Bird of Paradise

King Wallis Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose career spanned nearly seven decades. In 1979 he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his "incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator." He was nominated five times for a Best Director... Oscar, and won eight international film awards during his career. He was born in Galveston, Texas, where he survived the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. His grandfather, Charles Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 who settled in Galveston in the early 1850s. A freelance newsreel cameraman and cinema projectionist, Vidor made his debut as a director in 1913 with The Grand Military Parade. In Hollywood from 1915, he worked as a screenwriter and as director of a series of six short juvenile-delinquency films for Judge Willis Brown before directing his first feature, The Turn in the Road, in 1919. A successful mounting of Peg o' My Heart in 1922 got him a long term contract with Goldwyn Studios, later to be absorbed into MGM.
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George Archainbaud was a French-born American film and television director. In the beginning of his career he worked on stage as an actor and manager. He came to the United States in 1915, and started his film career as an assistant director to Emile Chautard at the World Film Company in Fort Lee,... New Jersey. In 1917 he made his own directorial debut As Man Made Her. During the next three and a half decades he directed over one hundred films. After the beginning of the 1950s he moved to television. While working at the RKO in the beginning of the 1930s, he showed some artistic and skillful eye with many of his films. The finest examples include Thirteen Women and The Lost Squadron . Especially the latter is a memorable thriller about Hollywood stunt flyers, who risk their lives under the direction of monstrous Erich von Stroheim. Although Archainbaud directed films of all genres, he is nowadays mainly linked with westerns. In fact, it was not until the last decade of his directorial career until he specialized in them. With the producer Harry Sherman he made several Hopalong Cassidy oaters.
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