Ray Nazarro

Biography

Boston-born Ray Nazarro began his movie career in the silent-film era, where he often worked as an assistant director. He started his directing career in 1932, beginning with shorts and graduating to low-budget quickie features for Poverty Row studios. He alternated between directing shorts and an assistant director on features--often on westerns at Columbia--for years. By 1945 he fell into directing westerns for that studio, a genre and a studio in which Nazarro would spent the vast majority of his career. He worked steadily for the next 20 years, churning out dozens and dozens of Columbia's westerns, including many in the "Durango Kid" series with Charles Starrett, and was at the helm of a slew of Columbia's musical westerns and low-budget hillbilly musicals, which featured such acts as The Hoosier Hotshots. As the era of the B western ended, Nazarro journeyed to Europe, where he turned out some "spaghetti westerns" and was one of several directors to work on a bizarre and trouble-plagued Jayne Mansfield film, Einer frisst den anderen (1964). He also returned to directing television series, a medium in which he had occasionally worked since the early 1950s -- again, mostly in westerns.