George Archainbaud

George Archainbaud (May 7, 1890 – February 20, 1959) was a French-American film and television director. In the beginning of his career he worked on stage as an actor and manager. He came to the United States in January 1914, and started his film career as an assistant director to Emile Chautard at the World Film Company in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1917 he made his own directorial debut As Man Made Her. During the next three and a half decades he directed over one hundred films. After the beginning of the 1950s he moved to television.

While working at RKO Radio Pictures in the beginning of the 1930s, he showed some artistic and skillful eye with many of his films. The finest examples include Thirteen Women (1932), a story of ethnic discrimination and revenge, with Myrna Loy as a half-caste Hindu; The Lost Squadron (1932), a memorable thriller about Hollywood stunt flyers, who risk their lives under the direction of monstrous Erich von Stroheim; Penguin Pool Murder (1932) and Murder on the Blackboard (1934), the first two films of the RKO trilogy starring Edna May Oliver as Miss Hildegarde Withers, a teacher and amateur investigator created by American writer Stuart Palmer; and later in his career the RKO drama Hunt the Man Down (1950), a film noir starring Gig Young which seems more concerned in showing the post-war transformation of seven characters since 1938, than the investigation to solve a murder case.

Although Archainbaud directed films of all genres, he is nowadays mainly linked with westerns. In fact, it was not until the last decade of his directorial career until he specialized in them. With the producer Harry Sherman he made several Hopalong Cassidy oaters. Later he was also one of the principal directors of Gene Autry's Flying A Productions, at which he made several episodes for such weekly television series as Buffalo Bill, Jr., Annie Oakley and The Adventures of Champion.

In 1921 he married actress Katherine Johnston (1890 – 1969), whose last film was The Flapper (1920). He died in 1959 and is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale).