Andrew V. McLaglen and Yvette Mimieux on the set of Monkeys, Go Home! (1967), which McLaglen directed solely to work with Maurice Chevalier, in one of his last films.

As I wrote in Senses of Cinema 50, Andrew V. McLaglen is one of the last of the Hollywood professions, and as this interview makes clear, despite his long association with the Western, he has no particular affection for the genre, which is surprising, given that the bulk of his work falls into this category.

As I noted in my introduction to the interview, “Andrew V. McLaglen (he is quite insistent on retaining the “V” in his name, as part of his authorial signature) is without a doubt one of the last of the classical Hollywood filmmakers who worked during the Golden Age of the studio system. Coming of age when his father, the gifted actor Victor McLaglen, won an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in John Ford’s The Informer (1935; Ford himself also won as Best Director that year, as did Max Steiner for his music score, and Dudley Nichols for the screenplay), young Andrew worked and lived with the cream of Hollywood’s most original and idiosyncratic artists.

In addition to John Ford, he knew and/or worked with John “Duke” Wayne, William Wellman, Budd Boetticher and Cary Grant, and later carved out a career for himself as a director in the Western genre that few can equal. Even now, he is still going strong, directing stage productions of such classics as Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman, and keeps an interested eye on the business.”

You can read the entire interview here.