's
Stop! Look! Listen! (1915) Joseph Santley was born in
Salt Lake City,
Utah. His mother,
Laurene Santley, was an actress. As a boy, he and older brother
Fred began performing in live theatre appearing in
summer stock and touring with their parents. In 1906, at age seventeen, Joseph Santley co-wrote and starred on
Broadway in the play,
Billy the Kid. In 1907, he acted in film for the first time for
Sidney Olcott at the
Kalem Company in a
silent Western film short called
The Pony Express. Santley continued to work almost exclusively in
musical comedy plays, returning to Broadway five more times as well as touring nationally. A gifted dancer and choreographer, Santley created the "Santley Tango" and the "Hawaiian Butterfly". He choreographed and starred in the 1913 Broadway musical
When Dreams Come True by
Silvio Hein and
Philip Bartholomae; a piece written specifically for him. After he married actress/singer and
cabaret dancer
Ivy Sawyer, beginning in 1916 the two danced as a team, performing together in a number of Broadway musicals beginning with
Betty and
Oh, My Dear! and eventually other productions at major venues across the United States such as the
National Theatre in
Washington, D.C. Their final collective Broadway presentation was in 1927's
Just Fancy, which Santley co-wrote, produced, and directed. He and Ivy Sawyer had a son Joseph born in 1916 and a daughter Betty born in 1928. In 1928, Santley directed his first motion picture, a short
talkie for
Paramount Pictures that featured singer
Ruth Etting. The next year, Paramount had Santley direct three more films that were short singing productions, one with Etting, another with
crooner Rudy Vallee, plus a third titled
High Hat with Broadway singing star Alice Boulden. He also directed
A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic, a musical film featuring
Eddie Cantor along with
Eddie Elkins and his orchestra. In 1929, Joseph Santley co-directed with
Robert Florey the first
Marx Brothers feature film,
The Cocoanuts, a
musical comedy for which he is most famous. Based on the
George S. Kaufman play, and with music by
Irving Berlin, the film was billed as "Paramount's All Talking-Singing Musical Comedy Hit." Santley also directed the musical short film,
All Americans which featured song and dance numbers relating to
nativism that arose in the 1920s. His other notable directorial efforts include 1935's
Harmony Lane, a biographical musical on the life of composer
Stephen Foster. In 1940, he directed
Melody Ranch starring "singing cowboy"
Gene Autry. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the
Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry. During
World War II, Joseph Santley worked for the war effort and in 1942 made the film
Remember Pearl Harbor. In 1950, he made his last feature film but came back at age sixty-five to produce the 1954-55 television comedy
The Mickey Rooney Show. In 1956, he put together two segments of
Jazz Ball, a made-for-TV musical revue created from various filmed performances by
jazz greats from the 1930s to the 1950s. Joseph Santley died in 1971 in Los Angeles. ==Partial filmography==