Joshua Logan

Joshua Logan (born October 5, 1908, Texarkana, Texas, U.S.—died July 12, 1988, New York, New York) was an American stage and motion-picture director, producer, and writer. Best known as the stage director who brought to Broadway such classics as Charley’s Aunt (1940), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Mister Roberts (1948), South Pacific (1949), and Fanny (1954)—the last three of which he coauthored—Logan also carved out a small but significant place for himself in Hollywood during the 1950s and ’60s.

Early work

Logan attended but did not graduate from Princeton University (1927–31), where he was active in the Triangle Club, the university’s venerable musical theatre troupe. He was also a member of the University Players, the summer-stock retinue on Cape Cod that helped launch the careers of James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, and Henry Fonda, among others. During his last year at Princeton, Logan earned a scholarship that allowed him to study acting under Konstantin Stanislavsky in Moscow.

Logan made his Broadway debut as an actor in 1932 and soon began working as an assistant stage manager and then as a director. His Hollywood career began in the mid-1930s, when he worked as a dialogue director on a pair of films starring Charles Boyer. In 1938 Logan and Arthur Ripley codirected Fonda in I Met My Love Again. Shortly thereafter Logan chose to return to Broadway, where his initial successes as a director included On Borrowed Time (1938), I Married an Angel (1938), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), and Charley’s Aunt (1940). On the musicals Higher and Higher (1940) and By Jupiter (1942), he worked with composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart.

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Films and plays of the 1940s and ’50s

After serving in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, Logan directed the highly successful musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946), which was produced by Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Logan cowrote and directed Mister Roberts (1948) and then cowrote and coproduced (with Rodgers and Hammerstein) as well as directed the classic musical South Pacific (1949), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Among other popular plays that he directed were Happy Birthday (1945), John Loves Mary (1946), Fanny (1954), and The World of Suzie Wong (1958).

Logan returned to filmmaking as the director of Picnic (1955), the film version of William Inge’s play of the same name, which Logan had also directed. Another Inge play provided the basis for Logan’s next film, Bus Stop (1956), in which the director coaxed from Marilyn Monroe what some critics believe to be one of her best performances while guiding Don Murray to an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. Even better received was Sayonara (1957), a story of interracial love and institutional bigotry involving U.S. soldiers on leave in Japan during the Korean War. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, Logan was nominated for best director, Marlon Brando was nominated for best actor, and Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki won the awards for best supporting actor and best supporting actress. Logan was then given the opportunity to make South Pacific (1958), a big-budget film version of the musical that had been a Broadway blockbuster for years. Although the film was eagerly anticipated by moviegoers, it was not well received by many critics, some of whom disparaged Logan’s use of filters to suffuse the screen with dominant colours that he felt reflected the moods of musical numbers.

Films and plays of the 1960s

Logan’s next film, the romantic comedy Tall Story (1960)—starring Anthony Perkins and Ray Walston and adapted from the Howard Lindsay–Russel Crouse play—was notable primarily for being Jane Fonda’s film debut. Having adapted Marcel Pagnol’s comedy Fanny as a stage musical in 1954, Logan transferred the musical to film in 1961, with Boyer, Leslie Caron, and Maurice Chevalier in the lead roles. Both the film and the score were nominated for Academy Awards. Produced, directed, and cowritten by Logan, Ensign Pulver (1964) was less likable than its predecessor, Mister Roberts (1955), the screenplay for which Logan had cowritten.

In the meantime Logan did not completely forsake stage work: he directed All American (1962), Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright (1962), and Ready When You Are, C.B. (1964), among other productions. He was back behind the camera for Camelot (1967), the film version of the popular Broadway musical of the same name by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, which was based on Theodore H. White’s novel The Once and Future King (1958). Although the film, which starred Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave, was a favourite of many fans of traditional musicals, it was a box-office disappointment and was widely regarded by critics as ponderous and overlong.

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Logan closed out his film career with Paint Your Wagon (1969), a lumbering, expensive ($20 million) musical western, with unlikely co-stars Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, a script by Paddy Chayefsky, and Lerner-and-Loewe songs (from the 1951 stage musical on which it was based). Like Paint Your Wagon, Logan’s late-career stage productions failed to find significant audiences.

On a couple of occasions in his life, Logan had been hospitalized for mental illness, and, after becoming aware that he suffered from bipolar disorder and that it could be controlled with medication, he became a vocal spokesman for those who suffered from the malady.