Birthday:
01-29-1891
Deathday:
12-04-1968 (77 years)
Birthplace:
New York City, New York, USA
Biography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Archie Mayo (29 January 1891, New York City – 4 December 1968, Guadalajara, Mexico) was a movie director and stage actor who moved to Hollywood in 1915 and began working as a director in 1917. His films include Is Everybody Happy? (1929) with Ted Lewis, Night After Night (1932) with Mae West, The Doorway to Hell (1930) with James Cagney and Lew Ayres, Convention City (1933) with Joan Blondell, The Mayor of Hell (1933) with James Cagney, The Petrified Forest (1936) with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, and The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938) with Gary Cooper. Mayo retired in 1946, shortly after completing A Night in Casablanca with the Marx Brothers and Angel on My Shoulder with Paul Muni, Anne Baxter, and Claude Rains. Mayo has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Archie Mayo, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Archie Mayo (29 January 1891, New York City – 4 December 1968, Guadalajara, Mexico) was a movie director and stage actor who moved to Hollywood in 1915 and began working as a director in 1917. His films include Is Everybody Happy? (1929) with Ted Lewis, Night After Night (1932) with Mae West, The Doorway to Hell (1930) with James Cagney and Lew Ayres, Convention City (1933) with Joan Blondell, The Mayor of Hell (1933) with James Cagney, The Petrified Forest (1936) with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, and The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938) with Gary Cooper. Mayo retired in 1946, shortly after completing A Night in Casablanca with the Marx Brothers and Angel on My Shoulder with Paul Muni, Anne Baxter, and Claude Rains. Mayo has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Archie Mayo, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Read morearrow_drop_down
Their works
- Release swap_vert
- Title swap_vert
- Ratings swap_vert
close
A Rarin’ Romeo
Director
event1925
top_panel_open
A 1925 comedy featuring Walter Hiers and Jack Duffy. A theater company does a unique presentation of the Shakespeare classic after consuming gasoline in their drinks.
Angel on My Shoulder
Director
event1946 star_border 6.4
top_panel_open
The Devil arranges for a deceased gangster to return to Earth as a well-respected judge to make up for his previous life.
The Speeder
Story
event1922
top_panel_open
The Speeder is a 1922 comedy short
A Night in Casablanca
Director
event1946 star_border 6.8
top_panel_open
The Marx Brothers are employed at a hotel in postwar Casablanca, where a ring of Nazis is trying to recover a cache of stolen treasure.
Bordertown
Director
event1935 star_border 5.9
top_panel_open
An ambitious Mexican-American gets mixed up with the neurotic wife of his casino boss.
The Doorway to Hell
Director
event1930 star_border 6.3
top_panel_open
A vicious crime lord decides that he has had enough and much to the shock of his colleagues decides to give the business to his second in command and retire to Florida after marrying his moll. Unfortunately, he has no idea that she and the man are lovers.
Moontide
Director
event1942 star_border 6.4
top_panel_open
After a drunken night out, a longshoreman thinks he may have killed a man.
Black Legion
Director
event1937 star_border 6.6
top_panel_open
When a hard-working machinist loses a promotion to a Polish-born worker, he is seduced into joining the secretive Black Legion, which intimidates foreigners through violence.
Charley's Aunt
Director
event1941 star_border 5.8
top_panel_open
In 1890, two students at Oxford force their rascally friend and fellow student to pose as an aunt from Brazil--where the nuts come from.
Orchestra Wives
Director
event1942 star_border 5.8
top_panel_open
Connie Ward is in seventh heaven when Gene Morrison's band rolls into town. She is swept off her feet by trumpeter Bill Abbot. After marrying him, she joins the band's tour and learns about life as an orchestra wife, weathering the catty attacks of the other band wives.
The Petrified Forest
Director
event1936 star_border 7
top_panel_open
Gabby, the waitress in an isolated Arizona diner, dreams of a bigger and better life. One day penniless intellectual Alan drifts into the joint and the two strike up a rapport. Soon enough, notorious killer Duke Mantee takes the diner's inhabitants hostage. Surrounded by miles of desert, the patrons and staff are forced to sit tight with Mantee and his gang overnight.
