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.
The Man I Married (1940), for example, starring
Joan Bennett,
Francis Lederer, and
Otto Kruger, centers on an American wife slowly discovering her German husband is a Nazi, and incorporated 1938 newsreel footage of the rise of Nazism. ''
Hudson's Bay'' (1941) was a highly pro-British, much-fictionalized historical adventure of the British founding of Canada with
Paul Muni and
Gene Tierney.
The Pied Piper (1942) recounts the story of an aged Englishman trying to get five children out of Nazi-occupied France.
Monty Woolley played the lead role (and earned an Oscar nomination), and
Otto Preminger, himself a refugee from occupied Austria, plays a Nazi commandant. The film, with a
Nunnally Johnson screenplay, was highly praised and also nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture and for best black-and-white cinematography by
Edward Crongjager. "For the most part," wrote
Bosley Crowther in
The New York Times, "Irving Pichel, the director, has muted the frightfulness of war and shown it through suggestion instead of displaying it realistically in all its horror...Few films have come out of this war that are as bright, touching and suspenseful as
The Pied Piper."
The Moon Is Down (1943) was an adaptation of
John Steinbeck's novel. The book was based on the Nazi invasion of neutral Norway in 1940, published in March 1942 and subsequently translated into French and distributed in Europe as an inspiration for local resistance to Nazi occupation. In both film and novel, a small Norwegian village gradually discovers how to organize resistance to Nazi invaders; the film stars
Sir Cedric Hardwicke and
Henry Travers and also marked
Natalie Wood's debut as a child actress (though she was uncredited), whom Pichel had discovered. With a screenplay by future blacklisted writer,
Nunnally Johnson, this was named as one of the top ten films of the year by the
National Board of Review. It played in Sweden in November 1944. Pichel also directed
Alan Ladd in
O.S.S. (1944), written and produced by the later James Bond screenwriter,
Richard Maibaum, and featuring an introduction by
Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) founder,
Wild Bill Donovan. The film showed Ladd finding love in occupied France under the auspices of the nascent O.S.S., which was the precursor to the
Central Intelligence Agency. Bosley Crowther of
The New York Times termed it "tense, tightly written and swiftly paced," and credited the film as the very first on the O.S.S. Several more war-themed films followed, including the sentimental
A Medal for Benny (1945) which led to
J. Carrol Naish gaining a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
Tomorrow Is Forever, (1946) starred
Orson Welles as an American soldier who is presumed killed in WW1 only to return to America and
Claudette Colbert as his wife who remarries; Natalie Wood, in her first credited role, plays an Austrian child with a German accent.
Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948), another film from a Nunnally Johnson script in which a married man, played by
William Powell, accidentally catches a mermaid on his fishing line. Made about the same time was
The Miracle of the Bells (also 1948), a big budget film which failed at the box office about an impoverished coal town with
Frank Sinatra miscast as a priest. "St. Michael ought to sue", wrote the reviewer in
Time magazine. Despite his patriotic war oeuvre, Pichel soon came under scrutiny by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, cofounded and steered by Mississippi Congressman
John E. Rankin who routinely and specifically attacked Jews in the Congressional Record and had bitterly resisted America entering World War II. Pichel chose as collaborators
Robert A. Heinlein, who did uncredited work on the script, and astronomical illustrator
Chesley Bonestell, who contributed the painted lunar backdrops. Pichel's last Hollywood film was for
Randolph Scott in an unexceptional, though profitable, Columbia western,
Santa Fe (1951), but his Hollywood career ground to a halt in the face of the blacklist. His last films as a director were independent European productions:
Martin Luther (1953), funded by the Lutheran Church, in one of its rare forays into film production, and
Day of Triumph (1954), about the life of Christ. Shot on location in Wiesbaden, Germany,
Martin Luther was nominated for Oscars for both its black-and-white cinematography by
Joseph C. Brun, and its art direction and set design recreating the early 1500s by Fritz Maurischat and Paul Markwitz. It was named as fourth in the top ten films of the year by the National Board of Review. Pichel, a lifelong Christian Socialist, died one week after
Day of Triumph was completed and before the premiere. ==Blacklist==