The Guardian (31/May/2008) - Obituary: Joseph Pevney

(c) The Guardian (31/May/2008)

Obituary: Joseph Pevney

Joseph Pevney, who has died aged 96, had three successful careers, first, as a character actor on stage and screen in the 1940s, then as a prolific film director, mainly providing Universal Pictures with solid commercial hits in the 1950s, and finally, from the 1960s onwards, as a television director of numerous popular series, including 14 episodes of the first series of Star Trek (1967-1968). Among them were particular Trekkie favourites such as The Trouble with Tribbles, in which small, cute balls of fur infest the USS Enterprise.

Those who recall Pevney as a competent director of genre movies may be surprised to learn of his early acting career in radical theatre and his involvement with many leftwing figures who later became victims of the House Un-American Activities committee in the late 1940s and early 50s. However, he escaped accusations of guilt by association and rapidly moved into the commercial mainstream.

Born in New York, the son of a Jewish watchmaker, he made his showbusiness debut at the age of 12 as a soprano in vaudeville. Intending to become a doctor, he studied at New York University but was soon distracted by the theatre, devoting his energy to directing college dramatics, then abandoning his studies to work as an assistant stage manager on Broadway. One of his first roles was as a West Point lieutenant in Johnny Johnson (1936), Kurt Weill's absurdist pacifist musical, produced by the leftwing Group Theatre and directed by Lee Strasberg. Among the cast were Lee J Cobb, Elia Kazan and Jules (later John) Garfield.

In 1941, Pevney was in the cast of Native Son, Orson Welles's production of the Richard Wright novel about a black man driven to murder. The following year, he directed a Harold Rome musical revue, Let Freedom Sing, featuring former child star Mitzi Green, whom Pevney married during the run. The marriage, which led to four children, lasted until Mitzi's death in 1969.

After serving in Europe as a staff sergeant in the US Army Signal Corps during the second world war, he returned to Broadway in a revival of Elmer Rice's Counsellor-At-Law, playing Harry Becker, a Jewish communist beaten senseless by the police during a protest. Facing the lawyer (Paul Muni) who is to defend him, he delivers a speech that denounces the lawyer and the capitalist system. But Pevney's most significant stage performance (and his last) was as Coney in Arthur Laurent]'s Home of the Brave (1945), the victim of anti-Semitism in the US army.

He then appeared in five films noirs, specialising in shady characters beginning with Nocturne (1946), in which he played Ned "Fingers" Ford, a smart-talking nightclub pianist being investigated in a murder case by a robotic George Raft. He was one of gangster Richard Widmark's henchmen in The Street With No Name (1948) and had good roles in two films directed by later blacklisted directors: as John Garfield's buddy, dropped by the up-and-coming boxer in Robert Rossen's Body and Soul (1947); and as a scheming truck driver in Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway (1949).

Pevney abandoned acting altogether after giving himself a small role in his first film as director, an effective B film noir Shakedown (1950). It was the first of around two dozen movies he made for Universal in the following seven years.

The prematurely grey, curly hair and earnest tanned features of Jeff Chandler were seen in seven of Pevney's pictures: boxing to kill in Iron Man (1951); in love with ex-con Loretta Young in Because of You (1952); wooing Rhonda Fleming with a sword in Yankee Pasha (1954); digging for gold as a half-Apache married to Jane Russell in Foxfire (1955); gradually seducing icy Joan Crawford in Female on the Beach (1955) - at their first meeting, when Chandler asks her how she likes her coffee, she replies: "Alone" - winning the war in Away All Boats (1956), a huge box-office hit, and, as a one-armed ex-soldier, facing up to four young hoodlums in a western, The Plunderers (1960).

Among the Universal contractors who responded well under Pevney's workmanlike direction were George Nader, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis, the last burgeoning into a serious actor as a deaf-mute boxer in Flesh and Fury (1952), as a young gang leader in Six Bridges to Cross (1955) and a traffic cop in The Midnight Story (1957). Most of his movies earned respectable returns at the box office, none more so than Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), an amiable family film that starred Debbie Reynolds as a backwoods girl singing Tammy, which topped the charts in both the US and the UK.

Pevney's penultimate film for Universal was Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), a rather fanciful biopic of Lon Chaney, excellently portrayed by James Cagney. In 1961, with the breakdown of the Hollywood studio system, he decided to give up feature films (one exception being The Night of the Grizzly, 1966) and concentrate on television.

Apart from Star Trek, his name was on dozens of episodes in TV series, including The Virginian (1962), The Munsters (1964), High Chaparral (1968) and The Incredible Hulk (1978).

Pevney, who retired in the 1980s, is survived by his third wife Margo and three of his four children.