Paul Wendkos, director

Published on Sunday 22 November 2009 21:51

Born: 20 September, 1925, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Died: 12 November, 2009 in Malibu, California, aged 84.

PAUL Wendkos, a movie and television director was best known for the frothy surfer film Gidget, but his other productions ranged from thrillers to historical dramas.

Wendkos was assigned to direct Gidget in 1958, a year after president of Columbia Pictures Harry Cohn signed him to a contract.

The film starred Sandra Dee, then 17, as tomboy Francie Lawrence, who doesn't understand why her girlfriends are so boy-crazy. Francie's only interest in the guys at the beach is having them teach her to surf. But love eventually snares her and she's soon drinking beer with the Big Kahuna (Cliff Robertson) just to make Moondoggie (James Darren) jealous.

Released in 1959, the movie and its sequel, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, also directed by Wendkos, helped popularise the surfing culture.

Wendkos's first feature film, The Burglar, starring a then little-known Jayne Mansfield, had brought him to Cohn's attention. Wendkos raised the money for the movie, a low-budget thriller whose noirish style foreshadowed many of his later films. Mansfield played the girlfriend of the leader of a gang that steals a precious necklace and who then goes on the lam.

Among his more than 100 productions, Wendkos directed TV movies about a man tortured by multiple personalities (The Five of Me, 1981); and a man who marries 82 women (Scorned and Swindled, 1984).

Reviewing Scorned and Swindled in the New York Times, John J O'Connor wrote: "Wendkos directs with an unerring ability to make the decidedly bizarre seem almost comfortably commonplace."

Wendkos's other big-screen films include Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), a sequel to the 1960 western The Magnificent Seven, and The Mephisto Waltz (1971), about a classical pianist whose soul is assumed by another pianist.

Abraham Paul Wendkos was born in Philadelphia on 20 September, 1925, to Simon and Judith Wendkos. After serving in the US navy during the Second World War, he graduated from Columbia University and studied film at the New School for Social Research (now the New School).

One of the productions he was most proud of was Right to Die, a 1987 TV movie with Raquel Welch as a strong-willed woman who is stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease and who must decide whether to go off life support. "Here is a film that deals candidly with a profoundly serious issue," O'Connor wrote in his review. "There is little pussyfooting and no phoney uplift."