Mark Sandrich

        (1900-1945)
                  by
       William M. Drew

     A director who made major contributions to the American musical film, Mark Sandrich was born Mark Rex
Goldstein on August 26, 1900, in New York City, the son of a rabbi.  He originally intended on a career in science
and trained to be a physicist at Columbia University.  A cousin of producer Zion Myers and silent star Carmel
Myers, Sandrich entered the film industry in the summer of 1923 while he was in Hollywood visiting some friends at
the Century studio, where they worked.  When director Al Herman needed help in setting up a wire gag for a
two-reel comedy he was making, Sandrich stepped forward, using his scientific training to make the gag work.
Herman, impressed with his ability, gave him a job as prop man. Soon, Sandrich was doing every kind of job around
the studio from stunting in the comedies to editing and assistant direction.  In 1926, he began directing comedy
shorts for companies including Century, Sunshine, Fox, and Educational. Among these were several Lupino Lane
comedies for Educational like Swords Point (1928), with its spirited burlesque of Douglas Fairbanks’s
swashbucklers.  Sandrich’s first feature, the 1928 silent Runaway Girls, was about a girl in the hands of white
slavers, a Columbia “exploitation” drama that was uncharacteristic of his later work.  His next feature and first sound film, The Talk of Hollywood, which he wrote and directed for Sono Art-World Wide in 1929, was a spoof on the coming of sound, anticipating in some of its scenes Singin’ in the Rain.  The film was unsuccessful with the critics and the public, and its failure forced Sandrich to return to directing shorts.

    Sandrich soon moved to RKO-Radio where, from 1931 to 1933, he directed a notable series of two-reelers starring the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough.  These films enabled Sandrich to develop further his sense of filmic rhythm, along with his love of satire, zany dialogue, and wild sight gags.  The turning point in Sandrich’s career came in 1933, when he directed an RKO musical short starring bandleader Phil Harris, So This is Harris.  The film, with its eye-popping optical effects blended with music, won an Academy Award as best short subject of the year.  It gave Sandrich his first opportunity to develop his conceptions of the musical form and enabled him to finally make a successful transition to features. His next film, which he also co-authored, was Melody Cruise with Phil Harris and Charlie Ruggles. Highly experimental in his use of the medium, Sandrich employed rhythmic dialogue and a wide array of startling visual effects including montage edited to music, lap dissolves, flat cuts, split screens, and wipes.  Coupled with the witty, double entendre-laced dialogue, Melody Cruise brought a new sense of style to musical films and heralded further innovations in the integration of song and dance within the narrative structure. Sandrich rounded out his 1933 films with a racy, energetic pre-Code comedy, Aggie Appleby, Maker of Men, in which the streetwise Wynne Gibson transforms a prissy socialite (Charles Farrell) into a man’s man.    In 1934 Sandrich directed the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, joined by Thelma Todd and their leading lady Dorothy Lee, in two classic comedies, Hips, Hips, Hooray! and Cockeyed Cavaliers, which rank among the best of the decade.  Sandrich succeeded in creating comic symphonies in these zany, tuneful, rapid-paced films.  Hips, Hips, Hooray!, a frenetic work detailing the adventures of two flavored lipstick salesmen, includes such highlights as a mock ballet performed by the stars and a wild racing car chase climax.  Cockeyed Cavaliers, with the comedy team as wandering vagabonds crashing 17th century English society, uses its costume setting as a vehicle for satiric comments on class structures and the relation between the sexes. In one dance number, the director uses both slow motion and speeded-up action for a gag. As in most of his films, in Hips, Hips, Hooray! and Cockeyed Cavaliers, the comedic and musical skills of his stars combined with his direction, resulting in a special kind of magic.  Made just before the Production Code took effect, Sandrich’s Wheeler and Woolsey comedies with their risqué situations, climax the director’s early work in film.

   Sandrich topped 1934 with The Gay Divorcee, the first starring vehicle of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and  an acknowledged landmark of the musical.  Set in England, the story concerns an American dancer pursuing a lovely divorcée.  Sandrich’s brilliant direction, allied with the dazzling talents of his two stars, transformed the Broadway show from which it was adapted into a cinematic masterpiece.  His fluid technique keeps the film on a lively pace for its nearly two hour length, as the director includes optical effects and numerous comic situations, as well as the elaborate musical numbers like “The Continental,” staged with a large cast and bravura editing.  At the same time, Sandrich worked closely with Astaire, Rogers, and their choreographer Hermes Pan, to create a new, more intimate approach to musicals, using a subtle technique that focused on the team’s resplendent dancing, as in “Night and Day.”  In content, too, The Gay Divorcee marks a new departure in musicals.  Whereas Ernst Lubitsch had built earlier sophisticated musicals around European characters, Sandrich introduced sophistication into a musical with American protagonists.  Like the subsequent Astaire-Rogers films, The Gay Divorcee accommodated the new limitations of the Production Code by replacing the brashness of earlier musicals with more subtle, suggestive wit. The mood of elegant high comedy is sustained throughout by the stars’ playing and a strong supporting cast of farceurs, Edward Everett Horton, Alice Brady, Eric Blore, and Erik Rhodes.

