by Stephen Vagg
A look at the career of 1950s leading man and husband, John Derek.
John Derek is best remembered today, if at all, for his taste in wives. Over the years, his paramours included such beauties as Ursula Andress, Linda Evans, and Bo Derek, which is a very good strike rate, up there with Roger Vadim (whose exes included Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda). This love life has tended to overshadow his other achievements, particularly his work as a photographer, film director and movie star. Here, we will focus on the latter – specifically, Derek’s fifteen acting career.
Because that’s all it was, really – a decade and a half. Well, maybe a little bit longer than that if you count when he played some bit parts starting out. But it wasn’t long. Derek became a star with his first decent part, and he continued to be one until he stopped acting in the mid 1960s. That was it – no ABC TV movies or guesties on Fantasy Island for Derek. He was never much of an actor, as he himself admitted, but the filmography is of some interest.
Derek was born in California in 1926, the son of actor-director Lawson Harris (who’d made a few films in Australia in the 1920s – a lot of foreign actors did that at the time, they’d come out to appear in a show and stick around to make movies, like Fred Niblo, Michael Redgrave’s dad Roy, Ida Lupino’s uncle Barry). The young Derek was very pretty – you can’t discuss his career without analysing his handsomeness, because he wouldn’t have had one without the other. He was spotted by agent Henry Willson, who cornered the market in pretty boys such as Rock Hudson, Guy Madison and Troy Donahue (Jim Parsons played Willson in the Netflix show Hollywood). Derek had bit parts in some films for Willson’s then boss, producer David O Selznick – Since You Went Away (1944) and I’ll Be Seeing You (1944) – but this momentum was interrupted when Derek was drafted into the army.
On demobilisation, Derek didn’t have to wait very long to become a star. Nicholas Ray was making a film for Humphrey Bogart’s production company, called Knock on Any Door (1949), a melodrama about a hood defended in court by Bogart. The role of the hood was a hot one in Hollywood at the time – the filmmakers dreamed of casting Marlon Brando, but wound up with John Derek (Ray had just launched another pretty boy actor, Farley Granger, in They Live by Night). Knock on Any Door isn’t the classic its makers were hoping for, but it’s not a bad film and Derek is effective enough. He’s the lead more than Bogart and gets to say the famous line “live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse”. Fun fact: the next film Bogart and Ray did together, In a Lonely Place (1950), was originally envisioned as a vehicle for John Derek until Bogart decided to play the lead role himself.
Knock on Any Door was released through Columbia Pictures, who signed Derek to a seven-year contract and set about building the young man into a star. The studio gave Derek a juicy support role in All the King’s Men (1949) playing the spoilt, weak son of Broderick Crawford’s Huey Long style politician. The film won Oscars, made money and Derek was off and running.
Knock on Any Door and All the King’s Men were very much prestige pictures, but the bulk of Columbia’s output was bread and butter fare: war films, Westerns, comedies, swashbucklers. Derek was given star roles in two of the latter: Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950) and Mask of the Avenger (1951). In the former, Derek plays the son of Robin Hood – the film is basically a remake of Columbia’s earlier hit, The Bandit of Sherwood Forest, which starred Cornel Wilde (whose career would parallel Derek’s in many ways, particularly in later moving into directing). In Mask of the Avenger, Derek played a Count of Monte Cristo type under the direction of Phil Karlson, and is easily outshone by Anthony Quinn (as the villain), who spent a lot of the 1950s outshining his pretty boy leading men. Derek isn’t one of the great swashbuckling stars, but the films are quite fun.
More classy was Saturday’s Hero (1951), where Derek plays a football player from a poor mining town sought out by colleges – years before All the Right Moves and Varsity Blues! The movie, which was specifically developed as a vehicle for Derek, features plenty of cliches – dim ethnic dad, wise cynical journalist, third act injury – and it feels like scenes were re-shot, but the film does take chances. It’s quite ferocious on the corruption of college football, and Donna Reed’s love interest is a wild child rather than the typical sweet thing that was common at the time (the movie was made by left wingers and has a Marxist feel). Saturday’s Hero is best remembered for introducing Aldo Ray to cinema audiences; he has an ease and comfort on screen that Derek never matched for all Derek’s beauty. But Derek is quite good here and the film does try, which counts.
Derek then supported some heavy-set old actors in film noirs: The Family Secret (1951), with Lee J Cobb; and Scandal Sheet (1952) with Broderick Crawford. The Family Secret (made through Bogart’s company) has an interesting set up – Derek accidentally kills a friend and confesses to dad Cobb – although this isn’t well developed. Derek does well, helped once again playing a character who is spoilt and weak. Scandal Street is the better movie, directed by Karlson from a novel by Sam Fuller; Derek plays a reporter investigating a murder committed by his boss Crawford. It’s a tight little noir; Fuller would have made a better version, but this one still holds the attention.
