The Films of Allan Dwan - by Michael E. Grost

Classic Film and Television Home Page

Allan Dwan

Allan Dwan was a Hollywood film director.

Some common characteristics found in more than one of his films include:

Characters on the move, from one locale to another (A Modern Musketeer, Chances, Black Sheep, Suez, The Gorilla, Around the World, The River's Edge).
Economic processes (money circulation: The Inside Story, stock market and running mines: Belle Le Grand).
Ambitious construction schemes (buildings: East Side, West Side, canal: Suez, mines: Belle Le Grand).
Young people, with ambitions in art or classical music (architect: East Side, West Side, art student: Chances, builder: Suez, painter: The Inside Story, soprano: Belle Le Grand).
Parties, usually with highly dressed up characters (Chances, Hollywood Party, Black Sheep, Suez, Up in Mabel's Room, Abroad With Two Yanks, Belle Le Grand).
Destructive storms (A Modern Musketeer, Suez).
Upper crust appearing characters who are crooks (A Modern Musketeer, Black Sheep, Belle Le Grand, The River's Edge).
Characters falsely accused, become social outcasts (Suez, Belle Le Grand, Silver Lode).

Sets and Locations:

Desert locations (A Modern Musketeer, Suez, The Sands of Iwo Jima, The River's Edge).
Interiors with more than one level (Hollywood Party, Suez, The Gorilla, Belle Le Grand).
Large scale outdoor constructions and sets (flume: The Poisoned Flume, castle: Robin Hood, canal construction: Suez, war zone: Chances, camp: The Sands of Iwo Jima, houses and fence: Belle Le Grand).
Elevators (characters moved by rope, up and down Grand Canyon: A Modern Musketeer, mine elevator: Belle Le Grand, rope on cliff: The River's Edge).

Families:

Brothers (Chances, Man to Man, The Sands of Iwo Jima).
Sisters (Belle Le Grand, Slightly Scarlet).
Fathers and sons (A Modern Musketeer, Man to Man, Black Sheep, Suez).
Older family members, who conceal their relationship to a young adult (Black Sheep, Belle Le Grand) A concealed boyfriend (The River's Edge).

Visual Style:

Camera movement, following characters through yards or gardens (Fairbanks in front yards: A Modern Musketeer, lovers in garden: Chances, heroine in house yards and along fence: Belle Le Grand).
Long shots, showing characters against canyon backgrounds (A Modern Musketeer, The River's Edge).
Full-body group shots of the characters (Chances, The Gorilla, The River's Edge)

Not all of these are in every Dwan film.

A Modern Musketeer

A Modern Musketeer (1917) is one of several films Dwan directed with Douglas Fairbanks.

I found A Modern Musketeer disappointing. It has a few good sequences, mainly in the first half of the picture. But much of the film is labored. And like some other early Fairbanks comedy-adventures such as Wild and Woolly (John Emerson, 1917), A Modern Musketeer suffers from racism, here in its treatment of Native Americans. These early Fairbanks films are disappointing.

The upper class appearing villain, turns out to have a secret past as a criminal. The bad guy in Belle Le Grand will be concealing a similar criminal background - although not from the audience, as in A Modern Musketeer.

The Town

The hurricane sequence shows both good special effects, and good visual style. It anticipates the big storm in Suez. The hurricane in A Modern Musketeer shows much of the hero's home town.

The best sequence shows young Fairbanks' enthusiastic response, to the idea of getting out of his small town. Millions of people must have shared this goal. The sequence starts off in his living room, and winds up with him leaping all over yards and buildings in his town. It shows a delight absent in much of the rest of the film.

Panoramas

In the second half, Fairbanks is shown against a panorama of the Grand Canyon, in some spectacular shots. These reflect Dwan's technique, of long shots that embed characters within a background.

The shots showing the character being raised and lowered by a rope into the Canyon are also fascinating.

Chances

Chances (1931) falls into two parts: the early scenes at home in Britain, and later World War I scenes in France.

Parties

The British scenes at the beginning are especially good. They point out the importance of parties as settings for Dwan. This film opens first with a social evening in a British pub, then a country weekend, climaxing in a huge charity ball. The soldier protagonists have three days leave... Lots of Dwan films put his characters in party-like atmosphere. Black Sheep has them all on a trans-Atlantic cruise, Suez opens with Parisian fetes and social encounters, Abroad With Two Yanks has the men on shore leave, Up in Mabel's Room mainly takes place at a party, lot of the late Westerns take place in saloons, dance halls, etc. Dwan even did a musical called Hollywood Party. Dwan was a well known host, too. A party he gave in the 1920's was the real life model of the most famous get together in American Literature, the party in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novella The Great Gatsby.

