Rowland V. Lee

Rowland V. Lee (September 6, 1891 in Findlay, Ohio - December 21, 1975 in Palm Desert, California) was an American director, writer, actor and producer. He directed the 1940 black-and-white film The Son of Monte Cristo, starring Louis Hayward, Joan Bennett, George Sanders. He also directed The Tower of London (1939) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944).

Coming from a show business family (his parents were stage actors), Rowland V. Lee began his career as a child actor in stock and on Broadway. He interrupted his stage career for a stint as a Wall Street stockbroker, but gave that up after two years and returned to the stage. Lee was hired by Thomas H. Ince as an actor in 1915, and after service in World War I returned to Ince, but this time as a director.

Lee didn't specialize in any particular genre in the many films he directed, but several of his lower-budget horror films were especially effective in their grim, gritty atmosphere, and his last film, Captain Kidd (1945) with Charles Laughton, had the potential to be a first-rate adventure yarn, but was hampered by its low budget.

incorrectly referred to Rowland V. Lee as a British director. In fact, he was born in Ohio, educated at Columbia University, and spent several of his early professional years as a Broadway actor. After a brief "intermission" as a Wall Street stockbroker, Lee entered films as a member of producer Thomas Ince's stock company.

His showbiz career was interrupted again by World War I; afterwards, he returned to Ince, this time on the directorial staff. Lee's silent and sound output was varied if nothing else, embracing war melodramas, romances, musicals, westerns and horror films.

He was obviously influenced by the "Germanic" school of the late 1920s, carrying over this impressionistic style into such sound films as Zoo in Budapest (1933), Love From a Stranger (1937) and Son of Frankenstein (1939). He functioned as producer on several of his films, notably the 1935 version of The Three Musketeers (a foredoomed effort, wherein Lee was denied the cast and production facilities he'd asked for), 1938's Service Deluxe, and 1939's The Sun Never Sets and Tower of London (the latter a marvelous example of how to do a Shakespearean film without one single word from Shakespeare).

 Inactive in films between 1945 and 1959, Rowland V. Lee made a comeback as producer of The Big Fisherman (1959), a splashy adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas' book about Simon-Peter which suffered from threadbare production values, a largely uninspiring cast, and the blockbuster competition of another 1959 Biblical epic, Ben-Hur.