William A. Seiter
(1890-1964)
by
William M. Drew
A versatile director who worked successfully in
both the silent and sound eras, William A. Seiter was born on
June 10, 1890, in New York City, the son of an exporter of glass
and China ware. He was educated at Hudson River Military Academy,
and, after working as an artist and writer, began his career with Mack
Sennett’s legendary Keystone Company in 1914. He initially worked
as an actor in a variety of parts (including one of the Keystone Kops)
for the company before graduating to scriptwriting and assistant directing.
After helming several shorts, he began directing feature films in 1920
with his gift for light comedy first apparent in a 1921-22 series starring
Doris May. He also directed more dramatic fare, including two films
for the newly-formed Warner Brothers: an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
just-published novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and a story
with a theme of labor conflict, The Little Church Around the Corner (1923),
Warners’ first real box office hit. Seiter’s rapport with feminine
stars was evident in the films he directed in 1924: Helen’s Babies, with
child star Baby Peggy and the future “It” Girl, Clara Bow; The White Sin
and His Forgotten Wife, starring Madge Bellamy; Daddies, with Mae Marsh;
and The Mad Whirl, a Jazz Age drama featuring May McAvoy.
Seiter reached his peak during the silent era
with a series of light comedies for Universal, starring Reginald
Denny, Laura La Plante, and Marion Nixon. Some of these films
include: The Fast Worker (1924), with Denny and
La Plante; Where Was I? (1925) and What Happened to Jones? (1926),
with Denny and Nixon; and Thanks for the
Buggy Ride (1928), with La Plante. The most renowned of these
films and probably Seiter’s greatest silent work is
the 1926 comedy Skinner’s Dress Suit. Under Seiter’s sure
hand, Denny and La Plante gave expert performances as a married couple
living beyond their means in 1920s suburbia. The film’s succession
of hilarious situations is
skillfully underscored by its realistic social observation of the
times.
Seiter was soon in demand by other studios, directing First National’s top star, Colleen Moore, in her last silents and first talkies. He adapted well to sound and contributed to the first wave of musical films with his 1930 versionsof Sunny, with Marilyn Miller, and Kiss Me Again. He kept up a bewildering pace in the 1930s as he worked for one studio after another, handling everything from Shirley Temple vehicles (Dimples <1935>, Stowaway <1936>) to historical dramas (This is My Affair <1937>, with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, and Allegheny Uprising <1939>, with Claire Trevor and John Wayne). But as in the silent era, his true forte remained comedy. Among thehighlights of his work in the 1930s are his films with the three greatest comedy teams of the decade, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Wheeler and Woolsey. Room Service (1938), with the Marx Brothers, while it has many amusing scenes, is considered one of their lesser efforts. But Sons of the Desert (1934), with Laurel and Hardy, ranks as the team’s greatest feature-length film. Seiter’s direction unifies the comedic structure that is built around the boys’ efforts to defy their wives and attend their lodge’s convention.
Seiter’s flair for madcap comedy reached new heights in his four classic films with Wheeler and Woolsey, Caught Plastered (1931), Peach O’Reno (1931), Girl Crazy (1932), and Diplomaniacs (1933). An example of frenetic satire in these works is the take-off on Reno divorce courts in Peach O’Reno, with the comedy duo playing divorceattorneys engaged in a cut-rate price war with a rival law firm. Another is in the surrealistic Diplomaniacs, in which the team are sent by the Indians as delegates to the Geneva Peace Conference. Their efforts to bring about peace aresabotaged by arms merchants and warring nation-states, resulting in World War II.
In a similar vein of wild satire are Seiter’s
Professional Sweetheart (1933) and Thanks for Everything (1938).
Scripted by Maurine Watkins, Professional Sweetheart pokes fun at
the radio industry, with Ginger Rogers as Glory Eden, a high-spirited performer
being sold to the public as “The Purity Girl” despite her own desire to
“sin” in real life. Thanks for Everything details the comic consequences
of an advertising agency’s attempt to find and promote a man as an average
American.
Seiter also continued to make films that, like Skinner’s
Dress Suit, were realistic in their exploration of
contemporary American life. Notable among these are Big Business
Girl (1931) and Hot Saturday (1932), both
exemplifying the freedom of the pre-Code American cinema.
The witty Big Business Girl stars Loretta Young as a
married college graduate attempting to make it on her own after
she finds work at a New York City advertising
agency. Hot Saturday includes a sharp-edged depiction of the
narrowness of small town life when local girl Nancy
Carroll rebels against strait-laced provincials like her mother
and fiancé (Randolph Scott) by running off with
playboy Cary Grant at the film’s conclusion.
During the mid-1930s, Seiter made memorable contributions
to the popular genres of musical and screwball
comedy. Roberta (1935), costarring Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire,
and Ginger Rogers, is an outstanding adaptation of the Jerome Kern Broadway
hit. The Moon’s Our Home (1936) stars Margaret Sullavan and Henry
Fonda in a
rollicking farce about the romance between a movie star and a writer.
The beginning of the 1940s found Seiter back at
his old studio, Universal, directing Rosalind Russell in Hired
Wife (1940) and several films starring the studio’s reigning queen,
Deanna Durbin, including It’s a Date (1940) and
Nice Girl? (1941). At Columbia, Seiter directed Fred Astaire
and Rita Hayworth in one of the best musicals of the
decade, You Were Never Lovelier (1942). Seiter’s directorial
output continued unabated into the early 1950s with
comedies like The Lady Wants Mink (1953) and crime thrillers, including
his final theatrical film, Make Haste to
Live (1954). He spent the remainder of the 1950s directing
episodes of such TV programs as The Gale Storm Show,then retired from the
business. Seiter was married to two of his stars: Laura La Plante
in 1926 and, after their divorce, Marion Nixon in 1934. He died on
July 26, 1964, in Los Angeles at the age of 74. Among his survivors
were Marion Nixon and their adopted son, Christopher.
While William A. Seiter mastered every genre of
film in which he worked, appropriately for a graduate of the
Keystone Company, his contributions to American screen comedy especially
stand out. A craftsman who has been
praised by such leading film historians as William K. Everson and
Kevin Brownlow, Seiter is still relatively
unknown to most film analysts. Yet most of those who worked
with him remember him as an inspiring director. Fay
Wray spoke of his “high good spirits” and his easy, hearty laughter
on the set. Indeed, it was his infectious
enthusiasm allied with his intuitive cinematic skills and insight
into characterization that produced a long succession
of bright, entertaining films. With a talent equal to his
better-known Oscar-winning contemporary, Leo McCarey,
the genial Seiter made a lasting mark on the development of the
American cinema. Perhaps a long-overdue
retrospective of his extensive oeuvre will ultimately secure his
deserved place in cinema history as a director whose comic verve was equally
at home in silent and sound films.
REFERENCES: Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1968); I. G. Edmunds, Big
U: Universal in the Silent Days (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes,
1977); William K. Everson, American Silent
Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Clive Hirschhorn,
The Warner Bros. Story (New York: Crown,
1979); Clive Hirschhorn, The Universal Story (New York: Crown, 1983);
William M. Drew, Speaking of Silents:
First Ladies of the Screen (Vestal, NY: The Vestal Press, Ltd.,
1989); 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).