Australian-born film director John Villiers Farrow began writing plays in the mid-1920s while he was a sailor; the most famous of these, A Registered Woman, was filmed in 1931 as A Woman of Experience. He later traversed the globe as a Marine researcher, spending several years in Tahiti, where he wrote a French-English Tahitian dictionary that served as a "standard" for decades. Hired by Hollywood to act as technical adviser for seafaring and naval films, Farrow turned to screenwriting in 1927. Extremely busy in this capacity in the 1930s, he managed to turn out two novels, The Laughter Ends (1934) and Damien the Leper (1937). While working on the screenplay of MGM's Tarzan Escapes, Farrow married the film's leading lady Maureen O'Sullivan. He was given his first opportunity to direct with the MGM Technicolor 2-reeler The Magic Spectacles (1936), stepping up to features in 1937. Though confined to "B" pictures at Warner Bros. and RKO, he garnered critical adulation for his innovative direction of such low-budgeters as The Saint Strikes Back (1939) and Five Came Back (1939).…  » Read more