After the portraits of Sternberg, Capra, Ford, Hawks and Walsh, we will pay tribute to a director whose career spans 1911 – the days of Griffith and Ince – to 1961 – the time of the new waves. In that half-century Allan Dwan produced 400 films (other estimates range to 1400), covering every genre and technical novelty, always handled with the care only a poet can provide. The early films are the rarest, many of them unseen for generations and now restored, with titles few cinephiles can resist: The Ranch Girl, Blackened Hills, The Thief’s Wife. In the 1920s Dwan made some of the finest star vehicles of the decade: with Douglas Fairbanks (ranging from A Modern Musketeer and its delicious mix of Dumas-inspired road movie to his poignant farewell in The Iron Mask) and Gloria Swanson (Zaza, Manhandled) – achievements of spectacle and comedy and everything between. 

Dwan said something very beautiful about Fairbanks: “…when he got his own company, I don’t think there was ever anybody more successful, both financially and artistically. And he was daring – he did fairy tales; he was a dreamer”. That would be almost a self-portrait of Dwan himself: each film, even many minor ones, touched on utopia.

Our examples from the 1930s – two rare entries: While Paris Sleeps and Fifteen Maiden Lane – and the 1940s show the lives of simple people and their innocence reflected with a “profound sense of the essential indomitability and deathlessness of the human spirit” – a nice definition by Peter Bogdanovich of Inside Story, for instance, that can be seen as a predecessor of the sitcom on a deeper level than the genre would become. “If there’s a single unifying theme to Dwan’s work, it has a lot to do with the amazing diversity of people and with an optimistic sense of humanity; his generosity and often genial humor are there throughout”. 

We have three examples from Dwan’s last period that ends with one of the most amazing and desperate finales of any career, The Most Dangerous Man Alive. It was produced by Bogeaus Benedict, who formed an exemplary and beautiful liaison with Dwan – they made ten films together. Silver Lode is the most famous: citizen Dwan’s good-hearted America has been transformed into something unrecognizable and he signs a great western to express his hurt feelings. Another western, Tennessee’s Partner, should have a place in lists of the best of the genre’s greatest decade: it’s the simplest of all, the one that most faithfully restores its timeless ethos and noble original style: “Above all he was a great story teller: even when the characters are a little faded, even when the stories have been told dozens of times, even if we know the sets and the intrigues.” Thus wrote the French critic Jean Claude Biette, who also characterized Dwan as a “great poet of space” in whose last films – and why not in many earlier ones? – “we find a constant exaltation of space.” 

(Peter von Bagh)

Programme curated by Peter von Bagh and Dave Kehr