---
name: "William Keighley"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/william-keighley"
roles: ["Director"]
born: "4 August 1889"
died: "24 June 1984"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
average_as: "director"
average_over: 1
updated: "2026-09-19T23:45:54.692289+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."
---

# William Keighley

Director. Born 4 August 1889 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Died 24 June 1984.

## Details

- **Work:** Director
- **Born:** 4 August 1889, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- **Died:** 24 June 1984
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Keighley, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2092903, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0445033/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/67426

## Streaming the US now

- **Tubi:** [*The Adventures of Robin Hood*](https://film.one/film/the-adventures-of-robin-hood.md) (90)

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

## Fi1m on William Keighley

> William Keighley was the Warner Bros. house director who finished on time and got out of the actors' way. That made him useful for twenty years and, on the one film everyone remembers, not quite enough.

The credits of *The Adventures of Robin Hood* (1938) carry two directors' names, and the story of the second one is the story of William Keighley's career. He shot the location work, the footage out among the trees, and the studio then took him off the picture and handed it to Michael Curtiz because it wanted more pace and more fighting. We gave the finished film 90 and would send a stranger to see it, and we cannot honestly say how much of what we love in it is his. That is not a slight. It is how the studio worked.

He came to films from the stage, an actor and then a Broadway director, and joined Warner Bros. around 1930 as sound arrived, working as a dialogue director before his first solo features in 1934. What followed was the studio's bread and butter, gangster pictures and comedies, made quickly. *'G' Men* (1935) put James Cagney on the right side of the law as a federal agent and was the film that made Keighley's name. *Bullets or Ballots* (1936) had Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart in an undercover crime story. *Each Dawn I Die* (1939) was Cagney again, in prison. They made five films together, and the best of them sit among the actor's stronger work.

The comedies came from Broadway, where he had started, and *The Man Who Came to Dinner* (1942), from the Kaufman and Hart play, is the one still spoken of well: a large cast talking fast in one house, which is a thing he knew how to run. The war took him to supervise the Army Air Forces' film unit, and afterwards the work thinned. *The Street with No Name* (1948) is a late crime thriller with a decent reputation. He stopped after *The Master of Ballantrae* (1953), his third film with Errol Flynn.

The case against him has always been the same one, and it is fair. He had no signature. Put a Keighley film next to a Curtiz film and you can tell which is which, and it is not Keighley's that catches the eye; *The Prince and the Pauper* (1937) is the example usually reached for. The case for him is the one the studio made every time it handed him a schedule: he would bring it in, it would move, and the stars would look like themselves. In the 1930s that was worth a good deal.

Watching *Robin Hood* again, we were as happy as we ever are in a cinema, and it surprised us that a film with so straight a moral line could still land so hard. Some of that happiness is in the forest, which was his. The rest belongs to Flynn and to the man who replaced him. A director whose most famous credit is the one he was taken off is a working man, not a tragic one, and the factory did well enough by him.

## Biography

William Keighley was an American film director and former stage actor. Born in Philadelphia in 1889, he trained at the Ludlum School of Dramatic Art and began acting on stage at the age of 23. He worked as an actor and director on Broadway in the 1910s and 1920s before moving to Hollywood with the arrival of sound films.

Keighley signed with Warner Bros., where he directed a range of genres including crime dramas and comedies. He began directing *The Adventures of Robin Hood* (1938) but was replaced by Michael Curtiz after several weeks of shooting; the two share credit. Other notable films include *'G' Men* (1935), *Bullets or Ballots* (1936), *The Prince and the Pauper* (1937), *Each Dawn I Die* (1939) and *The Man Who Came to Dinner* (1941). During the Second World War he supervised the US Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit.

He retired from film-making in 1953 and later lived in Paris with his wife, the actress Genevieve Tobin. Keighley died in New York City in 1984.

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

## On Fi1m (1)

- *The Adventures of Robin Hood* (1938), Fi1m 90, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/the-adventures-of-robin-hood.md)

## Complete filmography (46)

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

- *The Master of Ballantrae* (1953), Director
- *Close to My Heart* (1951), Director
- *Rocky Mountain* (1950), Director
- *Rebecca* (1950), Director
- *The Street with No Name* (1948), Director
- *Honeymoon* (1947), Director
- *Target for Today* (1944), Director
- *George Washington Slept Here* (1942), Director
- *The Man Who Came to Dinner* (1941), Director
- *The Bride Came C.O.D.* (1941), Director
- *Four Mothers* (1941), Director
- *No Time for Comedy* (1940), Director
- *Torrid Zone* (1940), Director
- *The Fighting 69th* (1940), Director
- *Each Dawn I Die* (1939), Director
- *Yes, My Darling Daughter* (1939), Director
- *Brother Rat* (1938), Director
- *Valley of the Giants* (1938), Director
- *Secrets of an Actress* (1938), Director
- *The Adventures of Robin Hood* (1938), Director — Fi1m 90, [page](https://film.one/film/the-adventures-of-robin-hood.md)
- *Varsity Show* (1937), Director
- *The Prince and the Pauper* (1937), Director
- *God's Country and the Woman* (1937), Director
- *The Green Pastures* (1936), Director
- *Bullets or Ballots* (1936), Director
- *The Singing Kid* (1936), Director
- *Stars Over Broadway* (1935), Director
- *Special Agent* (1935), Director
- *'G' Men* (1935), Director
- *Mary Jane's Pa* (1935), Director
- *The Right to Live* (1935), Director
- *Babbitt* (1934), Director
- *Big Hearted Herbert* (1934), Director
- *Kansas City Princess* (1934), Director
- *Dr. Monica* (1934), Director
- *Journal of a Crime* (1934), Director
- *Easy to Love* (1934), Director
- *Mary Stevens, M.D.* (1933), Dialogue
- *Picture Snatcher* (1933), Writer, Dialogue Coach
- *Ladies They Talk About* (1933), as Man Getting a Shoeshine (uncredited) · Director
- *The Match King* (1932), Director
- *Scarlet Dawn* (1932), Assistant Director
- *The Cabin in the Cotton* (1932), Assistant Director
- *Jewel Robbery* (1932), Assistant Director
- *Resurrection* (1931), as Captain Schoenbock
- *The Third Degree* (1926), Dialogue Coach

---
© 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/william-keighley