Harry Lachman

A former magazine illustrator, Harry Lachman traveled to Paris in 1911 to begin an art career, and soon became recognized as a first-rate post-Impressionist painter. Decorated for his contributions to art by the French government, Lachman afterwards became a set designer at a film studio in Nice. In 1925 American director Rex Ingram hired him as an assistant director on Mare Nostrum (1926) and soon thereafter Lachman gave up his painting career and traveled to England to began a career as a film director. He returned to France and made several films, then journeyed to the U.S. in 1933 and settled in Hollywood. Mainly given B-pictures, his best films were a Laurel and Hardy comedy, Our Relations (1936), and Dante's Inferno (1935), where his painter's eye was evident in the intense ten-minute hell sequence. Lachman ended his career with a Charlie Chan movie in the 1940s, and returned to painting. His artworks can be seen in such museums as Spain's Prado and the Luxembourg Museum.