Richard Wallace

Biography

Richard Wallace was born in Sacramento, California, in 1894. At 14 years of age he got a job as a theater projectionist, a job he held for four years. He later traveled to Los Angeles to get into the film industry, and wound up as an editor for such studios as Triangle and Robertson-Cole. His career was interrupted by service in the US Army Signal Corps during World War I, but upon his return he got a job with Fox Films as an editor, and eventually worked his way up to director. He spent several years directing comedy shorts for Universal, Mack Sennett and Hal Roach, and made his first feature in 1926, Syncopating Sue (1926). He worked for many years at Paramount, not quite an "A" director but more than a "B" director. One of his better, and most successful, films was Bombardier (1943), a war picture, and he got to work with John Wayne on the adventure epic Tycoon (1947).