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According to his official studio biography, American silent screen director Bert Bracken had been a bank teller and served in the U.S. Cavalry for one and a half years before entering films in 1910 in his hometown of San Antonio, TX, where the French Melies company were filming westerns. Heading for California along with the Melies troupe in 1911, Bracken signed with Fox as a director. By the mid-1910s he was helming such high-profile melodramas as The Eternal Sappho (1916) and East Lynne (1916), both starring femme fatale Theda Bara, from whom, according to Bara biographer Eve Golden, Bracken managed to elicit "a quiet, measured and intelligent performance" that impressed "even her hardest critics." The Bara films were perhaps the highlight of Bracken's directorial career, which for all intents and purposes ended in 1926. He did, however, return to write and direct the 1932 version of The Face on the Barroom Floor (1932) for low-budget producer Aubrey Kennedy. Bracken's second wife was silent screen actress Margaret Landis.