Best remembered as a reliable director on such well-regarded television series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and Batman, Don Weis got his start as a gopher at Warner Brothers before his wartime service with the motion picture unit of the US Army Air Corps gave him the training to call the shots behind the camera. A two-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put the 31 year-old Weis in the canvas chair for Bannerline (1951), the story of a cub reporter (Keefe Brasselle) who mocks up a phony newspaper front page to comfort his dying mentor (Lionel Barrymore) only to see the stunt backfire and bring down the vengeance of a local gangster (J. Carrol Naish). Bannerline was based on a stage play by Samson Raphaelson, who adapted his short story "Day of Atonement" as the Broadway hit The Jazz Singer, source of the 1927 early talkie starring Al Jolson. Later a respected screenwriter in his own right, Raphaelson enjoyed a long association with Ernst Lubitsch, contributing to the scripts for Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), and Heaven Can Wait (1943), while also helping to write Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) and George Sidney's The Harvey Girls (1946). Originally slated to direct but settling for screenplay credit, Charles Schnee had already co-written Red River (1948) for Howard Hawks and The Furies (1950) for Anthony Mann and would go on to win an Academy Award for scripting Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) the following year.

By Richard Harland Smith