John Brahm - Career

Career

He started his career in the theatre as an actor. After World War I he shuttled among Vienna, Berlin and Paris, eventually becoming a director, and was appointed resident director for acting troupes at the Deutsches Theater and the Lessing Theater, both in Berlin.

With the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Brahm left the country, first moving to England where he directed films for a while, after working as a movie production supervisor. He got a chance to direct his first film, a remake of D.W. Griffith's 1919 film by the same name as Broken Blossoms in 1936. He moved to the US the next year. He began his Hollywood career at Columbia Pictures and eventually moved to 20th Century-Fox. He directed the ill-fated Let Us Live, the true story of two men wrongly convicted of murder who were almost executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Authorities there were embarrassed by the incident and put pressure on the studio to cancel the film. The studio made the film nonetheless, but quietly, with a small budget.

In his book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, American film historian and critic Andrew Sarris states that Brahm "hit his stride" in the 1930s with "mood-drenched melodramas", suggesting that Brahm went into artistic decline after this period. Nevertheless, Sarris further notes that Brahm did not lack work, as he made "approximately 150 TV films" during a the 1950s and 1960s, directing numerous episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Brahm's last full-length film was Hot Rods to Hell.