Such parties are cheerful and festive - yet people get to have romantic encounters, and thrash out serious life issues. The parties can involve both family relationships, and romantic encounters. Family: there are two brothers in Chances, a father and son in Black Sheep. Triangles: both brothers fall in love with the same woman in Chances; the hero is chewed up in the duel between his wife and old girlfriend in Up in Mabel's Room, the hero is involved with two sisters in Slightly Scarlet.

These parties are more refined than Raoul Walsh's boisterous saloons. Dwan's characters do not always have money - but they tend to have a background of middle class refinement. The parties are also much warmer and friendlier than Alfred Hitchcock's duels over frighteningly stiff upper class restaurant meals (the cocktails in the Oak Room where Cary Grant is kidnapped at the start of North By Northwest, the early meal in Vertigo, the buffet supper in Rope, which takes place at home, but which has a similar feel).

Travel

Dwan's characters often commute from continent to continent. In Chances, the heroine is just back from Paris, where she has been studying art. In The Gorilla, the heroine is also just back from abroad; Black Sheep takes place on an ocean liner.

Costumes

The parties allow Dwan's characters to be dressed up to the max. The huge boots worn by his heroes in Chances anticipates Tyrone Power's big boots in Suez. The spectacular costumes in Chances are by Earl Luick, who also did Douglas Fairbanks' costumes in Little Caesar (1930) and Union Depot (Alfred E. Green, 1931). Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. never looked so good either before or after, as he did in these three films. Luick seems to know how to make him look like a real leading man. The long shots favored by Dwan, which displays his actors' whole bodies, serves to make these uniforms visible at all times.

Camera Style

Throughout the opening scenes in Britain, Dwan emphasizes long shots. He tries to keep all the actors involved in a scene on-screen at once, viewed as a whole. If the drama narrows down to two people, Dwan will move closer, until just those two are visible. Even in this case, Dwan prefers to frame them so their whole bodies are visible. Or Dwan can move to a medium shot, showing most, but not all of the legs, of his two characters. Dwan has little interest in cutting back and forth between close-ups of his characters.

Quite a few scenes at home are staged, so that we can see through the doorway of one room, into another. This is true both when just a few characters are visible, in the early shots at home - and when big crowds show up in the home for the party.

Dwan includes an elaborate tracking shot, through the garden, following Fairbanks and the heroine. A wall is in front of them, giving a visual grid or mask to the shot. Such foreground material in a lateral track is a trademark of both Sternberg and Ophuls. It is quite rare in Dwan's film, showing up in just this one scene.

The elaborate wooden bar and booth at the pub, anticipate the elaborate wooden staircase and its banisters in The Gorilla.

Suez

Allan Dwan's Suez (1938) and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) have some common features. Both have many scenes taking place in vast outdoor landscapes in tropical latitudes. In both, the landscapes have a sandy foundation, and are full of a combination of natural scenery, and vast human enterprises taking place on them - construction in Suez, soldiers camping out in the latter film. In both, the heroes have to make their way through a difficult life, showing personal determination and courage. In both, public issues are paramount. In both, there are no clear directions for the heroes: they have to use their own best ideas, and are on their own, as far as any pre-conceived answers go. They have to make a lot of difficult decisions and commitments. In both, they meet gutsy women whose efforts mirror theirs in taking on a difficult world. Both have men friends, too, and spend a lot of interacting within groups. Both films have young men, who are trying to follow in the footsteps of a distinguished father, sometimes uneasily.

The hero of Suez is falsely accused of a crime, and subjected to censure from large sections of the public. Such a situation will recur in Dwan's Silver Lode (1954). Belle Le Grand also opens with its heroine convicted in court for her husband's crimes.

Dwan's films can take place in times of social upheaval. Life and society are not fixed and static; instead, great changes are taking place. This can be as small scale as the changing power in a city government in Slightly Scarlet, or as large scale as the building of the Suez Canal in Suez. Dwan's lead characters often trigger this social change. They seem to be riding a huge wave of change.

