Ray Nazarro(1902-1986)
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Producer
Boston-born Ray Nazarro began his movie career in the silent-film era,
where he often worked as an assistant director. He started his
directing career in 1932, beginning with shorts and graduating to
low-budget quickie features for Poverty Row studios. He alternated
between directing shorts and an assistant director on features--often
on westerns at Columbia--for years. By 1945 he fell into directing
westerns for that studio, a genre and a studio in which Nazarro would
spent the vast majority of his career. He worked steadily for the next
20 years, churning out dozens and dozens of Columbia's westerns,
including many in the "Durango Kid" series with
Charles Starrett, and was at the helm
of a slew of Columbia's musical westerns and low-budget hillbilly
musicals, which featured such acts as
The Hoosier Hotshots. As the era of
the B western ended, Nazarro journeyed to Europe, where he turned out
some "spaghetti westerns" and was one of several directors to work on a
bizarre and trouble-plagued
Jayne Mansfield film,
La Môme aux dollars (1964). He also returned
to directing television series, a medium in which he had occasionally
worked since the early 1950s -- again, mostly in westerns.
