Delmer Daves, 1904-1977

Director Delmer Daves was born on this day in 1904. He never became quite as big a director as some of the other names out there, possibly because he did a lot of westerns, and most of those were smaller than what John Ford was doing. It's not as though Daves was a poor director by any means; I've recommended his 3:10 to Yuma before. Among his non-westerns were the Humphrey Bogart mystery Dark Passage, which I've mentioned briefly but never done a full blog post on.

It's also not as though Daves had no experience handling other genres. Like many directors who started directing in the 1940s, Daves got his start in Hollywood spending years as a screenwriter. Daves is responsible for the screenplay to The Petrified Forest, but also for a wide range of genres: from the college football movie So This Is College back in 1929, to musicals with Dick Powell like Flirtation Walk, to the sappy melodrama Love Affair.