The House Across the Bay
Director
event1940 star_border 5.3
top_panel_open
Nightclub owner Steve Larwitt sees his empire of investments collapse as he faces tax evasion charges and attacks by rivals. Believing Steve will be safer in prison for one year, his wife, Brenda, testifies against him on advice from his lawyer, Slant Kolma, who is in love with her. After Steve receives 10 years in Alcatraz, Brenda moves to be near him and avoids advances of airplane builder Tim Nolan, who knows nothing about her past.
Svengali
Director
event1931 star_border 6.1
top_panel_open
A music maestro uses hypnotism on a young model he meets in Paris to make her both his muse and wife.
Night After Night
Director
event1932 star_border 6.1
top_panel_open
A former boxer purchases a classy speakeasy and falls in love with a wealthy society girl.
The Man with Two Faces
Director
event1934 star_border 6.5
top_panel_open
Actress Jessica Wells, sister of actor Damon Wells, is on top of her form except when her husband Vance is around. When Vance takes her to the apartment of a theatrical producer she comes home incoherent and Vance is found dead in the vanished producer's hotel suite
Crash Dive
Director
event1943 star_border 6.2
top_panel_open
A US Navy submarine, the USS Corsair, is operating in the North Atlantic, hunting German merchant raiders that are preying on Allied shipping. Its new executive officer, Lt. Ward Stewart, has been transferred back into submarines after commanding his own PT boat. At the submarine base in New London, Connecticut, he asks his new captain, Lt. Cmdr. Dewey Connors, for a weekend leave to settle his affairs before taking up his new assignment. On a train bound for Washington D.C., Stewart accidentally encounters New London school teacher Jean Hewlett and her students. Despite her initial resistance to his efforts, he charms her and they fall in love.
The Mayor of Hell
Director
event1933 star_border 7.1
top_panel_open
Members of a teenage gang are sent to the State Reformatory, presided over by the callous Thompson. Soon Patsy Gargan, a former gangster appointed Deputy Commissioner, arrives and takes over the administration to run the place on radical principles. Thompson needs a quick way to discredit him.
Under Eighteen
Director
event1932 star_border 6.6
top_panel_open
Working girl Margie Evans has decided there are two kinds of opportunities for a slum kid during the Depression: Those you make and those you take. Determined to help her family out of its financial bind, she is ready to do both after she shows up at the penthouse pool bash of a wealthy playboy.
Confirm or Deny
Director
event1941 star_border 3.8
top_panel_open
Newsman Mitch and teletype operator Jennifer, whose job is to see he doesn't send inappropriate stuff out of the country, dodge bombs during the blitz of London while falling in love.
Illicit
Director
event1931 star_border 5.8
top_panel_open
Ann, a young woman with outrageously advanced ideas, has been living in sin with Dick, her lover, because of her conviction that marriage would destroy their love; but social pressure ends up paying off, so Ann and Dick get married.
It's Love I'm After
Director
event1937 star_border 7
top_panel_open
An infatuated debutante renews a Shakespearean actor's running feud with his leading lady.
Four Sons
Director
event1940 star_border 7
top_panel_open
Four Sons is a 1940 film directed by Archie Mayo. It stars Don Ameche and Eugenie Leontovich. It is a remake of the 1928 film of the same name.
They Shall Have Music
Director
event1939 star_border 6
top_panel_open
The future is bleak for a troubled boy from a broken home in the slums. He runs away when his step father breaks his violin, ending up sleeping in the basement of a music school for poor children.
Gambling Lady
Director
event1934 star_border 6.3
top_panel_open
A businesslike syndicate runs all the gambling joints in town; least profitable is honest Mike Lee's. Under pressure to allow cheating, Mike "walks out," leaving tough-minded daughter Lady Lee to earn a living the only way she knows. She soon becomes a success gambling among the rich, but, falling out with the syndicate, she considers the marriage proposal of blueblood Garry Madison. Can such a match work despite snobbery and old associations?
The Case of the Lucky Legs
Director
event1935 star_border 6
top_panel_open
A con man who stages phony "lucky legs" beauty contests and leaves town with the money is found with a surgical knife in his heart by Mason.
Desirable
Director
event1934 star_border 7.3
top_panel_open
A man meets the daughter of his lover and they begin to fall in love.
