D. Ross Lederman

David Ross Lederman (December 12, 1894 – August 24, 1972) was an American film director noted for his Western, action, and adventure films of the 1930s and 1940s.

Starting out as an extra in Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops series, Lederman worked his way through the ranks of film production, and first made his mark as a second-unit director. He directed several B-Western serials in the early 1930s, such as Two-Fisted Law and Texas Cyclone both 1932, in which he worked with Tim McCoy and a young John Wayne. Becoming a full feature director in the late 1930s, Lederman specialized in action films and especially westerns, continuing to produce films with McCoy at Columbia Pictures.

Style

By most accounts Lederman was regarded as a somewhat brusque man with an aversion to retakes and prima donna behavior and he clashed with McCoy on more than one occasion. He was renowned for his strict filming regimen and for bringing in films on time and under budget, which could only have helped to ensure his constant employment as a director, but was often criticised by critics in that several of his films looked rushed. Lederman's films have been described as having a "dystopian view of life" and a "relentless, inexorable narrative drive".

In the 1950s Lederman, like many of his "B" picture colleagues, concentrated on series television, and directed 31 episodes of the Captain Midnight television series as well as many episodes of Annie Oakley (1954), Buffalo Bill, Jr. and Range Rider, among others. He retired in the early 1960s.