Rowland Brown
Rowland Brown, born Chauncey Rowland Brown in Canton, Ohio, was an American screenwriter and film director, whose career as a director ended in the early 1930s after he started many more films than he finished. He walked out of State's Attorney, starring John Barrymore. He was abruptly replaced as director of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
As a writer, he was credited with twenty or so films including two Academy Award nominations, one in the 11th Academy Awards for Best Original Story Angels with Dirty Faces and another in the 4th Academy Awards for Doorway to Hell.
Early life
Chauncey Rowland Brown was the first child of Hannah and Samuel Gilson Brown, native Ohioans. In 1900, the year Rowland was born, his father was a thirty-year-old electrician in Canton, Ohio. Twelve and a half years later he had become a successful realtor in the same town. Then, on April 4, 1913, the family was packed and ready to leave for Panama, when Samuel Gilson Brown had a massive heart attack. He was rushed to an Akron hospital, where he died.. Samuel Brown's unexpected death left his widow, Hannah Rowland Brown, to raise their four children, Chauncey, Samuel Gilson, Marguerite, and Jean) alone. By default, twelve-year-old Chauncey had become the "man of the family."In 1915, Hannah married Walter J. Maytham, a successful engineer, who brought along his own five children. Two years later, on April 6, 1917, when the U.S. declared war on Germany, forty-year-old Walter Maytham and sixteen-year-old Rowland Brown rushed to enlist. Both were turned down, Maytham because of a "deformed toe" and Brown because he was too young. November 9, 1917, three days after Chauncey turned sixteen, Hannah gave birth to her third son, John Rowland Maytham.
Military service
Because of his earlier rejection by the United States Navy, on his second try Rowland Brown lied about his age. The fictitious year of birth, 1897, appears on his subsequent registration in the Navy Auxiliary Reserve and is widely given in books and web sources. For all of his desire to participate in the war, The Official Roster of Ohio Soldiers in World War I, page 240, shows that Brown wasn't called to active duty until November 4, 1918. He had just one week of active duty, which he served at Great Lakes Naval Training Station on the shore of Lake Michigan — just in time to hear the guns of the War to End all Wars" fall silent. The roster shows that he served as a seaman second class for an additional 135 days, before being released on April 27, 1919. He received an honorable discharge on September 30, 1921, the cause being a "lack of funds."Education
Brown attended University School in Cleveland, Ohio. According to Film historian, John C. Tibbetts, Brown attended the University of Detroit and Detroit School of Fine Arts. The occasional references to his having attending Harvard, perhaps confused him with his eldest son, who earned two Harvard degrees.)Marriage and children
Rowland Brown was married three times: in 1921 to Rhea Widrig; in 1940 to ; in 1946 to actress, Karen Van Ryn. He had five children: Rowland C.W. Brown, 1923; Megan Brown, 1927-2023 Steven Brown, 1942–2010; Daphne Browne; and Craig Brown, all of whom survived him.Reputation
Chauncey Rowland Brown's reputation preceded him and led to many rumors. It was said he knew a little too much about gangsters; that he must have been a communist because he thought capitalism was flawed; that he was hot headed and irresponsible; that he had been a professional boxer; that he was a heavy drinker.Underworld ties
The most pervasive rumors concerned Brown's ties to well known gangsters. Legend has it that he survived as a bootlegger during Prohibition in the United States. Another rumor was that before he came to Hollywood, he had been a bodyguard for a Detroit gangster. He apparently knew Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, but not well. The 1967 paperback We Only Kill Each Other: The life and bad times of Bugsy Siegel includes an anecdote in which Brown and Siegel meet at Santa Anita and threaten to commit various degrees of mayhem on each other.Brown, described as a thin and wiry man, responds to Siegel's threat by saying,"I'm just as tough as you are, and I know your pals Frank Costello and Frank Nitti and I've got a mind to call 'em and report what you said." Siegel' or his biographer's description of Brown differs from his friend, Gene Fowler's, who described Brown as "hulking." Philip Dunne described him as a "big bear of a man."
Nothing in Dean's anecdote suggests a friendship. The situation described in Jennings's book called for a bluff. Gangster rumors enhanced Brown's writing and consulting career, lending "authenticity" to his films.
