After graduating from the Pratt Institute, Higgin began working at the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, but his interest in the theater resulted in his designing stages for John Cort and then at the First National Pictures film studio as a property boy. Higgin was production manager on Cecil De Mille's Forbidden Fruit (1921). Higgin's first directing job was a 1922 comedy for legendary Wallace Reid, Rent Free. His later films include High Voltage and Skyscraper, and he worked with Wallace Beery, Clark Gable (as writer/director of Gable's screen breakthrough role as the unshaven villain in The Painted Desert), Carole Lombard, Bette Davis (in Hell's House), Pat O'Brien, Alan Hale, Sr., Blanche Sweet, Basil Rathbone, Robert Armstrong and Mae Clarke, among many others.
