Paul Landres made his mark in Hollywood, first as an editor of Johnny Mack Brown Westerns (and assistant on Tower of London!) and later as a director of B-movies (1950s) and television shows (during the medium’s infancy).
Born in New York in 1923, Landres attended California Christian College on a football scholarship. He then landed a job in the editing department at Universal Pictures in 1931. Landres worked for almost two decades as a editor on such projects as the Contemporary Western saga, Pittsburgh (1942), with John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Marlene Dietrich and Shemp Howard; and Samuel Fuller’s first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949).
Then as a director, Landres worked on a pair of George Montgomery Western vehicles, Last of the Badmen (1957) and Man from God’s Country (1958), plus multiple episodes of The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, Sky King, and The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Landres also directed a handful of Bonanza segments, including two of the show’s finest, “Enter Mark Twain” and “The Paiute War”. He died from complications from cancer in December 2001.