Red rumors
In the early 1930s, the country had seen what many believed to be the failure of capitalism. Banks were failing; the high unemployment rate resulted in bread lines and the dust bowl resulted in a great westward migration of homeless and desperate farm families, as a consequence, many Americans, whether intellectuals, artists or factory workers had their eyes on the Soviet Union, thinking it was possible that an economy based on something other than "free enterprise" might lead to a more stable society. Many American writers and artists joined the Communist Party.In his 1956 paperback, The Left Side of the Screen, Bob Herzberg described Rowland Brown as "an angry and short-tempered Communist" who "punched out a Fox producer in the early 1930s." Brown was neither a member of the Communist Party, nor a fellow traveler," but because of the implied critique of capitalism some found in his gangster movies, he was suspected. Brown, himself, furthered that reputation by announcing that he had sent a congratulatory telegram to the U.S.S.R. on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
Furthermore, Brown and his brother, , had accepted a Soviet invitation to make a film in Russia. They got as far as New York before changing their minds and turning back. Neither of the brothers was included on the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy Era. Even though Samuel Ornitz, who had worked with Brown on Hell's Highway, was one of The Hollywood Ten, Brown was never called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Sparred Jack Dempsey
Rowland Brown himself claimed to have knocked Jack Dempsey down, and it is true that he once sparred with Dempsey, though it is unclear whether he actually knocked him down. Gene Fowler, who was Dempsey's longtime friend, recalls a conversation with the former champion. Dempsey said that Brown "hung a right hand on my whiskers and I felt sort of groggy and futile ... He gave me plenty and he took plenty. ..." In the same article, Fowler consoles Dempsey by saying Brown had to be hospitalized after the fight.Punched producer?
Brown did in fact punch a producer, knocking him down, but no one can say which producer it was. Some writers say it was David O. Selznick, who fired him in anger over script changes for A Star is Born. In Sixty Years of Hollywood, John Baxter asserts the victim was the producer of The Devil is a Sissy, Frank Davis, and that this resulted in Brown's being replaced as director of the film. There is no question about Brown's having punched a producer; the question is whether the punch was career-ending.Use of alcohol
This was a popular rumor and would seem to be a reasonable assumption as Brown's behavior became increasingly erratic. However, Philip Dunne's is the only mention by one of his contemporaries of Brown's drinking. Fowler, quoting a mutual acquaintance, wrote "the novelist made affidavit " doesn't drink or smoke had on the entire industry.In her 1936 article, "Joining Sight and Sound," The New York Times film critic, Janet Graves discussed the problems that surfaced during the first few years that lead to their becoming "deadly 100 percent Talkies." She asserted film had become "hypnotized by the sound of its own voice." She said that words should neither reduce the camera work nor refute what the camera says. Graves praised Rowland Brown as one of the few writers or directors to go against the tide of words.
She credits Brown with "the first appearance of a style that remains unique in the development of motion picture dialogue "both in Doorway to Hell and Quick Millions." Graves illustrates Brown's style with the final scene from Quick Millions, in which the gang leader, Spencer Tracy says, "take your elbow out of my ribs," and the lieutenant says, "That's not my elbow." An unseen hand pulls down a shade and the audience hears two shots. End of movie! In comparison, Graves points to Franchot Tone's "pretty speech" at the end of Mutiny on the Bounty suggesting the words get lost against the dramatic background.
Broader issues, both political and moral, troubled the developing movie industry. With the stock market crash in 1929, and general economic turbulence, many writers who had begun to question both the survival and moral basis of capitalism; others felt Marxism was the greater threat to a democratic society. Racial and religious discrimination had been institutionalized. Prohibition had empowered gangsters and made drinking chic.
Reformists saw the silver screen as the perfect vehicle for presenting social issues. Others saw it as a canvas on which to display "ARS GRATIA ARTIS”—Art for art's sake—the motto of MGM. Others outside of the industry itself saw film as an entirely corrupting influence on society, in need of regulation. Young Rowland Brown, arriving from the Midwest with a handful of one-act plays, just hoped to address those issues, all of them, with the tools he had at hand. He soon discovered the many impediments to doing so.