---
name: "Harry Beaumont"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/harry-beaumont"
roles: ["Director"]
born: "10 February 1888"
died: "22 December 1966"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
average_as: "director"
average_over: 1
updated: "2026-09-19T21:25:35.648879+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Harry Beaumont

Director. Born 10 February 1888 in Abilene, Kansas, USA. Died 22 December 1966.

## Details

- **Work:** Director
- **Born:** 10 February 1888, Abilene, Kansas, USA
- **Died:** 22 December 1966
- **Academy Awards:** 1 Oscar nomination
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Beaumont, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q669045, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0064600/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/145605

## Streaming the US now

- **The Roku Channel:** [*The Broadway Melody*](https://film.one/film/the-broadway-melody.md) (60)

For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country.

## Fi1m on Harry Beaumont

> Harry Beaumont was a studio man who could get actors talking when the camera could barely move, and who finished his pictures on time. His one famous film, *The Broadway Melody* (1929), shows both the skill and its limits.

Two sisters in a hotel room, one bed, one man between them. That is the stretch of *The Broadway Melody* (1929) that still plays, and it is the part Harry Beaumont knew how to direct. He puts the camera where it can see both women, gets them talking and lets Bessie Love do the rest. Nobody sings. It is the best half hour in the first all-talking musical, and the singing has nothing to do with it.

Beaumont came up the long way. He acted in travelling stock companies, then on the New York stage, and joined Edison in 1912 as an actor and writer before he began directing in 1915. Through the 1920s he moved between studios and settled at MGM, where he made silents built around stars: *Beau Brummel* (1924) for John Barrymore, and *Our Dancing Daughters* (1928), the flapper picture that helped launch Joan Crawford. We have not reviewed either, but they tell you what the studio thought he was for. He was the man you gave a star to.

Then sound arrived and MGM gave him its first all-talking musical. The technical problem was real: early sound meant the camera had to sit inside a soundproof booth, and the production of *The Broadway Melody* found a way to make the booth mobile. What reaches the screen is still a camera that barely stirs. Beaumont directs the talk well and the spectacle hardly at all. When the stage numbers come on, they arrive, sit there and leave. We were bored for a good half hour in the middle, and we were bored because a chorus line filmed from a fixed seat in the stalls is not a film, it is a seat in the stalls. Then the picture went back upstairs to the sisters and we sat forward again.

That was the peak. *Lord Byron of Broadway* (1930) followed, another musical, and after that his work shifted to lower-budget features and second features, mostly at MGM, until *Alias a Gentleman* in 1948. His reputation inside the studio was for efficiency, for finishing on time and without fuss, and that is not a small thing in a factory. It is not, on its own, a reason to seek out his films.

Watch *The Broadway Melody* for Bessie Love and the hotel room, and treat the numbers as an interval. Of the rest, the Barrymore and Crawford silents are the ones to be curious about. The twenty years after 1929 are for completists.

## Biography

Harry Beaumont (1888–1966) was an American film director, actor and screenwriter. He began working in the industry as an actor with Edison studios around 1912 before directing from 1915, later working for studios including Fox, Goldwyn, Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Beaumont directed several notable silent-era films, including *Beau Brummel* (1924) with John Barrymore and *Our Dancing Daughters* (1928) starring Joan Crawford. He directed MGM's first sound musical, *The Broadway Melody* (1929), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; Beaumont received a nomination for Best Director.

He was married to actress Hazel Daly, with whom he had twin daughters born in 1922.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *The Broadway Melody* (1929), Fi1m 60, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/the-broadway-melody.md)

## Complete filmography (88)

Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page.

