Richard Thorpe: Efficient to a Fault

Though he directed nearly 200 movies, some of them enduringly famous, we have had but one occasion to mention director Richard Thorpe (1896-1991) thus far on Travalanche. He was the second director to work on the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. (Many sources say first, but that is incorrect)

While Victor Fleming is the credited director of that movie, no fewer than five worked on it. King Vidor finished the job when Fleming was called away to do Gone With the Wind. George Cukor took the helm for a short stretch just to keep it on track. And Norman Taurog was the first one. He shot some test scenes prior to being pulled away to do The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But Thorpe was the first to actually begin shooting the movie per se. He worked on the project for about two weeks. Buffs know him for one thing primarily. He was the one who attempted to give us the notorious BLONDE Dorothy:

It’s a weird choice somehow. Though it’s apparently an attempt to hang on to the original concept of a Shirley Temple type in the role (Dorothy is a much younger girl in the books) it somehow gives the opposite effect and makes Garland seem older. I almost get a Veronica Lake vibe, which conjures a version in which the producers had gone with Gale Sondergaard as the Witch as originally intended, and the two women go at it like noir broads, with Dorothy fully intending to melt her green nemesis with that bucket of water because she left her .38 back in the hotel room.

Ultimately, Thorpe was removed from The Wizard of Oz for possessing the quality he is best known for, which is at once his vice and his virtue. He rushed the process too fast. It’s to the studio’s credit that they didn’t settle for that in this case, for they ordinarily loved it. Thorpe was famous for never retaking scenes unless an actor flubbed a line or missed their marks. He was uninterested in getting the best acting take. As long as the actors said their lines, and you could hear them, and they made sense, it was good enough for him. And it was good enough for the studio, too. For these people, if it was on time and on budget it was a good movie. One gets it, of course. There have certainly been unconscionable indulgences from time to time in the history of motion picture production. But there’s a happy medium. There’s a reason some movies turn us on particularly, and the reason in such cases is usually that the director cares enough to make it the best he/she can. While many of Thorpe’s movies are well known, most of them, in the sound era anyway, are whopping bores as experiences.

As the last sentence implies, and as was true of all his generation, Thorpe had come up during the silent era. The native Kansan had started out with stock companies and vaudeville, served in World War One, and got involved in the pictures in New York in the early ’20s. He got his start working on Johnny Hines’ “Torchy” comedies as a supporting player, gagwriter, editor, studio manager, and assistant director. Then for the same studio (C.C. Burr), he had the opportunity to star in the feature Three O’Clock in the Morning (1923). He acted in a couple of more pictures after that, but was clearly more attracted to directing.

Thorpe cranked out dozens of movies, most of them low-budget westerns, throughout the remainder of the silent era and into the early ’30s. In the Pre-code sound era he was at Chesterfield, making gritty crime dramas. He came to MGM in 1935, with Tarzan Escapes (1936) being his first hit. Tarzan pictures, Thin Man movies, and similar programmers spoke to his strengths. But he did climb the ladder to more prestigious films, as we’ve alluded to a few times already, and now we will name them.

Amusingly, while Norman Taurog had been pulled off The Wizard of Oz to make The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Thorpe was reassigned to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) with Mickey Rooney. He worked with Wallace Beery a lot in movies like 20 Mule Team (1940), Wyoming (1940), Barnacle Bill (1941), and The Bad Man (1941). He did a couple of well-known musical bio-pics, Three Little Words (1950), about Kalmar and Ruby, and The Great Caruso (1951), and the Burt Lancaster western Vengeance Valley (1951).

In the end Thorpe seemed to find his metier with Technicolor historical dramas, the kind modern folks find dreary and soporific but were all the rage in the 1950s. They included Ivanhoe (1952), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), The Knights of the Round Table (1953), and The Adventures of Quentin Durward (1955).

In 1957, Thorpe directed Dean Martin’s first starring vehicle without Jerry Lewis, Ten Thousand Bedrooms. It flopped but it’s of passing historical interest.

Today, Thorpe’s most-watched films are surely his two Elvis pictures, Jailhouse Rock (1957) and Fun in Acapulco (1963). Similar pictures from the period included Follow the Boys (1963) with Connie Francis, and That Funny Feeling (1965) with Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee.

Thorpe capped off his career with the aptly named The Last Challenge (1967) a very cheap looking western with Glenn Ford, Chad Everett, and Angie Dickinson.

Thorpe was 71 when he tired. I bet he never dreamt he’d live another 25 years! What did he do with all that time on his hands? He could have directed another 75 movies!

For more on vaudeville consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and for more on silent comedy films please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook. These are where Richard Thorpe got his start!