By this stage, Columbia must have realised that Derek wasn’t a very good actor and wasn’t going to be a big star. The juiciest “young man” roles at the studio started going instead to Aldo Ray and Glenn Ford, who had what Derek did not – individuality. Still, there’s always a market in Hollywood for handsome leading men, and Columbia loaned him to Republic Pictures for a war movie, Thunderbirds (1952), co-starring John Drew Barrymore (aka Drew’s dad). This film set the template for many of Derek’s subsequent war movies: a story about two friends in love with the same girl who deal with a crusty old timer and lots of stock footage. It’s really dull. Far better was another swashbuckler at Columbia, Prince of Pirates (1953), a hugely enjoyable, lively film with plenty of colour and an enthusiastic cast. It’s one of Derek’s best movies.
The studio put him in two films supporting John Hodiak – Ambush at Tomahawk Gap (1952), a Western, and Mission Over Korea (1953), a Korean War story. Both are actually really good. Ambush is a brutal tale full of cynical characters – kind of like a Western noir with Derek and Hodiak as outlaws. Mission Over Korea has campy moments (eg Derek talking about wanting to napalm commies) but is full of interesting touches: it’s about spotter planes, which is different, there are genuinely exciting scenes and surprisingly interesting characterisation (Audrey Trotter’s tired, traumatised nurse), plus an emotional ending.
Derek was reunited with Broderick Crawford for The Last Posse (1953), an interesting, complex, tough Western about a posse. He then did a film at Republic, Sea of Lost Ships (1953), a dull coast guard movie with Richard Jaekel, after which Derek asked for – and was given – release from his Columbia contract.
This was a risky move. Pretty boy contract stars who aren’t particularly talented would often struggle when cut off from their home studio (eg Troy Donahue, Jeffrey Hunter) – but it didn’t seem to affect Derek’s career. Indeed, the move appears to have re-energised his acting (fear can do that). He actually got decent reviews for his work in a television version of A Place in the Sun, playing the Montgomery Clift role – another handsome weakling. He also made his best Western, over at Republic – The Outcast (1954) – one of the rare movies where Derek plays someone with balls, a tough, ruthless womanising killer. It’s pretty good work. The film was directed by Quentin Tarantino fave William Witney and is full of action – people are always climbing through windows and pulling guns and double crossing each other.
Producer Walter Wagner gave Derek the title role in an “Eastern” at Allied Artists, the hugely fun The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954). This was a big hit, perhaps the most successful of any film starring Derek (as shall be discussed, he was in blockbusters, but in support parts). It has nice colour, a Nat King Cole theme song, plenty of action, torture and dancing girls.
Also at Allied, Derek made one of his war movies, An Annapolis Story (1955), directed by Don Siegel, co-written by Daniel Mainwaring and produced by Walter Mirisch with Sam Peckinpah as dialogue supervisor. Siegel claims Derek insisted on switching roles at the last minute so that co-star Kevin McCarthy got the girl rather than Derek, but it doesn’t make much difference.
Philip Dunne then gave Derek one of his best ever roles, as John Wilkes Booth, in Prince of Players (1955), an otherwise dull biopic of Booths’ brother, the famed Shakesperean actor Edwin (played by Richard Burton). There’s great material here – Edwin Booth had a controlling father, a wife who died, a brother who shot Lincoln – but the material is treated like a musical biopic with renditions of Shakespeare instead of musical numbers (Burton recites the verse rather than acts it). Derek livens up every scene he’s in; even if it’s the part more than the actor, he doesn’t disgrace himself and makes you wish the film had just focused on the relationship between the Booth brothers.
Derek signed a contract with Paramount, who gave him some good chances. He was in a Western, Run for Cover (1955), an attempt by the Pine-Thomas team to go upmarket with James Cagney as star and Nicholas Ray as director (neither known for their association with Westerns). Cagney is always compelling, and Viveca Lindfords is great; although Derek plays a weak character yet again, the film could’ve done with a better actor in his part. Derek was more effective in Cecil B. De Mille’s big screen epic, The Ten Commandments (1956), playing the role of Joshua when original choice Cornel Wilde turned it down. The movie was a blockbuster commercially and still holds up well today.
On television, Derek was in a strong western, Massacre at Sand Creek (1956) for Playhouse 90, about the notorious massacre by US troops of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in southeastern Colorado. Derek plays a decent lieutenant who winds up blamed for the whole thing; once more, he’s effective as a weak and passive person.
