
Archie Mayo
Directing
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.
Known For

After a drunken night out, a longshoreman thinks he may have killed a man.
Moontide

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.
A Night in Casablanca

The Devil arranges for a deceased gangster to return to Earth as a well-respected judge to make up for his previous life.
Angel on My Shoulder

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.
Crash Dive

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.
The House Across the Bay

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 Petrified Forest

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.
Orchestra Wives

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.
Black Legion

John Meadham, in charge of a West African trading post, wires the home office in London that he is tired and worn out and that 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.
Vengeance

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.
Youth Takes a Fling

An infatuated debutante renews a Shakespearean actor's running feud with his leading lady.
It's Love I'm After

A music maestro uses hypnotism on a young model he meets in Paris to make her both his muse and wife.
Svengali

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.
Illicit

A man meets the daughter of his lover and they begin to fall in love.
Desirable

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.
Convention City

The Venetian traveler Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan and foils a plotter with fireworks in medieval China.
The Adventures of Marco Polo

An ambitious Mexican-American gets mixed up with the neurotic wife of his casino boss.
Bordertown

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.
The Mayor of Hell

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.
They Shall Have Music

A successful ex-boxer opens a high-class speakeasy in what once was the childhood home of a formerly rich society girl.