Henry Hathaway, a Great American Director

Hathaway made a fair number of bad movies. Most of my recent forays into the Hathaway catalogue (after a stretch of about a month when great film followed great film) have been unrewarding. And he never made a masterpiece on the order of, say, THE SEARCHERS, no. But at his best he was much greater than his common “competent craftsman” tag.

A Hollywood jack-of-all-trades, Hathaway made comedies, war films, docu-dramas, westerns, musicals, adventure films, hillbilly feud films, and noirs. In the ‘30s he made a few that are just plain undefinable (like the surrealists’ favorite PETER IBBETSON). Some of his...