In his three years at Warners, director William A. Wellman (1896-1975) would turn out an impressive seventeen pre-code films, most notably the James Cagney vehicle, 1931's The Public Enemy, and Wild Boys of the Road (1933). His western Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936) anticipated his better known Ox Bow Incident (1943) in its criticism of American mores. He made A Star is Born and Nothing Sacred respectively in 1937 in color for producer O Selznick, securing his only Oscar for the original story of A Star Is Born.
Nothing Sacred was penned by the prolific ex-Chicago newshawk Ben Hecht. Wellman then won a producer-director contract at Paramount where he successfully filmed three Robert Carson scripts, Men With Wings (1938) which concerned aerial warfare. Beau Geste in 1939. The French Foreign language tale and The Light That Failed (1939) which was derived from a Rudyard Kipling story with Ronald Colman as the painter slowly going blind and Ida Lupino as his cockney model.
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| Fancy meself a Picasso - Colman and Lupino canvas style in Nothing Sacred |
During the war he would matriculate from snappy and cynical satires that centered around hard-boiled dames such as a no holds barred Ginger Rogers in Roxie Hart (1942) and Barbara Stanwyck bringing the Gypsy Rose Lee novel to exhilarating life in Lady of Burlesque (1943) to the almost documentary immediacy of his celebrated war film The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)