The Gorilla

The Gorilla (1939) is an adaptation of a 1925 comedy-thriller stage play, by Ralph Spence.

Camera Style: The Long Shots

Dwan films much of the movie in long shot. These shots fulfill a number of functions:

They are beautifully composed. Each usually contains a good chunk of the architecture of the sets. Within this, a large number of players are arranged in dramatic tableaux. Both the architecture and the arrangement of the actors make beautiful geometric patterns.
The long shots help maintain the spooky atmosphere that is so important to an old-dark-house comedy. The shots always include plenty of the sinister mansion. They also often include such atmospheric features as rain storming against the window panes, fires blazing in the fireplace, and lamps shining out against shadowy rooms. The long shots make the action continuously show this mock-spooky background.
Dwan has a trio of stars, the Ritz Bothers, who all need to be included in the action. Long shots carefully include all three, and are thus suitable for this kind of film. In addition, Dwan gets in the rest of his cast as well, which features all sorts of talented audience favorites: Bela Lugosi, Patsy Kelly, Lionel Atwill, etc. Dwan usually frames the action, so that everyone in a sequence is on-screen at once. This gives his shots a multi-focus effect, displaying all his talented characters' performances. It is appropriate for a story that has no single protagonist, but which is an ensemble piece. Quite a few Dwan films focus on ensembles.
The long shots help preserve the "play-like" effect. We see all the action at once, as if we were watching in a theater. Of course, the camera placement will eventually shift, to pick up on a new set of events, unlike the fixed focus of a theater audience. Still, we see a true global picture of events at most times.

Dwan's long shots are thus play-like, allowing a global view of the action, and cinematic, in that they create beautiful compositions. This is an unusual combination.

Dwan only rarely shifts to a close-up. Sometimes, he needs a scary close view of a gorilla head, or to make clear some intricate bit of business that needs to be seen closely. But he tends to do this as little as possible.

Dwan sometimes cuts from one long shot to another. But he also frequently includes camera movements. These have the effect of adjusting the camera from one long shot position, to another. Dwan can move in. Or pan to the left or right. Or make a lateral camera movement through the set. In most cases, the moves are designed to serve as "long shots in motion". They are highly unusual, in this effect, which is not all that common in film history. While these shots sometime reframe the image due to the characters moving to a different part of the set, they do not seem like pure accompaniments of walking characters, a far more common type of camera movement.

Ensembles

The ensemble approach here returns in other Dwan films. The way in which different groups of characters keep interacting with each other, always moving the plot forward, is a kind of construction also seen in some of these Dwan ensemble pieces. A non-farcical example is The Inside Story (1948). It also shows up in Dwan farces, such as Up in Mabel's Room (1944). Such great critics as Peter Bogdanovich and Andrew Sarris loved Up in Mabel's Room, and disliked The Gorilla, but I felt exactly the opposite. Don't know what this difference of response means, if anything.

Acting styles in the film are calibrated in strange ways. The Ritz Bothers and Patsy Kelly do comedy, the uncle, his niece and her boy friend do straight dramatics, and the other characters are pitched somewhere in between. Dwan and his performers never lose sight of their approaches. They are perhaps helped by the "comedy relief" tradition of studio Hollywood film, in which one character would supply a succession of jokes in an otherwise serious film - see Alan Hale in Raoul Walsh's Manpower, for example. The niece and boy friend are especially good. They manage to keep on delivering apparently conventional dramatics, when everyone else is mugging in all directions. There is something a bit self conscious about all this, in a good way. I think the audience is encouraged to enjoy these performances. They are slightly heightened, and seem a bit tongue in cheek. Edward Norris is particularly steady as the noble boy-friend, always showing the exactly right pitch of concern for the heroine, and proper level of response to the horror twists of the plot. He is fascinating to watch, in a performance that is deliberately cut loose by the director from a realistic context around him. The Gorilla is in some ways an experimental film, in which Dwan is playing in creative ways, taking apart conventional narrative structures the way Alain Resnais would do with L'Année dernière à Marienbad.

The heroine's gesture of grief late in the film, when she collapses in a chair, seems stage-like. It is highly effective. It also seems designed to be seen as part of a long shot - one of the Ritz Brothers is also performing in the background. Dwan uses such gestures, rather than focussing in on a close-up of the heroine.

