--- name: "Joshua Logan" canonical: "https://film.one/person/joshua-logan" roles: ["Director","Writer"] born: "5 October 1908" died: "12 July 1988" reviewed_on_fi1m: 3 average_fi1m_score: 70 average_as: "director" average_over: 3 updated: "2026-09-20T03:49:10.471824+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." --- # Joshua Logan Director and writer. Born 5 October 1908 in Texarkana, Texas, USA. Died 12 July 1988. ## Details - **Work:** Director, Writer - **Born:** 5 October 1908, Texarkana, Texas, USA - **Died:** 12 July 1988 - **Active:** 1955–1961 - **Also known as:** Joshua Lockwood Logan - **Academy Awards:** 3 Oscar nominations - **Average Fi1m score:** 70, as director, over 3 titles - **Fi1m score by decade:** 1950s 70 (2), 1960s 70 (1) - **Score spread:** 0 at 80+, 3 at 60–79, 0 under 60 - **Genres:** Drama 3, Romance 2, Comedy 1, War 1 - **Screen time:** 6 hours of reviewed films - **Box office:** $30m across 2 films with figures - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Logan, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q505141, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0517597/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/86051 ## Streaming the US now - **Amazon Prime Video:** [*Fanny*](https://film.one/film/fanny.md) (70) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Joshua Logan > A Broadway director who filmed his own hits and made them wider without making them better. Logan was good with actors and poor with scale; the best scenes in his films happen in back yards, and the worst on horizons. When a speech in *Picnic* (1955) runs long, Joshua Logan has the actor turn and deliver it to the horizon, and in CinemaScope Kansas there is a great deal of horizon. It is the habit that tells you where he came from. He had directed William Inge's play on Broadway, where a long speech to the back wall is the job, and he brought the same instinct to a camera standing a few feet from the actor's face. Lines that carried across a theatre come out sounding recited, and George Duning's music swells under every confession until we stopped believing the confessions. He was a stage man first and for longest. He co-founded the University Players at Princeton with Henry Fonda and James Stewart, studied with Stanislavsky in Moscow, and by the late 1940s had directed *Annie Get Your Gun* (1946) and co-written and directed *Mister Roberts* (1948) and *South Pacific* (1949). Films came in the 1950s, and nearly all of them were his own hits or someone else's: *Mister Roberts* (1955), on which he holds the screenplay credit and finished the direction after John Ford fell ill; *Picnic*; *Bus Stop* (1956); *Sayonara* (1957); *South Pacific* (1958). The 1960s brought *Camelot* (1967) and *Paint Your Wagon*, which we have not reviewed and which were widely thought ponderous. What works is the actors, always. Holden's bruised swagger and Rosalind Russell's desperate schoolteacher are the reasons to sit through *Picnic*, and in *Bus Stop* he drew one of Marilyn Monroe's strongest performances. The slow dance on the lit pier in *Picnic* is the one scene where the music is exact and nobody is reciting, and we believed every second of it, because for once Logan let two people stand close and say nothing. Jo Mielziner's back yards, two frame houses and a shared fence, are where the film feels as small as the play, and that is where the good scenes are. What does not work is everything larger. Every time Logan leaves the yard for a bigger view, the people shrink. In *Mister Roberts* the crew he and Thomas Heggen wrote as a chorus stay a chorus, and when the film goes ashore the comedy goes wide, with brawls and men carried back up the gangway, and a rueful play becomes a service farce any studio could have made. The complaint against *Picnic* was that he had inflated a modest play, and we agree with the diagnosis if not the sentence. He said in 1953 that "Direction should be so clean and so modest and so invisible that it can't be noticed at all." On stage, by all accounts, it was. On film you notice it every time the frame widens. See *Mister Roberts* for Fonda and *Picnic* for the pier, and when the camera turns to the horizon, wait; it will come back to the porch eventually. ## Biography Joshua Logan (1908–1988) was an American stage and film director, writer and producer. Born Joshua Lockwood Logan III in Texarkana, Texas, he began his career in theatre, acting and directing with the University Players while at Princeton University. He achieved major success on Broadway, directing and often co-writing productions including *Mister Roberts* (1948), *South Pacific* (1949) and *Picnic* (1953). His film work included directing *Picnic* (1955), for which he received a Golden Globe, and contributing to the screenplay of *Mister Roberts* (1955); other credits include *Bus Stop* (1956), *Sayonara* (1957), *South Pacific* (1958), *Fanny* (1961), *Camelot* (1967) and *Paint Your Wagon* (1969). He received Tony Awards for his stage work and shared a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for *South Pacific*. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, britannica.com.* ## On Fi1m (3) - *Fanny* (1961), Fi1m 70, Theatre Play, Director, Producer — [page](https://film.one/film/fanny.md) - *Mister Roberts* (1955), Fi1m 76, Theatre Play, Screenplay, Co-Director — [page](https://film.one/film/mister-roberts.md) - *Picnic* (1955), Fi1m 63, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/picnic.md) ## Complete filmography (16) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *South Pacific* (2010), Musical - *South Pacific* (2001), Adaptation, Book - *Miss Moffat* (1974), Director of Communications, Producer - *Paint Your Wagon* (1969), Director - *Camelot* (1967), Director - *Ensign Pulver* (1964), Director, Screenplay, Theatre Play, Producer - *Fanny* (1961), Director, Theatre Play, Producer — Fi1m 70, [page](https://film.one/film/fanny.md) - *Tall Story* (1960), Director, Producer - *South Pacific* (1958), Director, Theatre Play, Book - *Sayonara* (1957), Director - *Bus Stop* (1956), Director - *Picnic* (1955), Director — Fi1m 63, [page](https://film.one/film/picnic.md) - *Mister Roberts* (1955), Screenplay, Theatre Play, Co-Director — Fi1m 76, [page](https://film.one/film/mister-roberts.md) - *South Pacific* (1952), Writer, Director - *Higher and Higher* (1943), Musical - *I Met My Love Again* (1938), Director ## Awards ### Academy Awards — 0 won, 3 nominated - 1962: Best Picture (nominated), for *Fanny* - 1958: Best Director (nominated), for *Sayonara* - 1956: Best Director (nominated), for *Picnic* ### Other awards — 8 won, 1 nominated - Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical 1962: Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical (nominated) - Tony Award for Best Director 1953: Tony Award for Best Director (won) - Pulitzer Prize for Drama 1950: Pulitzer Prize for Drama (won), for *South Pacific* - Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical 1950: Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical (won), for *South Pacific* - Tony Award for Best Director 1950: Tony Award for Best Director (won) - Tony Award for Best Musical 1950: Tony Award for Best Musical (won), for *South Pacific* - Tony Award for Best Author 1948: Tony Award for Best Author (won), for *Mister Roberts* - Tony Award for Best Director 1948: Tony Award for Best Director (won) - Tony Award for Best Play 1948: Tony Award for Best Play (won), for *Mister Roberts* *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/joshua-logan