An associate producer on Dwain Esper's notorious exploitation thriller Tell Your Children (aka Reefer Madness), Samuel Diege later became affiliated with Grand National, a minor studio built around James Cagney, whom executive producer Edward L. Alperson had managed to contract while he was involved in a dispute with Warner Bros. Cagney, who starred in Great Guy (1936) and the disastrous Something to Sing About (1937) for the struggling company, was soon enough back at Warners, leaving Grand National with little more than hayseed cowboy crooner Tex Ritter and a mounting debt. To salvage the floundering company, producer Don Lieberman hired radio songstress Dorothy Page to star in a series of singing cowgirl oaters. Diege helmed all three Page Westerns that were produced before the company finally collapsed in 1940, and the novice director actually proved to have a flair for the genre. All three were more than acceptable music Western fare, although a cowgirl heroine did not please the small fry that made up most of Grand National's paying customers. Diege was also listed as supervising producer on Grand National's The Sunset Murder Case, a whodunit starring fan dancer Sally Rand, which was filmed in 1938 but not widely released until August 1941, due to censorship troubles.
by Hans J. Wollstein
biography