Pre-Film Noir

The Gorilla (1939) is of the era that might be termed "pre-film noir". True noir films begin in 1940, with Boris Ingster's The Stranger on the Third Floor, and gradually emerge as a genre in 1941-1942. The Gorilla (1939) is definitely not noir. But it has a few features that seem to anticipate noir to come:

It takes place mainly in the night and rain, the classic noir setting.
Clocks play a suspense role in the main murderous attack by the villain.
Staircases are everywhere in the film.
The hero is dressed in the sort of clothes that would be popular in 1940's noir: sharp pin-striped, double-breasted suit, and a trenchcoat over it worn as a raincoat.
He definitely has a urban look, and while the action all takes place at a spooky mansion in the sticks, the opening newspaper accounts suggest the crimes are urban in scope.

Belle Le Grand

A Mix of Genres

Belle Le Grand (1951) is a Western: most of it takes place in Colorado in 1870. But in many ways, it resembles a Dwan historical epic like Suez, more than it does a typical Western. As in Suez, the characters are people who love to build vast enterprises: in Belle Le Grand, these are mainly mines, but they also include gambling houses. The performers are usually in fancy 19th Century suits and evening clothes, also like Suez, rather than the cowboy gear of most Westerns.

Belle Le Grand is also a musical of sorts. It is full of songs by Muriel Lawrence, a gifted real-life operatic soprano who would make three of her four films with Dwan. She mainly sings "light" classical music showpieces here, and does a terrific job.

The early sections of Belle Le Grand seem to be from yet another genre of Hollywood film, the anti-bellum tale of the Old South. A little of this dubious genre goes a long way, and one feels relief when the action moves forward in time to 1870.

Ensemble

Like other Dwan works, Belle Le Grand has something of an ensemble feel. The characters often take turns, coming to the forefront of the action.

William Ching plays the hero's partner. The two are often together and very close. They recall the brothers in Chances. Both tend to be similarly dressed, in suits, evening clothes, etc - also like the brothers in Chances.

Processes

Belle Le Grand shows Dwan's fascination with large scale processes. The stock market sequence is perhaps the most ambitious in any film before L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962). Its look at a complex economic process, here the buying and selling of stock, recalls Dwan's look at the economy of money circulation in The Inside Story.

The look at 19th Century Western opera houses, the courtroom scene, and the picture of a whole mining town and its way of life, are other large scale processes in the film.

The Fence

Dwan includes an outstanding panning shot, near the start. This shows the heroine, moving through a black district. The architecture includes a long running fence. The fence recalls the massive flume in The Poisoned Flume.

The character's slow move through the front yards, contrasts with Fairbanks' mad dash through the yards of his neighborhood in A Modern Musketeer.

Multi-Level Interiors

Dwan moves the camera up and down between boxes at the opera. He also has a large staircase in the mansion.

The River's Edge

The River's Edge (1957) is one of Dwan's least appealing films. It has nasty characters, in a depressing narrative about people whose lives keep getting worse and worse.

The River's Edge has an odd mix of genres. It is a crime thriller, but it is set in the modern day West. In this it resembles Lightning Strikes Twice (King Vidor, 1951).

Shooting Characters against Vistas

Dwan had previously brought criminal characters to the Southwest US desert in A Modern Musketeer. In both films, Dwan shoots the actors against panoramic vistas. Both include canyons in the backgrounds. People are up high on a level ground; the scenery drops away spectacularly behind them.

Characters also use rope to scale cliffs in both films.

Characters

Ray Milland plays another Dwan crook who masquerades as a charming member of the upper classes.

The heroine can't stand her life at the ranch, and wants to move to a glamorous city. This recalls young Fairbanks' discontent with small town life in A Modern Musketeer.

The hero of A Modern Musketeer tries to help a "woman in distress" near the beginning, who instead remains loyal to her bad boyfriend. The plot of The River's Edge is related.

Harry Carey Jr. gets a chance to show off his charm in a brief modern day role, near the start.

Color

The early interiors at the shack, are in a mixture of red-orange and blue. This color scheme runs through other 1950's filmmakers, notably Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor and William Castle.

Later, the trailer is green on the outside. It is green-and-red inside, with blankets and Milland's red scarf adding to the color scheme, along with reddish wood. Green-and-red is also found in Minnelli and Hitchcock.

Dwan also uses monochrome harmonies. In the cave, Milland is shown sleeping against a gray wall, under a matching gray blanket, and with his gray case.