William J. Cowen
2 credits on HibingeTV
American film director and screenwriter of the early sound era. He directed low-budget features for Chadwick Pictures and other Poverty Row outfits, including the 1933 adaptation of Oliver Twist, the earliest sound version of the Dickens novel. His career was concentrated in the 1930s.
Directed
Drama, Romance
An early RKO talkie built around a then-modern question: what happens when a society girl secretly marries a man her parents would never approve of and has to keep the marriage hidden while living at home? Olive Borden plays the debutante who weds Morgan Farley's penniless architect and then splits her life between his boarding-house room and her family's mansion, dodging a mother's plan to marry her off to a rich suitor. Directed by William J. Cowen and produced by William LeBaron, it is a time capsule of both the transitional sound era and 1920s anxieties about class and working wives. It entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.
Drama · Romance
Half Marriage
1929 - Drama
Drama
The earliest sound adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel, made on a shoestring by Poverty Row studio Monogram. Young Dickie Moore plays the workhouse orphan who falls in with Fagin's gang of boy pickpockets, with Irving Pichel as Fagin and William "Stage" Boyd as the brutal Bill Sikes. Stripped to the bare bones of the story by its tight budget, the film nevertheless preserves the novel's core scenes and was the only talking-picture Oliver Twist for more than a decade. The film is in the public domain.
Drama
Oliver Twist
1933 - Drama