Remembering Sam Wood

Samuel Grosvenor Wood (1883–1949) was a former real estate broker who, in the silent days of American cinema, became a movie director—and, by the advent of sound, a prominent filmmaker and one of the most trusted and technically gifted of all Hollywood veterans.

He appeared as an actor in a few two-reelers in 1908 under the name Chad Applegate, and in 1915 became an assistant director to C. B. DeMille. Late in 1919 he was promoted to director at Paramount. In the 1920s he handled many of Gloria Swanson’s films (including some parts of the ill-fated Queen Kelly). He developed a reputation as a reliable craftsman who could turn mediocre material into acceptable entertainment. Unfortunately, most of his silent films are lost or inaccessible. He solidified his position in the 1930s when, at MGM, he directed—along with a large number of routine productions—such diverse films as the superb Marx Brothers comedies A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. 

Goodbye, Mr. Chips was another of his favored films from this period. He even directed a few scenes of Gone With the Wind after George Cukor was fired by producer Selznick. He reached the peak of his craft toward the end of his career, in the 1940s, when he turned out with sure-handed skill such films as Our Town, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Pride of the Yankees, Command Decision, and the excellent drama Kings Row. It was also Wood who directed Ginger Rogers to her Oscar-winning performance in Kitty Foyle.

He made four films with his friend Gary Cooper, the leading male star of the war years, beginning with The Pride of the Yankees, a biopic of baseball legend Lou Gehrig (who had recently died at age 37), and continuing with For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of Wood’s masterpieces, Casanova Brown, and Saratoga Trunk.

Despite these achievements, Wood's contribution to American cinema has been largely ignored by film historians, perhaps because of his dedication to conservative right-wing politics, which reached its peak during the last years of his life—exactly when he was making his best films.

After relative quiet in the early war years, several incidents in 1944 revealed Hollywood's increasingly volatile and politicized labor scene. The first involved the creation of two quasi-political organizations: the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAAI, usually MPA) and the Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions (CHGU). The Motion Picture Alliance was formed in February 1944 by a group of notable Hollywood conservatives, including Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, King Vidor, writer Casey Robinson, and art director Cedric Gibbons; Sam Wood was elected its first president. According to Variety, the Alliance was formed in response to a Writers Congress meeting at UCLA that the founders felt was Communist-inspired; the organization’s goal was to combat communism, fascism, and other alien “isms” in Hollywood. In a brochure published in 1944, the Alliance defined its mission as follows:

“Our purpose is to uphold the American way of life, on the screen and among screen workers; to educate, not to smear. We seek to make a rallying place for the vast, silent majority of our fellow workers; to give voice to their unwavering loyalty to democratic forms and so to drown out the highly vocal, lunatic fringe of dissidents; to present to our fellow countrymen the vision of a great American industry united in upholding the American faith.”

Reflections of this manifesto are evident in Wood’s optimistic The Stratton Story (1949) and, earlier, in many of his early-1940s pieces of Americana.

Later on, sadly, he provided key testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, helping to fan fears of Communist influence in the U.S. film industry. It was then that Groucho Marx called him a fascist.

Wood died of a heart attack in Hollywood at the age of 66.