The Adventures of Marco Polo
Director
event1938 star_border 6
top_panel_open
The Venetian traveler Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan and foils a plotter with fireworks in medieval China.
Ever in My Heart
Director
event1933 star_border 5.3
top_panel_open
World War I brings tribulations to an American woman married to a German.
Street of Women
Director
event1932 star_border 4.8
top_panel_open
An architect has an affair with a woman who inspires him. Her brother is in love with the architect's daughter. The complicated entanglement leads to misunderstanding and dissolution, but ultimately love.
Call It a Day
Director
event1937 star_border 5
top_panel_open
The various members of the middle-class Hilton family have a series of romantic misadventures during one eventful spring day.
Sweet and Low-Down
Director
event1944 star_border 5.2
top_panel_open
After their annual free concert at Chicago's Dearborn Settlement, Benny Goodman and his band are packing up to go to their next engagement when a kid steals Goodman's clarinet. Goodman and Popsie pursue him to a tenement flat where he has led them to hear his brother play the trombone. Shenanigans ensue following Goodman's offering the brother a job with the band.
Bought!
Director
event1931 star_border 6
top_panel_open
Working-class girl dreams of living a better life and forsakes her friends when she has a chance to break into high society.
Two Against the World
Director
event1932 star_border 5.6
top_panel_open
A socialite finds herself involved in a murder trial that is prosecuted by her boyfriend.
The Expert
Director
event1932 star_border 6.3
top_panel_open
An elderly gentleman arrives for an extended stay with his grown son in Chicago.
Reno or Bust
Director
event1924 star_border 7
top_panel_open
Bobby Vernon has just been married to Lila Lee, but her parents object and kidnap her to Reno, where, if not rescued, they will be divorced. It probably wouldn't hold up before a judge, but it does produce a fairly funny movie.
Wide Open
Director
event1930 star_border 5.3
top_panel_open
An eccentric, fluttery bachelor is dismayed to discover an undressed woman in his apartment.
Give Me Your Heart
Director
event1936 star_border 6
top_panel_open
An American lawyer's wife is reunited with her child and his father, an English nobleman.
The Life of Jimmy Dolan
Director
event1933 star_border 6
top_panel_open
Champion boxer Jimmy Dolan has cultivated a wholesome image for himself, but he's a boozer and womanizer behind the scenes. Intoxicated at a party, he punches a reporter who threatens to expose his hypocrisy, and accidentally kills him. Dolan panics and skips town, winding up on a farm that serves as a home for disabled children run by kindhearted Peggy. As the cynical Dolan falls for Peggy, he begins to change his ways.
I Married a Doctor
Director
event1936 star_border 4.7
top_panel_open
City girl marries country doctor, meets prejudice and exclusion when she tries to befriend the townspeople.
Go Into Your Dance
Director
event1935 star_border 7
top_panel_open
An irresponsible Broadway star gets mixed up with gambling and gangsters.
Convention City
Director
event1933 star_border 3.5
top_panel_open
Extra-marital fun and games at a convention of the Honeywell Rubber Company in Atlantic City. President J.B. Honeywell is to choose a new company sales manager. T.R. Kent and George Ellerbe are two salesmen who both want the job. However, they both get into trouble: T.R. is discredited when jealous saleswoman, Arlene Dale, interferes with his attempted seduction of Honeywell's daughter, Claire, and George attempts to seduce Nancy Lorraine. The position of sales manager is bestowed upon a drunken employee as a bribe after he catches J.B. about to visit "Daisy La Rue, Exterminator." Considered a lost film.
Quarantined Rivals
Director
event1927
top_panel_open
Elsie Peyton’s parents favor two different men for her. Dad likes Bruce Farney, as does Elsie while Mom prefers Bob Howard. The domineering Mrs. Peyton sees to it that football player Bruce is discouraged from taking Elsie to the game. Bruce stops in a barbershop where Minette, the manicurist flirts with him to make barber Ed jealous. Disappointed when he sees Elsie with Bob at the game Bruce follows them in his car. Meanwhile, Mrs. Peyton calls Minette to the house for a manicure. When the trio arrive from the game the house is suddenly placed under a 2-week quarantine for smallpox. Hilarious complications ensue as Bruce is obliged to room with his rival, but by a clever trick Bruce marries Elsie despite the quarantine.
