History has largely ignored John Farrow. Despite the Marrickville-born film-maker carving out a staggering body of work – directing about 50 features for major US studios and working with stars including John Wayne and Bette Davis – it’s as though he barely even existed, beyond his name appearing in credits.
The story of cinema is punctuated by those who rise to fame while countless others are relegated to the ash heap of history. John Farrow: Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows is a new documentary that shines a light on the Australian artist who was once a mover and shaker in Tinseltown, but whose legacy went the way of the dodo – similar to Gillian Armstrong’s 2015 film Women He’s Undressed, which examines the life of Australian-born costume designer Orry-Kelly.
Many of Farrow’s films were well reviewed and he received two Oscar nominations: for best director (1942’s Wake Island) and best adapted screenplay (1956’s Around the World in 80 Days). The director belongs to a famous lineage, being the father of the actor Mia Farrow and the grandfather of Ronan and Dylan Farrow.
Yet the co-directors of the film about his life, Frans Vandenburg and Claude Gonzalez, found almost nothing documenting his prolific career.
“We were completely floored,” Vandenburg says. “Like, how did this happen? Where did this guy come from? You could find anything you wanted to about Mia but there was nothing about John.”
Gonzalez add: “We went through the work of some of the best critics in the world – from Pauline Kael to Andrew Sarris – and found none of them mentioned Farrow. We looked into archives – no archive. We looked into biographies – no biography. We looked into interviews – no interviews. He had come and gone, and somehow made all these films without leaving much of a cinematic historical trace.”
Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows, which premieres this weekend at Sydney film festival, is a work of excavation and investigation, digging up and studying a neglected artist’s oeuvre. It marks what is almost certainly the first rigorous analysis of a director who, according to Gonzalez, was “a pioneer” and “could match [Otto] Preminger, [Billy] Wilder and even [Alfred] Hitchcock, in his chutzpah, in his sense of drive, in his idea of the beauty of what a visual language cinema could be”.
A conga line of experts appear throughout the film proclaiming Farrow’s virtues. One critic describes his 1942 action-drama Wake Island as “one of the most astonishing war movies ever made” and his fellow director Philippe Mora (Mad Dog Morgan, The Return of Captain Invincible) calls 1944’s The Hitler Gang “the first American film to track the rise of Hitler”.
Farrow was also one of few Australians working in the old school Hollywood studio system. Vandenburg says there were “one or two” Australian cinematographers in Hollywood in that period but “I don’t think there’s another director who worked in the same period, in the same studios, who was Australian”.
For those partial to film noir – as every cineaste should be – good entry points into Farrow’s work include 1948’s The Big Clock and 1950’s Where Danger Lives – two tight, twisty, pacey crime thrillers starring Ray Milland and Robert Mitchum respectively. One unfortunate consequence of his low profile, however, is that many of his films are difficult to find.
Farrow’s many faces
Farrow’s life outside cinema was stranger than fiction, encompassing adventures that sound like flourishes from Errol Flynn’s famously tall tale-filled autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways. And yet he really did (according to Man in the Shadows) masquerade as a doctor, which horrified his family; he really did take to the high seas and become a sailor; he really wrote the Tahitian-English-French dictionary; he really did fight in various revolutions, and on and on we go. Man in the Shadows was made with assistance from Farrow’s family, and includes interviews with his son John Charles Farrow and cousin Jim Farrow.
So, why did history forget about John Farrow? The film-makers believe one important factor is that he didn’t big-note himself or his work. Vandenburg describes this as one of the director’s few “Australianisms”.
Directors such as Hitchcock, Wilder and Preminger, Vandenburg says, “obviously knew what they were doing, but they also made a great fuss about what they were doing and how they were doing it”.
“Hitchcock notoriously feted publicists and there are many, many interviews with him,” Gonzalez says. “There are none with Farrow about his work.”
The co-directors also believe Farrow’s apparent willingness to direct any movie the studios assigned to him left an impression that he wasn’t a serious auteur. “He amassed this workload, basically taking on whatever project they threw at him,” Vandenburg says “He wasn’t credited as having a particular style – but we discovered, looking at his work, that he does have a particular style, and can be credited as an auteur because of his love for things like lengthy tracking shots.”
But it’s not all high praise – the documentary acknowledges Farrow’s reputation for being notoriously difficult to work with. .
One interviewee doesn’t pull any punches, saying Farrow was known for being “very sadistic, very cruel and overbearing” and “something of a monster”. The film explores the familiar tension between the greatness of the artist versus the sins of the person, with even his own son describing the director as “a dictator on set” and reflecting that he “had a couple of meltdowns working with him, as a lot of people did in Hollywood”.
On top of that, Gonzalez explains, “he was a philandering husband, a person who had a secret life outside of family, who had a second family, who had illegitimate children”.
“So he was a very complicated personality … and in the end he was critical of Hollywood society, seeing it as very money-driven, full of people hungry for power.”
Gonzalez says Farrow became “very much guilt-ridden about what he was involved in – the idea of seeking fame and fortune through this medium”. This is another factor helping to potentially explain why he’s been overlooked and under-appreciated, suggesting the director’s omission from the history books may have been partly of his own volition.
The engraving on Farrow’s headstone doesn’t mention his film career. “He’s described as a sailor and poet, a loved husband and father – and there is no mention of being a film-maker,” Vandenburg says. “That sums up a lot.”
John Farrow: Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows is airing in select cinemas as part of Sydney film festival, and is available for streaming on SFF On Demand
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