Background
William Keighley was born on 4 August 1893 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
William Keighley was born on 4 August 1893 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Keighley was never more than one of Warners’ second-string directors. There is not much doubt about who is responsible for the flair of Robin Hood; Keighley’s handling of Errol Flynn in, say, The Prince and the Pauper, Rocky Mountain, or The Master of Ballantrae is very pedestrian compared with Curtizs panache. The one genre in which he matched the studios standards was the thriller adventure. Torrid Zone is a good pairing of Cagney and Ann Sheridan in a banana republic, while Each Dawn I Die moves at great speed and even brings George Raft to life in the prison sequence. Bullets or Ballots is another racy piece of urban slaughter and conniving, without depth but sure of its pace. He was less happy with com¬edy and made a dull Bette Davis picture—The Bride Came C O D.—although George Washington Slept Here was one of Jack Benny’s better pictures and The Man Who Came to Dinner is an amusing transposition of Monty Woolleys great stage success (with Davis, again, lost in a dowdy role).
Keighley came to the movies late. He was an actor and director in the theatre before he worked as assistant director to William Dieterle on Jewel Robbery (32) and Scarlet Dawn (32), and to Curtiz on The Cabin in the Cotton (32). He stayed with Warners until Honeymoon—with a subadult Shirley Temple at RKO—and The Street With No Name, at Fox. But he returned to Warners and made three more pictures before retiring