Don Siegel, 1912-1991

Today marks the birth anniversary of director Don Siegel. Like many directors, he started off doing other things in Hollywood; in his case, that was editing movies at Warner Bros. in the early 1940s. His first big film was Night Unto Night, which was an ill-fated mess. I don't know how much he was responsible for it and how much of it was the casting, since Ronald Reagan and Broderick Crawford are both pretty seriously miscast here. I also don't know if it set his career back, but it seems he never really got to make the big movie: he was working fairly regularly, but his best remembered films from the 1950s would be Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which certainly wasn't a big film at the time; and the post-noir classic The Lineup. It was only in the 1970s that Siegel started to get a few bigger jobs, such as John Wayne's final film, The Shootist.

TCM isn't showing any of Siegel's films today, since they're honoring William Hopper, but you can catch Count the Hours tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 PM.