Vincent Sherman, who directed Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis and Errol Flynn during their 1940s heyday at Warner Bros., has died. He was 99.
Mr. Sherman died Sunday of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital, his son Eric Sherman told The Associated Press.
An actor-turned-screenwriter, Mr. Sherman began his directing career at Warner Bros. in 1939 with the low-budget “The Return of Dr. X,” which is memorable only as Bogart’s sole foray into the horror genre: He played a criminal who died in the electric chair and was brought back to life by a doctor who restores life to corpses.
Working on pictures assigned by the studio, Mr. Sherman quickly established a reputation as a competent technician with a flair for melodrama.
Among his credits are “All Through the Night” (1942), starring Bogart; “The Hard Way” (1943) starring Ida Lupino and Jack Carson; “Mr. Skeffington” (1944), starring Davis and Claude Rains; “The Adventures of Don Juan” (1948), starring Flynn; “Goodbye, My Fancy” (1951), starring Joan Crawford; “Lone Star” with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner (1952) and “An Affair in Trinidad” (1952) with Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford.
Mr. Sherman later directed Paul Newman in “The Young Philadelphians” (1959) and Richard Burton in “Ice Palace” (1960). In the 1960s, he turned to directing for television.
In 1932, Mr. Sherman was hired for a role as a young communist in the Chicago company of Elmer Rice’s play “Counsellor at Law.”
A year later, he was brought out to Hollywood to re-create the role in director William Wyler’s film version.
During the McCarthy era in the 1950s, Sherman was “gray listed” in Hollywood for a number of years, losing what “should have been my best, most productive years as a director.”
“I wasn’t a communist, but I knew people like John Garfield who’d been blacklisted, and I stood beside them,” he told the Toronto Star.
After turning to television directing, he worked on numerous series such as “Medical Center,” “Baretta,” “The Waltons” and “Trapper John, M.D.”
At the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in 1996, Mr. Sherman’s “The Hard Way” was screened as part of a series of forgotten masterpieces.
“Of the 30 films that I made, I really liked only 10 or 12 of them,” he told the San Jose Mercury News. “The rest were what we called bread-and-butter pictures.”
