Irving Pichel

Irving Pichel (June 24, 1891 – July 13, 1954)

Pichel moved to Los Angeles where he studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. It was there that Pichel achieved considerable acclaim as the title character in the landmark Pasadena Playhouse production of Eugene O'Neill's play Lazarus Laughed in 1927. Two years later, when the studios were hiring any theater-trained actors suitable for talkies, he was signed to a contract with Paramount. Pichel worked steadily as a character actor throughout the 1930s, including the early version of the Theodore Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy (1931), Madame Butterfly (1932), in a low budget version of Oliver Twist (1933) as Fagin, in Cleopatra (1934), alongside Leslie Howard in Michael Curtiz's British Agent (1934), as the servant Sandor in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), in the Bette Davis film Jezebel (1938), as the proprietor of a seedy roadhouse in the once scandalous The Story of Temple Drake (1933) and as a Mexican general in Juarez (1939). Pichel was a friend of the screenwriter George S. Kaufman and joined the circle of those witty and iconoclastic friends who had abandoned the Algonquin Round Table in New York to make small fortunes in the talkies. Pichel was soon drawn to directing and his character acting dropped off after 1939. He co-directed several B-movies until he signed with 20th Century Fox in 1939 and began directing their established stars. Much of his directing work was in anti-Nazi and pro-British-themed films in the years before the United States entered the war; this perhaps led to his problems with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and subsequent blacklisting in the industry.

Like many of those who came under HUAC investigation by the late 1940s, Pichel moved into film noir, in They Won't Believe Me (1947). Here, Pichel had the benefit of longtime Alfred Hitchcock collaborator and screenwriter, Joan Harrison, as his producer, who would go on to produce the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The low-budget, black-and-white Quicksand (1950) featured one of Mickey Rooney's finest performances as a desperate good kid going bad, and emigre Peter Lorre as an unforgiving arcade operator. Rooney and Peter Lorre put their own money together to finance it, and thus gave Pichel, the blacklist already looming over him, one of his last Hollywood films. He died on July 13, 1954, at age 63. Pichel is interred at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.