   The following year, Sandrich directed Astaire and Rogers in another classic, and their most famous work, Top Hat, with one of Irving Berlin’s best-loved scores.  As with their other films, Astaire and Hermes Pan spent weeks in preparation, devising the dances, which they then rehearsed with Rogers. But it was Sandrich who integrated song, dance, and story into a unified musical and comedic structure. Like The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat is built around a mistaken identity plot and places its American leads in a European setting, beginning in London and ending up in a dreamlike Art Deco Venice.    The team’s next film, Follow the Fleet (1936), also with songs by Berlin, marks a striking departure from their earlier works.  Instead of using a romantic, sophisticated Old World setting, Sandrich in Follow the Fleet projects a much more realistic American milieu closer to his audience’s experiences during the Depression era.  Fred plays a sailor on shore leave in San Francisco visiting his former vaudeville partner, Ginger, who is now forced to work in a cheap dance hall.  In this context, the film’s moving climactic number, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” takes on added significance as a song of survival amidst the economic grind of the thirties.    Sandrich’s second film of 1936, A Woman Rebels starring Katharine Hepburn, was his most atypical RKO film.  His only drama for the studio, A Woman Rebels is a strong feminist statement, depicting with sympathy its heroine’s struggles for equal rights during the Victorian age.  The director returned to contemporary America and Fred and Ginger with two more musicals, Shall We Dance? (1937) and Carefree (1938).  Shall We Dance?, with unforgettable songs by George Gershwin,  relates a romance between a ballet star (Astaire) and a revue artist (Rogers) that is splashed across the front pages, a plot motif that pokes fun at newspaper publicity.  Sandrich’s final film with the team, Carefree, blends Berlin songs with a deft satire on psychiatry.

   Shortly afterward, Sandrich left RKO to join Paramount where he worked for the rest of his career.  Following an
amusing series of Jack Benny vehicles (Man About Town <1939>, Love Thy Neighbor and Buck Benny Rides Again <both 1940> and Skylark (1941), a screwball comedy starring Claudette Colbert, Sandrich directed his most beloved film of the 1940s, Holiday Inn (1942).  Starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, the film’s Irving Berlin score introduced his great hit, “White Christmas.”  Sandrich’s last three films were all topical: So Proudly We Hail (1943), a large-scale war drama about the nurses in Bataan, starring Claudette Colbert; I Love a Soldier (1944), a story about marriage on the home front, with Paulette Goddard; and Here Come the Waves (1944), a musical with a wartime theme, starring Bing Crosby and Betty Hutton.  By this time, Sandrich was one of the most respected directors in Hollywood, the president of the Director’s Guild, and his own producer at Paramount.  He was preparing to make another musical, Blue Skies, which would reteam Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, when tragedy struck.  On March 4, 1945, only 44 years of age, Sandrich died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Hollywood.  He was survived by his wife Freda and their two sons, Mark, Jr. and Jay, both of whom later worked successfully in television. In addition to his career as an assistant director, Mark, Jr. composed the musical, Ben Franklin in Paris. Jay Sandrich, who inherited his father’s gift, built up a solid resume as an award-winning director of popular television comedies.   Mark Sandrich’s untimely death probably explains why his individual contributions have often been obscured, despite the uninterrupted popularity of the Astaire-Rogers musicals over the decades.  Also, during the years when much of the pre-Code cinema was overlooked, Sandrich’s equally outstanding early work for RKO was seldom revived.  Yet his contribution to the shaping of the films he directed is unmistakable, demonstrating a unique effervescence that permeates all his work.  Like Frank Capra, Sandrich was a conscious artist who was able to utilize his scientific training when developing the form of his films.  Before shooting, he would prepare detailed diagrams outlining complete breakdowns of the films, with colors denoting a particular activity, such as music, dancing, or drama.  His aim was to develop the musical film along symphonic lines, with songs, dialogue, sound effects, and visual experimentation integrated into a flowing, specifically cinematic form, differing markedly from stage technique.  Also like Capra, Sandrich was the center that pulled together other brilliant individual talents--performers, composers, writers, and technicians--to make unified works of art that reflected his point of view.  Sandrich’s body of work is innocent yet knowing, and is sensitive both to romantic beauty and to human absurdity manifested in a rollicking style of wit that embraces sophistication and slapstick.  With their consistently high quality, the films of Mark Sandrich represent a treasured legacy of the American cinema.

REFERENCES:  Fred Astaire, Steps in Time (New York: Harper, 1959);  Leonard Maltin, Movie Comedy Teams
(New York: New American Library, 1970); Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (New York:
Dutton, 1972); Richard B. Jewell with Vernon Harbin, The RKO Story (New York: Arlington House, 1982); Ginger
Rogers, Ginger: My Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Edward Watz, Wheeler & Woolsey: The Vaudeville
Comic Duo and Their Films, 1929-1937  (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994); William M. Drew, At the Center of the
Frame: Leading Ladies of the Twenties and Thirties (Lanham, MD: Vestal Press, Inc., 1999).