John Farrow: Ingenious Filmmaker, Incorrigible Fabulist, Impossible Person (Preview)
by David Sterritt

John Farrow’s hour may be coming around at last. Although he directed scores of features between Men in Exile in 1937 and John Paul Jones in 1959, the prolific and versatile director has been oddly overlooked since 1963, when he died from a heart attack at the young age of fifty-eight. Today he’s best known as the father of movie star Mia Farrow and the grandfather of crusading journalist Ronan Farrow, who have kept the family name very much in view. But he made respected pictures in an array of genres, from Five Came Back (1939) and Two Years Before the Mast (1946) to The Big Clock (1948) and The Sea Chase (1955). Hollywood talents on the level of John Wayne, Alan Ladd, and Ray Milland worked with him repeatedly, and Maureen O’Sullivan, who acted in several of his movies, was his wife and the mother of their seven children. He earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Director with Wake Island (1942) and shared an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with James Poe and S. J. Perelman for the 1956 epic Around the World in 80 Days, which he directed for a day or two until producer Mike Todd fired him and gave Michael Anderson the job. He also produced a few movies and wrote a number of fiction and nonfiction books.

Quite a career. So why doesn’t Farrow have a spot in the usual lists of major American directors? One answer might be that Andrew Sarris, the chief American popularizer of auteurism, skipped clear over Farrow in The American Cinema, his (overly) influential book on the subject. A more important answer might be that a director this flexible is hard to tag with a signature style and a set of favorite personal themes. As with other conspicuously supple filmmakers—Louis Malle, Michael Curtiz—his mercurial interests and all-purpose skills don’t fit into easy critical pigeonholes. Yet auteurists who pay attention can’t miss meaningful through lines in his best pictures of the Forties and Fifties, when he wove his religious interests into film after film and cultivated a camera style based on continually flowing action captured in some of the most bravura long takes of their era. He also believed in personal cinema after a fashion, saying he wanted to craft commercially successful movies in order to keep studio interference at bay. He saw pleasing the multitudes as a route to pleasing himself.

Whatever the reason, Farrow is a semi-forgotten figure, and “Directed by John Farrow,” an all-region Blu-ray box set from the Australian label Imprint, aims to get him back into the limelight. The set comprises five major films—Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), The Hitler Gang (1944), Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Submarine Command (1951), and Botany Bay (1952)—plus a feature-length documentary by Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg, aptly titled John Farrow: Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows. The discs amount to a welcome and worthy effort, but the collection would be more persuasive if some of Farrow’s most remarkable films weren’t absent. Wake Island, The Big Clock, Five Came Back, Alias Nick Beal (1949), and Where Danger Lives (1950) are among the missing, and no first-rate Farrow library should be without them. The organizers eliminated two strong movies, Alias Nick Beal and Plunder of the Sun (1953), because they’re already in the Imprint catalogue; for their final selections they sought out high-quality films not readily accessible from other sources. A more generous compilation would make a better case for Farrow as the noteworthy auteur he certainly is, but on the upside, Imprint’s digital transfers are mostly excellent, and all except one of the films are accompanied by well-done audio commentaries and other extras. As far as it goes, this is a fine release. 

The eclecticism of Farrow’s filmography is matched by the variety of his off-screen exploits, although he was such a fabulist that it can be hard to tell what’s real and what’s invented in his personal history. He was an Australian from a suburb of Sydney, where he worked briefly as an accountant before heading to sea with the Merchant Marine, sailing in the southern Pacific and fighting in Latin American revolutions, or so he claimed. According to Gonzalez and Vandenburg’s documentary, he got in trouble as a teenager for running around with a stethoscope and pretending to be a physician, and according to Marilyn Moss’s biography The Farrows of Hollywood: Their Dark Side of Paradise (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023; see my review in Cineaste, Winter 2023), his first wife described him as a “mysterious, monocled youth” who said he was the heir to a British earldom.

A lot of this was bogus, but he had indeed been to sea, and when he eventually landed in California, he parlayed his shipboard experience and knack for writing into gigs as a screenplay consultant and technical advisor, first for Cecil B. DeMille and then for the RKO and Paramount studios. Soon he was writing silent-movie intertitles—the same entry point used by Alfred Hitchcock—and writing and doctoring scripts, specializing in so-called women’s pictures. He also penned a novelization of George Fitzmaurice’s 1930 melodrama The Bad One, a book in which Moss detects a “stunning prose style” (but take it from me, the prose is exceedingly prosaic). In 1933 he was arrested for violating immigration law—his visa had expired, and the government was chasing down “aliens” in the film industry—yet he managed to remain in Hollywood, making his directorial debut in 1934 with The Spectacle Maker, an MGM short about magical eyeglasses, with glowing Technicolor that justifies the movie’s title. While co-directing Tarzan Escapes (1936, credited to Richard Thorpe) he met and married O’Sullivan, remaining with her until his death, but during their marriage sleeping with so many other women that O’Sullivan had a separate door and stairway added to their house so she wouldn’t have to hear his late-night entrances and exits…

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David Sterritt is a Cineaste contributing writer and author or editor of fifteen books on film.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 1