Delmer Daves

[domino harvey]

Delmer Daves (1904-1977)



"To learn is to understand, and to understand is to love."


Filmography

Divorce in the Family (1932) (screenplay only)

No More Women (1934) (screenplay only)

Dames (1934) (screenplay only) R1 Warners

Flirtation Walk (1934) (screenplay only)

Stranded (1935) (screenplay only)

Page MIss Glory (1935) (screenplay only)

Shipmates Forever (1935) (screenplay only)

The Petrified Forest (1936) (screenplay only) R1 Warners

The Go Getter (1937) (screenplay only)

The Singing Marine (1937) (screenplay only)

She Married an Artist (1937) (screenplay only)

Professor Beware (1939) (screenplay only)

Love Affair (1939) (screenplay only) R1 PD

$1000 a Touchdown (1939) (screenplay only)

The Farmer's Daughter (1940) (story only)

Safari (1940) (screenplay only)

Young America Flies (1940) (screenplay only)

Unexpected Uncle (1941) (screenplay only)

Night of January 16th (1941) (screenplay only)

You Were Never Lovelier (1942) (screenplay only) R1 Columbia

Stage Door Canteen (1943) (screenplay only)

Destination Tokyo (1943) R1 Warners

The Very Thought of You (1944)

Hollywood Canteen (1944) R1 Warners

Pride of the Marines (1945) R1 Warner Archives

The Red House (1947) R1 PD

Dark Passage (1947) R1 Warners

To the Victor (1948)

A Kiss in the Dark (1949)

Task Force (1949) R1 Warner Archives

Broken Arrow (1950) R1 Fox

Bird of Paradise (1951) R1 PD

Return of the Texan (1952)

Treasure of the Golden Condor (1953)

Never Let Me Go (1953)

Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) R1 Fox

Drum Beat (1954)

White Feather (1955) (screenplay only) R1 Fox

Jubal (1956) R1 Sony

The Last Wagon (1956) R1 Fox

3:10 to Yuma (1957) R1 Sony

Cowboy (1958) R1 Sony

Kings Go Forth (1958) R1 MGM

The Badlanders (1958) R1 Warner Archives

The Hanging Tree (1959) R1 Warner Archives / R2 Warners Spain

A Summer Place (1959) R1 Warners

Parrish (1961) R1 Warners

Susan Slade (1961) R1 Warmers

Rome Adventure (1962) R1 Warners

Spencer's Mountain (1963) R1 Warners

Youngblood Hawke (1964)

The Battle of Villa FIorita (1965)


Forum Discussion

A Summer Place

Busby Berkeley Collections

Gangsters Collections

Warner Archives

Warner Romance Collection

[domino harvey]

I've been quite taken recently with Delmer Daves' oeuvre, which is on the whole a little hard to peg into auteurist arguments (at least so far, maybe a few more titles will flip some switches) but focusing solely on his romantic melodrama output yields some fairly identifiable traits. Certainly Daves is a master of juvenile melodrama, and I don't say this in the pejorative. Characters in a Daves film simply operate on the base level of young love and teenagedom-- his films offer keen observation of the flighty bonds of young love that nonetheless are never stronger than in those first few years of "adult" sexuality.

But what is teenage romance without the threat of perpetual doom? Though it's somewhat transparently shown in Susan Slade and A Summer Place, with its teenage protagonists, it's there even more starkly in the very-much-adult Clark Gable and Gene Tierney of Never Let Me Go, racing around in rowboats and fighting an entire country to consummate their love. So the universally appealing sense of working against hopelessness, which neatly mirrors the teenage fight against the world that just doesn't understand the egocentric universe youths build around themselves, is another hallmark of Daves romances.

And may I just say on a completely non-critical plane that these films, for all their sheen and soap, are entertaining as hell? And isn't that something? Seeing Troy Donahue exhaust himself on a tobacco farm for two plus hours while working his way through the loose woman, the ice princess, and the good girl to find happiness may be eye-rolling on paper, but it's shamelessly effective in execution. Above all, Daves' romances employ the very maxim of popular entertainment: that they entertain, and such entertainment has rarely been achieved so fluidly with so little.