JackFavell wrote:I swear Pichel and Barrat were in every movie made in the 30's.
Barrat averaged 20 films a year up until about 1936, whereupon he slowed down to about 10 a year, according to IMDB!
Irving Pichel is quite an interesting man. He started out as an actor, showing up in movies as diverse as CLEOPATRA, I AM A THIEF, DRACULA'S DAUGHTER and THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE. He was the voice of Huw as a man, in HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, and narrated SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON. He moved into directing early on, with THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME followed up by SHE and went on to direct about 40 movies, a few of which are favorites of mine, though they aren't really remembered much. THEY WON''T BELIEVE ME, MR. PEABODY AND THE MERMAID and AND NOW TOMORROW are some of the more well known titles. His second to last movie, DESTINATION MOON was just discussed over at the Movie Morlocks page, and he himself narrates the Woody Woodpecker cartoon in the middle of the movie.
I wish I'd seen the Mary Astor-Ricardo Cortez movie. It sounds like fun.
Irving Pichel also gave the movie world one of its brightest, if short-lived figures:
Natalie Wood, whom he discovered as a four year old extra
who dropped her ice cream cone on the sidewalk at the beginning of the movie,
Happy Land (1943), filmed in Santa Rosa, CA. She was named Natasha Gurdin then and her mother's ambition and Pichel's kindness to her brought the entire family to LA where she was given the less foreign-sounding name of Natalie and took the last name of Pichel's friend, Sam Wood. Pichel and Wood went on to make three more movies together as director and actress,
The Moon Is Down (1943),
Tomorrow Is Forever (1946), and
The Bride Wore Boots (1946).