---
name: "Irving Rapper"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/irving-rapper"
roles: ["Producer","Director"]
born: "16 January 1898"
died: "20 February 1999"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 3
average_as: "producer"
average_over: 0
updated: "2026-09-20T00:33:54.465938+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."
---

# Irving Rapper

Producer and director. Born 16 January 1898 in London, England, UK. Died 20 February 1999.

## Details

- **Work:** Producer, Director
- **Born:** 16 January 1898, London, England, UK
- **Died:** 20 February 1999
- **Active:** 1937–1941
- **Also known as:** 欧文·拉帕尔
- **Titles on Fi1m:** 3: 1 directing, 2 crew
- **Fi1m score by decade:** 1930s 70 (1), 1940s 69 (2)
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Rapper, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q323243, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0710924/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/93904

## Fi1m on Irving Rapper

> Irving Rapper came out of the theatre and directed as if he were still in one: he stood back and let good actors be plain. On a slight script that looks like polish; on Fredric March's Methodist minister it looks like judgement.

Fredric March spends *One Foot in Heaven* (1941) moving from one draughty Iowa parsonage to the next, and over some thirty years the stakes never rise above a roof, a salary and a congregation's good opinion. Irving Rapper directed it and produced it, and the producing is the telling part. As producer he chose material in which nothing much is at stake, and as director he declined to inflate it. March never asks to be admired, the film never asks to be wept over, and the last forty minutes quietly pay for the slow first hour.

That restraint came from the stage. Rapper acted, stage-managed and directed on Broadway in the 1920s and early 1930s, then joined Warner Bros. in the mid-1930s as a dialogue coach and assistant director, working on *The Story of Louis Pasteur* (1936) and with directors including William Dieterle and Anatole Litvak. He was not promoted to director until 1941, with *Shining Victory*, so by the time he directed he had spent five years on other people's sets. What followed is the run his reputation rests on: *Now, Voyager* (1942), *The Corn Is Green* (1945) and *Deception* (1946), all with Bette Davis, and *The Glass Menagerie* (1950), the first time a Tennessee Williams play reached the screen. After he left the studio the films came less often and were noticed less.

His strength and his limit are the same thing. He specialised in plays and novels brought to the screen, and he trusted the actors to carry them rather than the camera; the complaint that follows him is that the scripts were sometimes slight and his direction merely made them shine. He knew what he wanted from a performer. "She doesn’t give a damn what she looks like, only how well she performs. She has an inner electricity," he said of Davis, and the four films they made together are where most people meet him. We have only one of his films under review, and it is the modest one, so we will not pretend to weigh the Davis pictures here.

What we can say is that *One Foot in Heaven* worked on us against our expectations. We sat down braced for piety and found ourselves, somewhere in the final stretch, minding a great deal about that roof and that salary and what the congregation thought, because Rapper had let March make the man ordinary and then left him alone. It is a small film, and it is slow, and we would not send a stranger to it. But if you want to know what a director who came up through the theatre thought a film was for, start there, and then go and find the cigarette scene in *Now, Voyager*.

## Biography

Irving Rapper was a British-born American film director. Born in London in 1898, he emigrated to the United States and studied at New York University while working as an actor and stage director on Broadway. He joined Warner Bros. in Hollywood in 1936 as an assistant director and dialogue coach.

Rapper made his feature directorial debut with *Shining Victory* (1941). He directed and produced *One Foot in Heaven* (1941), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Among his other films were several starring Bette Davis: *Now, Voyager* (1942), *The Corn Is Green* (1945), *Deception* (1946) and *Another Man's Poison* (1951). He also directed *The Brave One* (1956).

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

## On Fi1m (3)

### Directed (1)

- *One Foot in Heaven* (1941), Fi1m 74, Producer, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/one-foot-in-heaven.md)

### Crew (2)

- *All This, and Heaven Too* (1940), Fi1m 64, Assistant Director — [page](https://film.one/film/all-this-and-heaven-too.md)
- *The Life of Emile Zola* (1937), Fi1m 70, Dialogue Coach — [page](https://film.one/film/the-life-of-emile-zola.md)

## Complete filmography (35)

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

- *Born Again* (1978), Director
- *The Christine Jorgensen Story* (1970), Director
- *Pontius Pilate* (1962), Director
- *Joseph and His Brethren* (1961), Director
- *The Miracle* (1959), Director
- *Marjorie Morningstar* (1958), Director
- *The Brave One* (1956), Director
- *Strange Intruder* (1956), Director
- *Bad for Each Other* (1953), Director
- *Forever Female* (1953), Director
- *Another Man's Poison* (1951), Director
- *The Glass Menagerie* (1950), Director
- *Anna Lucasta* (1949), Director
- *The Voice of the Turtle* (1947), Director
- *Deception* (1946), Director
- *Rhapsody in Blue* (1945), Director
- *The Corn Is Green* (1945), Director
- *The Adventures of Mark Twain* (1944), Director
- *Now, Voyager* (1942), Director
- *The Gay Sisters* (1942), Director
- *One Foot in Heaven* (1941), Producer, Director — Fi1m 74, [page](https://film.one/film/one-foot-in-heaven.md)
- *Shining Victory* (1941), Director
- *All This, and Heaven Too* (1940), Assistant Director — Fi1m 64, [page](https://film.one/film/all-this-and-heaven-too.md)
- *Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet* (1940), Assistant Director
- *Invisible Stripes* (1939), Dialogue Coach
- *Dust Be My Destiny* (1939), Script Supervisor
- *Juarez* (1939), Dialogue Coach
- *Off the Record* (1939), Dialogue
- *The Sisters* (1938), Assistant Director
- *The Life of Emile Zola* (1937), Dialogue Coach — Fi1m 70, [page](https://film.one/film/the-life-of-emile-zola.md)
- *Kid Galahad* (1937), Assistant Director, Dialogue Coach
- *The Go-Getter* (1937), Dialogue Coach
- *Stage Struck* (1936), Dialogue
- *The Story of Louis Pasteur* (1936), Assistant Director
- *The Hole in the Wall* (1929), Assistant Director

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© 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/irving-rapper