On his deathbed, prolific filmmaker William Wellman told his son (and now biographer), "Don't feel sorry for me. I've lived the life of a hundred men." A decorated World War I hero, Wellman married four times, had eight children and, despite prickly relationships with actors and studio heads, directed 76 motion pictures from 1923 to 1958.
Wellman (1896-1975) earned the nickname "Wild Bill" when he moved to Paris and joined the French Foreign Legion as a fighter pilot. After being shot down, he returned home--and immediately enlisted in the U.S. Army, training pilots. His friend Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., helped him segue from small roles in silent films to writing and directing.
Unwilling to be typecast in a specific genre, Wellman's oeuvre included war films (Wings, which won the first Best Picture Academy Award in 1927), screwball comedies (Nothing Sacred, with Carole Lombard, 1937), gangster dramas (Public Enemy, with Edward G. Robinson, 1931), westerns (The Ox-Bow Incident, with Henry Fonda, 1941), adventure (The High and the Mighty, with John Wayne, 1952) and melodramas (A Star Is Born, 1937--which earned Wellman his only Academy Award, for his screenplay).
William Wellman, Jr.'s Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel is a film buff's delight: a gloriously detailed, no-holds-barred insider's look at his father's four-decade-long career working with a dazzling number of top stars. It's also filled with juicy on-set stories (including fistfights, decades apart, with Spencer Tracy and Anthony Quinn). Wellman previously wrote The Man and His Wings (about the making of his father's Wings) and the 1995 film documentary Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick. --Kevin Howell, reviewer and marketing consultant