until his death; they had seven children - four daughters, three sons.
Dorothy starred in Wellman's 1933 film Wild Boys of The Road and had seven children with Wellman, including actors Michael Wellman, William Wellman Jr., Maggie Wellman, and Cissy Wellman. His daughter Kathleen "Kitty" Wellman married actor James Franciscus, although they later divorced. His first daughter is Patty Wellman, and he had a third son, Tim Wellman.
William Wellman, Jr. wrote two books about his father, The Man And His Wings: William A. Wellman and the Making of the First Best Picture (2006), and Wild Bill Wellman - Hollywood Rebel (2015). Wellman Jr. has been a guest-host on Turner Classic Movies to introduce films made by his father.
William Wellman died in 1975 of leukemia. He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea. His widow, Dorothy Wellman, died on September 16, 2009, in Brentwood, California, at the age of 95.