Ray Nazarro

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Boston-born Ray Nazarro (1902 - 1986) entered the movie business during the silent era, and began directing short films in 1932 with "The Rent Page". He spent the next 13 years working in two-reelers, honing an approach to filmmaking that was quick, lean, and eminently desirable, before he became a feature film director at Columbia Pictures, beginning with "Outlaws of the Rockies" (1945).

Nazarro did the vast majority of his work for Columbia, and was one of the busiest directors in the lot of any major studio - from 1945 thru 1955, he worked at a furious pace, directing as many as 13 pictures in one year. These were almost all B-westerns, very quickly but also very well made, lean and uncluttered, with an emphasis on action but also a serious elegiac view of the west - among the best of them were "Al Jennings of Oklahoma" (1951) and "The Black Dakotas" (1954), although all of Nazarro's movies are worth watching.

At the end of the 50s, with the market for B-westerns drying up in America, Nazarro picked up his career in Europe with spaghetti westerns and features such as the German-made Jayne Mansfield starrer "Dog Eat Dog" (1964). He also began working in television.

Writing in "The B-Directors", Wheeler W. Dixon cites his work as comparable to that of Budd Boetticher, his co-writer on "The Bullfighter and the Lady" (1951, for which both of them shared an Oscar nomination), but with less sentimentality.