Sidney Davis (April 1, 1916 – October 16, 2006) was an American director and producer who specialized in social guidance films.
Early life
Davis was born on April 1, 1916, in Chicago, Illinois. He was born to a housepainter father and a seamstress mother. The family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1920, when Davis was four years old. That same year, he began working as a child actor; for example, he was featured in a comedy made by Harold Lloyd. He dropped out of junior high school to help support his parents. When he was older, he often worked as a stand-in for Leif Erickson and John Wayne.
Filmmaking career
In November 1949 Linda Joyce Glucoft, a six-year-old girl in Los Angeles, California, was molested and murdered by a man named Fred Stroble. The story made front-page news in the Los Angeles Times for a week as police and the FBI searched for Stroble. The story was picked up by Time Magazine and other national media and led to a flurry of reported rapes and attempted rapes. Some media began to speculate that the supposed epidemic of rape was simply media manipulation of public perception.
Davis stated that the tragedy particularly disturbed him because his then-six-year-old daughter Jill did not seem to pay attention to his warnings about strangers. Davis talked to John Wayne saying that a film about this should be made, and Wayne suggested that Davis make the film. Wayne gave Davis $1,000 ($ when adjusted for inflation) and used the money to make his first film, The Dangerous Stranger, a film he would remake at least twice over the next 30 years. The film tells the story of several young children—some of the children are kidnapped and eventually saved, others are kidnapped and never seen again. Davis used schoolchildren and police officers instead of professional actors. Peter L. Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle said "[t]he film was a success among schools and police departments".
Davis sold copies of the film to schools and police departments, reaping a $250,000 profit. He used the money to make more than 150 films over the next few decades. Davis' films are typically 10 to 30 minutes long; he prided himself on making each one for $1,000, a minuscule film budget even at that time. Due to the content of his films, people referred to him as the "King of Calamity".
His films cover topics such as driver safety, marijuana use, heroin addiction, and gang warfare. Live and Learn (1951), a fairly famous Davis film, features Jill cutting out paper dolls in her room. When her father comes home, she jumps up to greet him, trips on the carpet, and impales herself on the scissors. Other children in the film are equally unlucky—falling off cliffs, being run over by cars, or losing vision in one eye from flying shards of glass.
One of Davis' most notorious films, Boys Beware (1961), produced with the cooperation of the Inglewood, California Police Department and the Inglewood Unified School District, warns boys of the perceived dangers of male homosexuals, predatory pedophiles. The film includes the line "What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick—a sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious—a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual: a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex." Many commentators have pointed out that the "educational" film simply spread hateful stereotypes and bigotry. "It might be easy to laugh at the stupidity of “Boys Beware” if the film wasn't so virulent in equating homosexuality and pedophilia. There is a world of difference between adults having consensual intercourse and adults abusing children, and even at this late date too many stupid people cannot tell the difference. Films like “Boys Beware” reinforced a culture of homophobia which is only recently being chipped away by voices of intelligence and common sense." The same year, Davis made Girls Beware, warning girls not to put themselves into situations where they would be defenseless, a topic that Davis had covered at least 10 years earlier in his film Name Unknown, in which a man used a gun to accost a couple in isolated surroundings, forcing the boy into the trunk of the car and raping the girl.