As soon as I could read, I started paying attention to the names that popped up again and again in the movies I liked — Sam Katzman, Roger Corman, William Witney, Joe Kane, Edward L. Cahn and on and on.
I’d see the same names over and over every weekday afternoon during The Three Stooges shorts. Didn’t know what these people did, but if they hung out with the Stooges, they must truly be giants among men. And I want to make sure we remember them.
Delmer “Del” Lord (October 7, 1894 – March 23, 1970)
Delmer Lord left his home town of Grimsby, Ontario for New York City with the idea of working in the theater, Instead, he ended up in Hollywood, working with Mack Sennett and appearing in a few of the Keystone Cops shorts.
Behind the camera, Lord was a master at car gags — crashing ’em, blowing ’em up, etc. — and became a director for Sennett.
Mack Sennett: “Putting a pie in Del Lord’s hand was like handing Rubens a brush and palette. He was an artist to his fingertips.”
Sennett had to close his Keystone Studios during the Depression, and Lord eventually made his way over to the Hal Roach Studios, where he directed things like The Taxi Boys shorts. After Roach, Lord did shorts at Paramount. Next, in the summer of 1934, Lord was working as a salesman at a relative’s car lot. Jules White happened along, looking for a car, and hired Lord to make shorts for Columbia, including some of the earlier Three Stooges films.
Del Lord was the best director of The Three Stooges — he made over three dozen of their shorts. Consider a few of the Stooges pictures he directed (and sometime wrote): Three Little Beers (1935), We Want Our Mummy (1939), A Plumbing We Will Go (1940) and Three Pests In A Mess (1944). His Stooge films probably set the pattern the other writers and directors followed.
After his time with The Three Stooges, Lord made a handful of Columbia shorts with folks like Hugh Herbert, some Judy Canova features (also at Columbia), and the second Bowery Boys picture, In Fast Company (1946), for Monogram. It’s one of their best. He passed away in 1970.
His features are fine, but they don’t have the pacing and knockabout genius he brought to the shorts. Lord was probably one of the finest directors of shorts, period. Some of his films are now over a hundred years old!
The Hannibal 8 