Courage
Director
event1930
top_panel_open
Belle Bennett plays as the widowed mother of seven children living in Sioux City, Iowa. She moves with them to Cambridge, Massachusetts in order to educate her children with culture and give them every advantage. Bennett, who is unversed in financial matters, soon faces poverty for herself and her children. She takes out a loan from an unscrupulous lender (played by Richard Tucker), who is so impressed by the charm and valiant spirit of Bennett than he neglects to ask her for collateral. Bennett, however, is only able to partially pay her creditors. Marion Nixon, Bennett's eldest daughter, is shocked by her mother's actions and attempts to sacrifice herself to Tucker in order to clear her mother's obligations, even though she is engaged to marry a well to do Harvard undergraduate, played by Rex Bell. This film is believed lost.
Vengeance
Director
event1930 star_border 3.5
top_panel_open
John Meadham, in charge of a West Africa trading post, wire the home office in London that he is tired and worn out, and they need to send a replacement to take over. The company sends a stiff upper-lipper, Charles Summers, accompanied by his wife, Margaret. An antagonism develops between the two men from the moment Summers arrives.
The Beast of Budapest
Producer
event1958
top_panel_open
Archival footage combined with new footage re-creates the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. It is also a love story between a devout communist woman and the liberal son of a prominent professor. Because of their political differences, the two can never be together.
The Great American Broadcast
Director
event1941 star_border 5.4
top_panel_open
After WWI two men go into radio. Failure leads the wife of one to borrow money from another; she goes on, after separation, to stardom. A coast-to-coast radio program is set up to bring everyone back together.
Youth Takes a Fling
Director
event1938 star_border 1
top_panel_open
McCrea plays Joe Meadows, whose only ambition as a Kansas farm boy was a life at sea. He moves to New York to try to get a job as a sailor, finds it more difficult than he thought, and meets Helen Brown, who falls for him and uses her feminine wiles to try to prevent him leaving.
Oh, Sailor, Behave!
Director
event1930 star_border 7
top_panel_open
Based on the farcical stage play written by Pulitzer Prize-winning* writer Elmer Rice, Oh, Sailor Behave! is a movie Musical with a split personality. Nanette Dodge (Irene Delroy) falls for newspaper reporter Charlie Carroll (Charles King) who is on assignment in Venice to land an interview with Romanian General Skulany (Noah Beery). Our couple is split apart by a pair of storylines - Nanette tries to woo a Russian prince (Lowell Sherman) who is blackmailing her sister, while Charlie, following a lead to the general, finds himself Romantically involved with Kunegundi (Vivien Oakland), "the general's favorite."
Johnny Get Your Hair Cut
Director
event1927
top_panel_open
An orphan is adopted by a kindly old racehorse owner. He decides to pay back his benefactor by training to ride the horse so he can win an important race.
The Sap
Director
event1929
top_panel_open
A small town dimwit takes the blame for his brother-in-law's crime.
Christine of the Big Tops
Director
event1926 star_border 8
top_panel_open
When her circus-performer parents die in an accident, Christine (Pauline Garon) is raised by other circus-performers, including Hagan, a balloon-vender, and Pete Barman as her guardians. When she grows up, she asks to also become a performer, and Barman agrees. Bob Hastings (Cullen Landis) joins the traveling circus as its doctor, and he and Christine fall in love. This angers Barman, who is also in love with her.
Sonny Boy
Director
event1929
top_panel_open
Sonny Boy's parents are in the midst of a bitter divorce when the boy's mother talks her sister into kidnapping him because she is terrified that her husband will take the boy out of the country after the divorce.
My Man
Director
event1928
top_panel_open
Fannie Brand, an industrious girl who supports her brother and sister by working in a theatrical costume house, falls in love with Joe Halsey, a young fellow who earns a precarious living demonstrating an elastic exerciser in a drugstore window. Fannie and Joe set a date to be married, but the wedding is called off when Fannie finds Joe making love to her unprincipled sister, Edna. Fannie auditions for Landau, a theatrical producer, and goes on the Broadway stage. Fannie is a great success, and she and Joe soon find their way back into each other's arms.
Is Everybody Happy?
