William Keighley

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William Keighley was one of Warner Brothers' middle-bracket directors through the 1930s and 1940s. His best films are the thrillers and gangster movies; in other genres he was polished but often ineffectual, being taken off the filming of The Adventures of Robin Hood (after completing half) for not putting enough steel into it.

He was an actor before establishing a solid reputation as a Broadway director in the 1920s. With the coming of sound, he gravitated to Hollywood, being given a few assignments as assistant director, ironically once to Michael Curtiz, the man who was ears later to replace him on Robin Hood. After co-directing two films with Howard Bretherton, Keighley was allowed to strike out on his own, but it was 1935 before he scored his first big success -- with G-Men, the gangster film that set James Cagney on the right side of the law. Keighley followed this by putting another mobster figure on the straight and narrow -- Edward G. Robinson in Bullets or Ballots. Keighley's best film outside the crime milieu was The Man Who Came to Dinner starring Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan and Monty Woolley.