Paramount gave Derek a lead vehicle, playing a boxing priest in The Leather Saint (1956). This should have been surefire material – the priest is raising money for a hospital, a gangster’s moll falls for him, etc – but the film is wonkily structured and Derek can’t paper over its flaws. This movie, more than any other, proved that Derek wasn’t a proper film star. A Tony Curtis or a Rock Hudson would have made this compelling; Derek was unable to.
Paramount had Derek support Cornel Wilde in the sluggish Eastern, Omar Khayyam (1957); Derek’s part could have been cut out of the film. He made a cheap Western, Fury at Showdown (1957), with Nick Adams that is dull and angsty (although the thought of Derek and Adams hanging out together offscreen is fun – both men had lively personal lives).
Like many fading stars around this time, Derek tried his luck in Europe. He travelled to Italy to appear in a mediocre swashbuckler, Pirate of the Half Moon (1957), then went to Britain to make The Flesh is Weak (1957). The most interesting of the two is Flesh, which was directed by Don Chaffey for producer Raymond Sloss, who specialised in sexier movies. Derek plays a sleazy pimp based on the Messina Brothers gang; he actually seems to be trying here and it’s one of his best performances – the film turned out to be a sleeper hit at the British box office.
Derek shifted over to Switzerland to make the adventure film, High Hell (1958), which was set in Canada, and directed by American Burt Balaban, son of Paramount’s president, Barney. He stayed in Europe to make an action tale, Prisoner of the Volga (1959).
Derek returned to Hollywood to play a key supporting role in Exodus (1960), based on Leon Uris’ best seller about the establishment of Israel; Derek played a “good Arab” who gets [Spoilers] a great on-screen death, strung up by Arabs, with the Star of David etched into his chest. He guest starred on Zane Grey Theatre, and starred in a TV series, Frontier Circus (1961-62), appearing alongside Chill Wills and Richard Jaekel.
Derek disliked acting and was critical of his own abilities. He admitted, “directors never went for a second because they knew it’d be no different from the first” and “I had a monotone voice, which went even flatter when I tried to act.”
Fortunately, by now he had developed a strong reputation as a photographer; he could also live off his wives. Derek’s first wife was Russian ballerina Pati Behrs, who he left in the mid ‘50s for Swiss model Ursula Andress. After Andress became an international star in Dr No (1963), she and Derek appeared together in the enjoyable B movie Nightmare in the Sun (filmed 1963, released 1965) directed by actor Marc Lawrence. Derek was given a co-producing credit, supposedly because he was going to persuade Andress to do a nude scene only to renege. Derek was showing his age by now – more a grey fox than pretty young thing – and he gives a decent performance and the movie is interesting.
Derek had aspirations to direct and made his debut with Once Before I Die (1966) starring himself and Andress. This is a decent story about various people fleeing for safety in the Philippines immediately after Pearl Harbor and is full of interesting visual touches – flashy montages, freeze frames, etc. It’s interesting to watch the Derek-Andress relationship on screen – he basically treats her like a baby, and she responds in kind, wanting to go and get her puppies, and not wanting to be alone, and suggesting he get a haircut: is this how they acted together during their marriage? Richard Jaekel is excellent, and Andress was never shot more beautifully – Derek really knew how to frame her face.
In real life, Andress left Derek for Jean Paul Belmondo, but he quickly bounced back, hooking up with Linda Evans, who was a star on TV’s The Big Valley. Eventually, he left Evans for the under-age Mary Collins (better known as Bo Derek) and they stayed together until his death.
Derek quit acting after Once Before I Die but he continued to work as a director: A Boy a Girl (1969) with Dean Paul Martin, Childish Things (1969) with Evans, Fantasies (shot 1973, released 1981) with Bo, and Love You (1979), a porno with Annette Haven. Bo Derek’s success in 10 (1979) enabled John Derek to get finance for a series of films starring his wife: Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), Bolero (1984), Ghosts Can’t Do It (1990). They have their charms but at heart, Derek was a photographer more than a proper director – his films are full of striking images that are insufficiently dramatised (Roger Vadim’s movies had a similar problem). Derek is sometimes blamed for ruining the momentum of his wife’s career post-10, and was often called a Svengali; she turned down High Road to China but the press got a little hysterical about it all. He died in 1998.
What lessons can be drawn from the career of John Derek? The main one is to be born good looking. But his truly great talent was as a lover of attractive women, and a photographer.
He isn’t much of an actor but his filmography includes some enjoyable epics (The Ten Commandments, Exodus), a splashy scene-stealing support role (Prince of Players), several above-average Westerns (Attack at Tomahawk Gap, The Outcasts, The Last Posse) and noirs (Scandal Street, Once Before I Die), a couple of fun swashbucklers (Prince of Pirates, Hajji Baba) plus interesting dramas (All the King’s Men, Saturday’s Hero, Knock on Any Door). That’s a track record Derek possibly didn’t deserve, but it is one to be proud of.
