Obituary: Michael Gordon

Michael Gordon, film director: born Baltimore 6 September 1909; died Los Angeles 29 April 1993.

MICHAEL GORDON'S name does not appear in any lists of Hollywood's best film directors yet he deserves at least one footnote in movie history for directing Pillow Talk in 1959. This huge commercial success - only Ben-Hur and One Hundred and One Dalmatians earned more money that year - started the cycle of Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies in which sex was talked about but never seen. While Hollywood was breaking down barriers in terms of language, sexuality and violence, Gordon's prim picture took its style from television comedy shows and seemed to augur a moral backlash, at least at Universal Studios. It is perhaps the quintessential commercial product of the dying days of the Eisenhower era. Gordon said later that Pillow Talk 'started a pernicious trend in male-chauvinist pictures'.

It was Gordon's first Hollywood film since 1951, when his fellow director Edward Dmytryk went before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named him (and Bernard Vorhaus) as a Communist. Gordon himself was called before the Committee and after refusing to co-operate he was blacklisted. Interviewed by Victor Navasky for his definitive book on the blacklist, Naming Names (1980), Gordon said: 'The Hitler era was not yet over and the whole concept of being an informer was repugnant, repellent, against the principles of what the democratic way of life meant.'

Like many other film-makers, Gordon fared badly during the days of the blacklist. He suffered two heart attacks and was able to make just one film, Wherever She Goes (1953), an account of the early life of the concert pianist Eileen Joyce which was made in Australia. By 1958 he was desperate and after some agonising he changed his mind about the blacklist. At a secret meeting in a hotel room, he met Congressman Jackson and a court reporter and named names. He felt that the blacklist was almost at an end and that he could do little damage to other people's careers while rehabilitating his own.

'I felt disloyal to a principle,' he said, 'though it no longer was of such urgency that it called for the supreme sacrifice of one's profession. The climate had thawed.'

Gordon's background was in the theatre. He had attended the Yale Drama School with Elia Kazan and fell in with the group of leftist playwrights, actors and directors there. He worked on the original stage production of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy (1937) and directed Arthur Laurents' Home of the Brave (1945) on Broadway. During the war years he commuted between Hollywood and New York, earning money from the former and prestige from the latter. His first films were low-budget affairs - his debut in 1942 was a Boston Blackie serial; One Dangerous Night (1943) was part of the Lone Wolf series and he made the original Crime Doctor (1943). After a four-year break in New York, he returned to Hollywood with slightly improved status for The Web (1947), an agreeably tense film noir about a luckless bodyguard, and Another Part of the Forest (1948), a powerful adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play about a ruthless American family.

Then came his biggest break to date: Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), which won a Best Actor Oscar for Jose Ferrer who had already played the role on Broadway and on American television the year before. Produced by Stanley Kramer and adapted by Carl Foreman - who was also about to be blacklisted - it was made on a very tight budget. Gordon's direction is at best perfunctory - it's hard to decide whether lack of money forced him to adopt an almost minimalist style or whether he lacked a style at all. He was perhaps merely a talented observer of actors who plonked his camera down in front of them and let them read their lines. It survives as a record of Ferrer's performance.

Any serious intent vanished from Gordon's work when he returned to Hollywood. From drama he turned to comedy - Boys Night Out (1962), with Kim Novak, James Garner and a lot of sexual innuendo, and then Move Over Darling (1963), with Doris Day and a script left over from the aborted Marilyn Monroe film Something's Got To Give. Gordon made only one decent film after that, an enjoyable spoof western with Dean Martin called Texas Across the River (1966), and three dismal, leering sex comedies that flopped in the era of Easy Rider and The Graduate.

Gordon retired from film-making in 1970 and took up a professorship-in-residence at the University of California in Los Angeles. Summing up his blacklist years and what he described as his 'tortured intellectual conflicts', he said: 'We weren't playing for nickels and dimes. We were playing for our lives.'

(Photograph omitted)