Howard Christie

Born in Orinda, CA, in 1912, Howard Christie was a good enough student to plan on a career in medical school. Instead, as a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and a football All-American, he was chosen to appear in a small role in the anti-communist comedy drama Fighting Youth (1935). He stayed on in Hollywood as an actor for a year and decided that he liked the movie business, but not working in front of the camera. He moved onto the production side, as an assistant production manager, before becoming an assistant director and then a director at Universal. His work in the latter capacity was competent but otherwise as undistinguished as most of the studio's releases of the late '30s and '40s. He moved up to the producer's spot in the late '40s and was responsible for the production of the Ma and Pa Kettle series and many of Abbott and Costello's late '40s and early '50s movies. Among Christie's best films were Lady on a Train, an attempt to put Deanna Durbin into a film noir-type setting; Against All Flags, starring Errol Flynn; Away All Boats, with George Nader and Jeff Chandler; and Joe Dakota, a fascinating, topical Western dealing with racism and murder. By the end of the 1950s, Universal was making fewer of the B-Westerns and comedies in which Christie specialized, but he landed on his feet when the studio appointed him to a vice presidency in its television division. It was there that he became one of the most familiar studio-employed producers, responsible for the series Wagon Train, starring Ward Bond and then John McIntire, for its complete run, and also for the successful 90-minute Western series The Virginian, which also enjoyed an extended run on television through most of the 1960s and into the beginning of the next decade. He retired from the studio in 1970, at age 58, and passed away in 1992. Reruns of Wagon Train and The Virginian have both enjoyed great popularity on cable television in the decades since, and several of Christie's film productions have seen re-release on laserdisc and, more recently, on DVD.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide