Clarence Brown: Mainstream Director of the Stars

Martin Scorcese. Robert Altman. King Vidor. Alfred Hitchcock. Clarence Brown.

For a casual film buff, the first four names on that list likely ring a loud and clear bell (well, maybe not Vidor, but hear me out). Each of those men is easily recognizable as a great film director. Scorcese is the man of Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. Hitchcock was the master of suspense, Altman was a maverick, and Vidor - well - Vidor was the guy who filmed part of Wizard of Oz and the excellent silent films The Big Parade and The Crowd. At the very least, the first four are acknowledged by film historians and critics as being extremely influential in the history of directing. All four of them easily made the Top 100 Directors list at the website TheyShootPictures.com.

But what about Clarence Brown? He was a film director, but his name would rarely, if ever, be placed in the same company as the four names mentioned first. He does not appear on the previously cited Top 100 list, and one would be shocked if any modern director acknowledged him as being significantly influential.

However, more probably should. The list of names at the top is the list of men who, as of this writing, had the most Oscar nominations for Best Director without winning. This is pretty elite company for Brown to fall in with, so one must ask: how exactly is he so forgotten by modern film buffs?

The answer is simple: he was the anti-Robert Altman. He was a mainstream studio director who made wide-appeal movies at MGM - the hegemon of the big boys - during the studio era. Everything that the critics and the filmmakers who came of age during the "post-classical" period stood for - and still stand for today - runs directly counter to what Brown did.

Clarence Brown's most instantly recognizable films today are all geared towards a family audience: National Velvet (1944) and the original - and best - Angels in the Outfield (1951). He was also involved with the best adaptation of Frances Burnett's novel The Secret Garden (1949). Many of his film assignments came from studio staples like biopics (such as Edison, the Man (1940) or Song of Love (1947)), popular literary works at the time (like The Rains Came (1939) or The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)), or classics (Anna Karenina (1935)).

Does this make him any less of a director? Granted such films aren't as memorable, and some of them are downright mediocre, but from solely a direction standpoint, the man should be considered with the greats. No, the material for his films was not as good as the scripts that Frank Capra worked with, or as sexy in its own right as the stuff someone like, say, Mervyn LeRoy received, but that should hardly prevent Brown from being a great director.

Two examples of this are the criminally underrated near-masterpieces The Yearling (1946) and Intruder in the Dust (1949). The Yearling is a family tale about a young boy who adopts a pet deer, adapted from the popular-at-the-time but utterly mediocre novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. But Brown brings the material to life. His direction strikes a variety of balances that make the film work, even to modern eyes. The actors all portray the hardships of life in the 19th century wilderness, but at the same time their emotions have a universality. Yes, it seems sappy to our dulled sensibilities, but so does Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and plenty of folks praise that. In fact, given the wonderful sets and the fantastic cinematography, the only logical reason one can give for why the film is overlooked in favor of lesser ones (It's A Wonderful Life, for one) is that critics write the film off as an Old Yeller-type, which ignores the sophistication and complexity actually at work. The film could be awful, but it's not, and that's partly because the practiced hand of Clarence Brown was on the set.

Intruder in the Dust is an extremely well-known novel by William Faulkner. Now, anyone who's ever read Faulkner knows that Faulkner would be no treat to adapt to Golden Age cinema, but what Brown did was nothing short of suburb. In what is an essentially early racial commentary, Brown guided a cast of mostly young and unheralded actors to making the finest adaptation of a work written by one of America's greatest literary masters. Does that sound like someone who should be written off as a studio hack?

The truth is, if more young directors actually studied Brown's movies against their source material, they would learn a great deal, much more so than if they sat around brewing up the most creative way to rip off one of the post-1950 greats. Brown understood the nature of the story. He could tell it with any number of stars, for he worked extensively with Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, the Barrymores, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, Jimmy Stewart, Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and on and on. Sure, anyone who worked in Hollywood would run across those names, but Brown guided 10 different ones to Oscar nominations.

It's just a shame too many modern fans, critics, and directors reject his legacy because the subject matter is about as far from the edge as it gets. Sadly, when they seek that mythical boundary, too many of them stray and wind up falling over. Besides the films mentioned thus far, one would also be advised to check out the 1925 silent film The Eagle (starring Rudolf Valentino), 1941's Come Live With Me (with Jimmy Stewart and Hedy Lamarr), and the 1936 romantic comedy Wife vs. Secretary (with Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy).

Brown lived from 1890 until he passed away at the ripe age of 97 in 1987. He walked away from the film business in the 1950s after becoming quite wealthy in the California real estate market. An intelligent man, Brown had multiple engineering degrees before coming to Hollywood. Though born in Massachusetts, he came from Tennessee and moved back there after his retirement, and now the University of Tennessee has a theater named in his honor.