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Apr 28, 2023 · The Estate Sale of Delmer and Mary Lou Daves. Set in their Bel Air family home built in 1938, very little has changed since they first moved in shortly thereafter. It's a true time-capsule collection that showcases how they lived, loved and celebrated a full and beautiful life...
Apr 6, 2024 · Delmer Daves was a director of films like 3:10 to Yuma, Dark Passage and many more. He died in 1977 and his children have sold some of his estate in 2023. Daves appears to have been well-regarded but I was not familiar until after noticing many listings were from limitation 840/1,500, I asked the seller who the previous owner was.
Jun 25, 2015 · The penultimate Western of Delmer Daves was a film version of part of Frank Harris’s unreliable memoirs, Cowboy. It starred the excellent Glenn Ford again and also (very good casting) New Englander Jack Lemmon as Harris.
Turning director with the classic Destination Tokyo (1943), Daves often wrote and produced his own pictures. Of the many films he made, the westerns he did were especially close to his heart--as a youth he had spent much time living on reservations with Hopi and Navajo Indians.
- January 1, 1
- San Francisco, California, USA
- January 1, 1
- La Jolla, California, USA
- Overview
- Early work
- Westerns
- Later films
Delmer Daves, (born July 24, 1904, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died August 17, 1977, La Jolla, California), American writer and director of motion pictures who worked in a number of genres but was best known for his westerns, which include Broken Arrow (1950), The Last Wagon (1956), and 3:10 to Yuma (1957).
Daves earned a law degree at Stanford University but decided to pursue a career in Hollywood. He was a crew member on several films before turning to acting in 1928. Although typically uncredited, he appeared in more than 10 movies, including The Duke Steps Out (1929) and Good News (1930). During this time he also started working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a screenwriter and collaborated on such notable films as Dames (1934), The Petrified Forest (1936), Love Affair (1939), and You Were Never Lovelier (1942).
Daves was given a chance to direct at Warner Brothers, and in 1943 he made the efficient World War II drama Destination Tokyo, with Cary Grant and John Garfield; as with most of his films, he also was involved with writing the screenplay. The following year he helmed The Very Thought of You, a mild home-front romance, and Hollywood Canteen, a comedy and musical revue featuring an all-star cast that included Bette Davis, Jack Benny, and Joan Crawford. Pride of the Marines (1945) was more serious fare. The biopic chronicles a marine’s difficulties in adjusting to civilian life after he was blinded at the Battle of Guadalcanal. Featuring a strong performance by Garfield in the lead role of Al Schmid, the film was a critical and commercial success.
After moving to Twentieth Century-Fox in 1950, Daves directed his first western and one of his best pictures, Broken Arrow. The superlative drama, which focuses on the growing conflict between Apaches and white settlers, featured notable performances by James Stewart, as a former soldier who falls in love with an Apache (Debra Paget), and Jeff Chandler, as Cochise. The movie’s strong box-office showing helped ignite a series of films with Native American protagonists. Daves, however, continued to explore other genres. Bird of Paradise (1951) and Treasure of the Golden Condor (1953) were both adventure movies, while the sword-and-sandal epic Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) was a popular sequel to The Robe (1953), a hit by director Henry Koster.
In the mid-1950s Daves became a freelance director, which allowed him to concentrate on westerns. Drum Beat (1954) was his return to the genre, with a notable performance by Charles Bronson as the Modoc subchief Captain Jack. Jubal (1956), a western take on Shakespeare’s Othello, used Rod Steiger, Ernest Borgnine, and Glenn Ford to good effect, while The Last Wagon (1956) featured Richard Widmark as a resourceful killer who protects the survivors of a wagon train despite his own agenda. Daves then directed what is perhaps his best film, 3:10 to Yuma (1957). A variation on Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), it pits a farmer (Van Heflin) in a battle of wits with a captured killer (Ford, who was effectively cast against type). This “psychological” western is generally considered a classic of the genre. Ford returned for Cowboy (1958), portraying the gruff mentor to a tenderfoot (Jack Lemmon).
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Daves then made a series of romantic dramas starring Troy Donahue, the most notable of which was A Summer Place (1959), the biggest hit of Daves’s career. Based on Sloan Wilson’s novel, it was considered somewhat controversial for its look at adultery and premarital sex. Other films from that time included Parrish (1961), Susan Slade (1961), and Rome Adventure (1962).
In 1963 Daves directed Spencer’s Mountain, a precursor to The Waltons TV series. The family drama featured Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara as a rural couple overcoming adversity. After Youngblood Hawke (1964), an adaptation of Herman Wouk’s best seller, Daves made his last picture, The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1965), a soap opera in which an Italian pianist (Rossano Brazzi) romances an unhappily married English woman (O’Hara).
- Michael Barson
The Ethical Romantic. By Bertrand Tavernier in the January-February 2003 Issue. Dark Passage. Delmer Daves is the most forgotten of the American directors championed by French film critics in the Fifties—why? The reasons have little to do with his true stature as a filmmaker.
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He wrote scripts for many of Hollywood's best films of the 1930s and 1940s, including The Petrified Forest (1936) , Love Affair (1939) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942). Turning director with the classic Destination Tokyo (1943), Daves often wrote and produced his own pictures.
