I happened to have come across two mentions of Beaudine recently. One was rereading The Golden Turkey Awards, which listed him as a nominee (but not the winner) in the category of all-time worst director. But the other mention was in Secret Lives of Great Filmmakers and they pointed out that Beaudine had an amazing sixty-seven year long career.
Now I’m not claiming Beaudine was a misunderstood genius. But was he really all that bad but somehow able to keep getting work decade after decade? Or was a workmanlike director who did what he could with the third-rate material he was offered?
He kept being hired because he got the movie done on time and under budget. That counts for a lot.*
Granted Beaudine’s filmography is far from distinguished, but he would print even the most obviously blown scenes. And he seemed to insist that actors overemote as though they were in silent films. Note, too, that he moved seamlessly into TV, where the ability to finish a shoot on time was highly regarded.
Is the the worst director of all time? Well, when The Golden Turkey Awards came out, there was no IMDB, so you had to take their word for it. Beaudine’s long list of terrible movies (terrible from the get-go – not even Howard Hawks could have made them tolerable) was what people were basing their opinion on.
*I remember someone an editor in the comics biz telling the story about why he was using Artist X all the time when the artist clearly was second rate. He said, “Because he gets his pages done on time.”
There is at least one genuinely good movie in Beaudine’s filmography: Sparrows (1926), starring Mary Pickford. The last and best of her “girl” movies before she got her hair bobbed and went on to adult roles. The website Silent Era ranks it #58 in its list of Top 100 Silent Era Films.