Pichell, Irving

PICHEL, IRVING (1891-1954). A unique Christian Socialist who directed mainstream Hollywood mainstream features, mainly light romance and comedy, Pichel also sought to convey moral lessons. Notably, he created three heavily leftish (or anti-authoritarian) Biblical dramas. During the last years of his life, he escaped testifying before Congressional committees by fleeing to Europe and creating his last films there.

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, a boyhood friend of George S. Kaufman, Pichel graduated from Harvard University in 1914 and later headed for Hollywood. In the Pasadena Playhouse, he achieved early fame as an actor, in the lead of Lazarus Laughed. Pichel worked in Hollywood through the middle 1930s as a character actor and a film and radio voice. From 1939, he devoted himself to directing, beginning with a series of high profile anti-Fascist films, among them The Man I Married (1940), The Moon is Down (1943), and A Medal for Benny (1945). The last, taken from a Steinbeck novel, cleverly ridiculed the racism of a California town that could not deal with its heavily publicized, dead war hero being a Mexican-American. The Miracle of the Bells (1947) co-starring a miscast Frank Sinatra, movingly treated the lives of Pennsylvania Slavic coal miners through the travails of their Joan of Arc, a local singer/actress dying of tuberculosis. Like many other left-wingers in Hollywood, Pichel turned to bitter noir films in the immediate postwar years. They Won’t Believe Me (1947) had the Hitchcockian quality of betrayal on all sides and Quicksand (1950) brought Peter Lorre together with Mickey Rooney in a drama of down-swirling doom, set in a lower-class amusement gallery.

But there was another Pichel. The Great Commandment (1939), made by Cathedral Films, has Jesus arriving triumphantly, against Rome and the power of the Rabbis, into Galilee, but with a cinematic trick: Jesus himself is never shown. The film was bought up by Fox before it could be offered to theaters and released only after Fox abandoned distribution. Mostly, it seems to have had private screenings in churches.

Martin Luther (1951), shot in German and funded by the Lutheran Church, offers a straightforward defense of the founder of Protestantism, leaving aside the very dark elements of the hero, including his pronounced anti-Semitism. The film centers on a rebel resistance by Luther to giving “friendly” testimony to a Church committee that itself seems all too close to HUAC. Day of Triumph (1954) recovers the saga of a mystical, militant Hebraic sect of biblical days, the Zakokites, attempting to halt the conviction and crucifixion of Jesus but defeated by power-brokers of the Roman Empire and of the Judaic hierarchy. (The “triumph” is, of course, Jesus’ return from the Dead.)

Pichel rarely expressed himself outside of his film work, but his several essays in the leftwing Hollywood Quarterly were highly thoughtful contemplations on the production of films: technical details and plot themes, film music and color technique. He commented especially on the paucity of serious critical literature looking at the process of film-making from the work and ideas of the people inside. Cautiously, he proposed in 1948, that the camera, imitating the eye, “operates as the mind does when one reads a story,” but “objectifies magically, as no other medium can, the wish to …see more clearly and intimately than life or earlier films or theater art have allowed us.” From this standpoint, David Lean’s classic Great Expectations (1946) was the masterpiece to emulate, for its concision: the protagonist, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, becomes “more real as symbol and synthesis than any actual man who may have lived.” Lean showed what cinema could do, in the shadow of the dramas of Antiquity that Pichel knew so well.

With that thought, so to speak, and with the purge of the Hollywood Quarterly editorial board and of leftwing film workers at large, something had come to an end. Pichel himself succumbed in exile.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Films and Television, 1950-2002. New York, Palgrave, 2003.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood: the Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Films. New York: The New Press, 2002.