- *Alias a Gentleman* (1948), Director
- *Undercover Maisie* (1947), Director
- *The Show-Off* (1946), Director
- *Up Goes Maisie* (1946), Director
- *Twice Blessed* (1945), Director
- *Maisie Goes to Reno* (1944), Director
- *When's Your Birthday?* (1937), Director
- *The Girl on the Front Page* (1936), Director
- *Enchanted April* (1935), Director
- *Murder in the Private Car* (1934), Director
- *Should Ladies Behave* (1933), Director
- *When Ladies Meet* (1933), Director
- *Made on Broadway* (1933), Director
- *Faithless* (1932), Director
- *Unashamed* (1932), Director
- *Are You Listening?* (1932), Director
- *West of Broadway* (1931), Director
- *The Great Lover* (1931), Director
- *Laughing Sinners* (1931), Director
- *Dance, Fools, Dance* (1931), Director
- *Those Three French Girls* (1930), Director
- *Our Blushing Brides* (1930), Director, Producer
- *The Florodora Girl* (1930), Director
- *Children of Pleasure* (1930), Director
- *Lord Byron of Broadway* (1930), Director
- *Speedway* (1929), Director
- *The Broadway Melody* (1929), Director — Fi1m 60, [page](https://film.one/film/the-broadway-melody.md)
- *A Single Man* (1929), Director
- *Our Dancing Daughters* (1928), Director
- *Forbidden Hours* (1928), Director
- *One Increasing Purpose* (1927), Director
- *Womanpower* (1926), Director
- *Sandy* (1926), Director
- *Rose of the World* (1925), Director
- *His Majesty, Bunker Bean* (1925), Director
- *Recompense* (1925), Director
- *A Lost Lady* (1924), Director
- *The Lover of Camille* (1924), Director
- *Babbitt* (1924), Director
- *Beau Brummel* (1924), Director
- *Don't Doubt Your Husband* (1924), Director
- *The Gold Diggers* (1923), Director
- *Main Street* (1923), Editor, Director
- *Crinoline and Romance* (1923), Director
- *Love in the Dark* (1922), Director, Producer
- *June Madness* (1922), Director, Writer
- *They Like 'Em Rough* (1922), Director
- *Lights of the Desert* (1922), Director
- *Seeing's Believing* (1922), Director
- *Very Truly Yours* (1922), Director
- *The Ragged Heiress* (1922), Director
- *Glass Houses* (1922), Director
- *The Fourteenth Lover* (1922), Director
- *Officer 666* (1920), Director
- *Stop Thief* (1920), Director
- *Going Some* (1920), Director
- *Dollars and Sense* (1920), Director
- *The Great Accident* (1920), Director
- *The Gay Lord Quex* (1919), Director
- *Toby's Bow* (1919), Director
- *Lord and Lady Algy* (1919), Director
- *The City of Comrades* (1919), Director
- *One of the Finest* (1919), Director
- *The Little Rowdy* (1919), Director, Story
- *A Man And His Money* (1919), Director
- *A Wild Goose Chase* (1919), Director
- *Go West, Young Man* (1918), Director
- *Thirty a Week* (1918), Director
- *Brown of Harvard* (1918), Scenario Writer, Director
- *Skinner's Baby* (1917), Director
- *Filling His Own Shoes* (1917), Director, Scenario Writer
- *Skinner's Dress Suit* (1917), Director
- *The Truant Soul* (1916), Director
- *The Little Samaritan* (1916), Director, Scenario Writer
- *Joyce's Strategy* (1916), Director
- *The Call of the City* (1915), Director
- *An Absent-Minded Mother* (1914), Actor
- *The Haunted Bedroom* (1913), Actor
- *Alexia's Strategy* (1913), as Walter Young
- *Who Will Marry Mary?* (1913), Actor
- *Over the Back Fence* (1913), as Charles - the Colonel's Nephew
- *An Old Fashioned Elopement* (1912), Actor
- *The Totville Eye* (1912), as Tom
- *The Butler and the Maid* (1912), as Frank the Butler
- *A Daughter of Australia* (1912), Writer
- *Ben Hall, the Notorious Bushranger* (1911), as Gilbert
- *A Ticket in Tatts* (1911), Actor
- *One Hundred Years Ago* (1911), as Burglar

## Awards

### Academy Awards — 0 won, 1 nominated

- 1929: Best Director (nominated), for *The Broadway Melody*

*From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.*

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/harry-beaumont