Dudley Murphy | |
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| Born | (1897-07-10)July 10, 1897 Winchester, Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | February 22, 1968(1968-02-22) (aged 70) Mexico City, Mexico |
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Dudley Bowles Murphy (July 10, 1897 – February 22, 1968) was an American film director.
Murphy was born on July 10, 1897, inWinchester, Massachusetts, to the artists Caroline Hutchinson (Bowles) Murphy (1868–1923) andHermann Dudley Murphy (1867–1945), both accomplishedModernist landscape painters. After first finding work as a journalist, Dudley Murphy began making films in the early 1920s.[1]
In his firstshort film,Soul of the Cypress (1921), a variation on theOrpheus myth, the film's protagonist falls in love with a dryad (a wood nymph whose soul dwells in an ancient tree) and throws himself into the sea to become immortal and spend eternity with her. Murphy's then-wife Chase Harringdine played the dryad. Murphy followed this withDanse Macabre (1922) featuringAdolph Bolm,Olin Howland, andRuth Page. Both of these early films are in the DVD collectionUnseen Cinema issued in October 2005.
Murphy's eighth film,Ballet mécanique, which he co-directed with the French artistFernand Léger, premiered on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna. Considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking,Ballet mécanique also included creative input fromMan Ray andEzra Pound, and was presented at the exposition byFrederick Kiesler. The film was scheduled to be screened withGeorge Antheil's masterpiece of the same name. However, the music ran close to 30 minutes while the film was 17 minutes long. In 2000, Paul Lehrman produced a married print of the film.[2]
In her bookDudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card, film historian Susan Delson argues persuasively that Murphy was the film's driving force but that Léger was more successful at promoting the film as his own creation.Ballet mécanique, with theGeorge Antheil music originally written for the film, was included in the DVD collectionUnseen Cinema released in October 2005.
In addition toBallet mécanique, Murphy is best remembered forSt. Louis Blues (1929) withBessie Smith andJimmy Mordecai,Black and Tan (1929) withDuke Ellington and His Orchestra,Confessions of a Co-Ed (1931),The Sport Parade (1932) withJoel McCrea, andThe Emperor Jones (1933), starringPaul Robeson.
In 1932, Murphy helped introduce the Mexican artistDavid Alfaro Siqueiros to prominent people in the Los Angeles community. To show his gratitude, Siqueiros painted a mural on a wall in Murphy's Pacific Palisades home. The only intact mural by Siqueiros in the United States,Portrait of Mexico Today was donated anonymously to theSanta Barbara Museum of Art in 1999.
From the late 1940s through the 1960s Murphy and his fourth wife, Virginia, owned and operated Holiday House, an exclusive Malibu hotel designed byRichard Neutra and favored by the Hollywood elite.
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