VINCENT SHERMAN was one of the last surviving studio contract directors from Hollywood’s postwar golden age. He worked at Warner Bros throughout the 1940s, directing Humphrey Bogart in his only horror movie, The Return of Dr X (1939), and refereeing Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins on Old Acquaintance (1943) after the original director dropped out.
Sherman also directed Davis in Mr Skeffington (1944), a classic melodrama in which Davis learns the value of true love only after a series of misadventures. During a career stretching across six decades, he worked with Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Ronald Reagan — whose ego Sherman felt was far bigger than his talent — and Paul Newman, whom he directed in the 1959 drama The City Jungle, aka The Young Philadelphians.
He replaced John Huston on Across the Pacific (1942), an unofficial follow-up to The Maltese Falcon (1941) involving a Japanese plot to blow up the Panama Canal. Huston went off to join the war for real, leaving Bogart being held prisoner by Japanese spies and no notes on how he was meant to escape.
The son of a Russian emigrant storekeeper, Sherman was born Abraham Orovitz in Vienna, Georgia, in 1906. He worked as a crime reporter, while studying law. But his life took a different turn after he co-wrote a play and moved to New York in the hope of getting it staged. Almost by accident he drifted into acting, first in theatre and then in Hollywood, reprising his stage role in the 1933 William Wyler film Counsellor-at-Law.
Back in New York he worked as an actor, writer and director, before joining Warners, initially as a writer, taking old plots and reworking them into new films. Crime School (1938), in which Bogart takes over the running of a reformatory, was a remake of the Cagney film The Mayor of Hell, released only five years earlier, but proved a big hit.
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Bogart is totally miscast in The Return of Dr X as the bespectacled, streaky-haired doctor, who has been executed for murder, but is brought back to life as a vampire. Bogart had fallen out with Jack Warner. The film was Bogart’s punishment, but Sherman’s big chance to become a director.
His work with Bette Davis and the drama The Hard Way (1943) with Ida Lupino established him as a director who could get the best out of Warner’s leading ladies. Off screen he was romantically linked not only with Davis, but also with her arch enemy Joan Crawford and with Rita Hayworth. His 1996 memoirs were entitled Studio Affairs.
He was “greylisted” during the notorious anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s and his resumé remained blank for the years 1953-56 before he picked up at Warners where he had left off. Increasingly during the 1970s and 1980s Sherman worked in television, directing episodes of Alias Smith and Jones (1971), The Waltons (1972) and even a TV biopic called Bogie (1980), with Kevin O’Connor playing the legendary actor, more than 40 years after the real Bogart starred in Sherman’s directorial debut.
Having worked in Hollywood, Sherman latterly attracted the attention of film festivals, scholars and critics, who praised his work with actors and his storytelling.
Hedda, his wife of 53 years, predeceased him. He is survived by his partner and two children.
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Vincent Sherman, film director, was born on July 16, 1906. He died on June 18, 2006, aged 99.