Samuel Bischoff

Biography

Samuel Bischoff, a Connecticut-born graduate of Boston University and Northwestern College, was trained as a Certified Public Accountant and naturally viewed the film industry from a financial, rather than artistic, perspective. In 1922, he formed his own production and distribution company, which, for six years, released short comedies made on shoe-string budgets, including the early Stan Laurel effort Mixed Nuts (1922), and a series of twelve two-reelers for Mack Sennett, starring Eddie Gribbon and Mildred June. From 1926, Bischoff turned out feature films for Poverty Row studios like Mascot and Tiffany, where his budget-conscious methodology sufficiently impressed the ever-frugal Columbia boss Harry Cohn to hire him as supervising producer. In 1932, he moved on to work at Warner Brothers, primarily as associate producer for the B-unit. In that capacity, his only credited A-grade features were the gangster melodramas The Roaring Twenties (1939) and Castle on the Hudson (1940). Having acquired the taste for more ambitious projects, Bischoff produced a string of popular escapist films for Columbia and RKO between 1941 and 1956. These included the lavish musical You'll Never Get Rich (1941), the mystery-comedy A Night to Remember (1942), the tongue-in-cheek fairy-tale adventure A Thousand and One Nights (1945) and the Robert Mitchum - Jane Russell film noir Macao (1952). His final six films were released under the banner of his short-lived Bischoff-Diamond Corporation, the last being the Alfred Hitchcock wannabe The Strangler (1964).