Director
event1929
top_panel_open
It is the story of Ted Lewis, popular band leader and clarinettist. The music for the film was written by Harry Akst and Grant Clarke, except for "St. Louis Blues" by W. C. Handy and "Tiger Rag". The film's title comes from Lewis's catchphrase "Is everybody happy?" The film's soundtrack exists on Vitaphone discs preserved at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, but the film itself is considered a lost film, according to the Vitaphone Project website. A five minute clip from the film can be found on YouTube.
Retribution
Director
event1928
top_panel_open
Henry B. Walthall made his talkie debut in this 10-minute short from Vitaphone. In the film he plays a once rich man who has found himself in the dumps due to drug abuse and other issues. He goes to see a former friend (Tom McGuire), now a Senator, and he's not too open to giving the man a second chance.
State Street Sadie
Director
event1928
top_panel_open
Unassuming clerk Tom Blake is framed for the murder of a policeman in the midst of a violent bank robbery. Considered a lost film.
On Trial
Director
event1928 star_border 6
top_panel_open
A man is put on trial for the murder of his best friend. A young attorney wants to become successful and decides to defend him. However, he is very inexperienced.
Money Talks
Director
event1926
top_panel_open
Sam Starling (Owen Moore) is deep in debt, his wife Phoebe (Claire Windsor) is leaving him and still he is confident. When Phoebe boards a luxury yacht and is wooed by the captain, Sam comes aboard as a woman and tries to seduce the captain (in fact, a liquor smuggler), away from his wife.
Slightly Used
Director
event1927
top_panel_open
Cynthia Martin’s father insists she marry before her two younger sisters Helen and Grace. So, she invents a husband for herself called Major Smith. Trouble begins when the fictitious husband Major John Smith materializes, bringing with him chaos and confusion.
The College Widow
Director
event1927
top_panel_open
Following another instance of the perennial defeat of the Atwater College football team, President Witherspoon is told that unless better athletes can be induced to come to Atwater, he will be asked to resign. Acting upon the suggestion of Professor Jelicoe, Jane, the professor's beautiful daughter, uses her personal charm to draw noted football stars from neighboring schools by a series of ruses at a vacationing spot. Billy Bolton, son of a financial magnate, falls for Jane and to prove himself registers under another name and works his way through school, attaining scholastic and athletic honors. Through the jealousy of another girl, Billy learns of Jane's trickery and persuades the athletes not to play;
Away We Go
Director
event1924
top_panel_open
Bobby Vernon was a talented comic actor during the silent era, who became a writer and comedy supervisor at Paramount for W.C. Fields and Bing Crosby, when the sound era arrived. Here Vernon stars with Duane Thompson, Lila Leslie and Victor Rodman in a 1924 classic originally released as RENO OR BUST.
Weak, But Willing
Director
event1926
top_panel_open
A devilish courtship.
Beware of Married Men
Director
event1928 star_border 1
top_panel_open
A press sheet printed in Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World in 1928 put forth the suggestion that “people in the need of a good hearty laugh should take this opportunity of getting it” by seeing a newly released comedy by Warner Bros., suggestively entitled Beware of Married Men. Since director Archie Mayo (The Petrified Forest) helmed this feature during the dying days of the silent era, the studio sought to enhance its commercial viability by embellishing the shot-silent picture with a synchronized music and effects soundtrack using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system. Ultimately, these efforts went for naught, as the picture failed at the box office and quickly disappeared from theaters.
The Crimson City
Director
event1928
top_panel_open
Gregory Kent is on the run for a crime he did not commit.
The Sacred Flame
Director
event1929 star_border 1
top_panel_open
Colonel Maurice Taylor of the Royal Flying Corps is hopelessly injured in an airplane crash immediately following his marriage to Stella. Maurice is non-functional in most of the physical areas of marriage that count, but Stella attends to his other needs faithfully for three years. Then his brother, Colin, shows up from South America, and he and Stella fall passionately in love and are making plans to run away together. Mother Taylor is aware of the romance, as is Nurse Weyland, who is secretly in love with Maurice, and now hates Stella for her careless attitude toward Maurice's patiently-borne sufferings. Maurice is also aware of the affair. He has a talk with his wife and brother. Complications arise.
Show more expand_more
keyboard_double_arrow_down