Clarence G. Badger

Biography

A graduate of the Boston Polytechnic Institute, Clarence Badger had a varied early career as an artist, stage actor, editor and journalist with several newspapers and magazines (including "The Youth's Companion") before entering the film business with Mack Sennett in 1915. At Sennett's Triangle-Keystone, his qualifications ensured rapid promotion to writer/director of numerous two-reel situation comedies. Badger's style was gentler, more subtle and based on character development, rather than on the prevalent visual slapstick. Several of his early shorts featured a young Gloria Swanson in the first stages of her climb to stardom. Badger was lured away from Sennett by Samuel Goldwyn in 1917 to direct a series of comedies with Will Rogers, including the small town farce Jubilo (1919), Doubling for Romeo (1921) and Honest Hutch (1920). During the 1920s, he worked for Paramount and Metro where his best films were the Civil War romp Hands Up! (1926), Potash and Perlmutter (1923), and the romantic comedy that made Clara Bow into a major star, It (1927). During the remainder of the decade, Badger directed some of the biggest names in the business, from Colleen Moore and Betty Compson, to Jack Buchanan and Bebe Daniels. Pick of the bunch among his last few directorial efforts (under contract to Warner Brothers/First National) was the high-spirited first-time screen adaptation of the Broadway hit musical No, No, Nanette (1930). There were also two back-to-back box office flops: the Herbert Fields musical The Hot Heiress (1931) and the woefully under-acted melodrama Woman Hungry (1931). These failures may have persuaded Badger to leave the industry. In 1935, he moved out of his Spanish colonial-style mansion in the Hollywood Hills and emigrated to Australia a year later. Except for a couple of independently produced melodramas filmed in New South Wales, Clarence G. Badger spent the remainder of his life in happy retirement.