The actor Joel McCrea and his son Jody were both tall (6ft 3in), well-built and ruggedly handsome. But Jody, who has died of a heart attack aged 74, found it difficult to fill his famous father's shoes. Joel McCrea had a long and varied acting career, working with many of Hollywood's leading directors. Jody's career, during which he made many westerns in the shadow of his father, was more limited, though he came into his own in six of the seven Beach Party movies in the 1960s.
Almost all of the series, made for the youth market, starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, with slow-drawling McCrea in the supporting cast and ancient Hollywood stars on their last legs as guest stars. The plots usually involved a group of young, scantily clad surfers defending their right to continue their love-ins and gyrations to surf music without interference from killjoy "squares".
McCrea played a character variously called Deadhead, Big Lunk and Bonehead, who could always be counted on to say something idiotic, much to the despair of his comparatively brighter companions. "It took me four pictures to figure it out. The kids liked Deadhead because they felt superior to me, to him," McCrea said many years later.
Jody was born and brought up in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by showbusiness friends of his father and mother, Frances Dee, a star in the 1930s and 40s, who met Joel on the film The Silver Cord (1933). His ambition was to become a rancher like his father, rather than follow him into films. Nevertheless, he studied drama at the University of California, in Los Angeles, before making his official screen debut as a soldier in The First Texan (1956), starring Joel as Sam Houston. Two more westerns with his father followed, Trooper Hook and Gunsight Ridge (both 1957), in which he was hardly noticeable.
He was more visible in William Wellman's Lafayette Escadrille as a young first world war flying ace in a team with Tab Hunter and Clint Eastwood, and as a bully in the heated, small-town drama The Restless Years (both 1958). On television, he played deputy to his father's town marshal in Wichita Town (1959). It lasted for only four episodes. Thereafter, he started making a career for himself, helped by his father's semi-retirement. But inter-generational comparisons were unavoidable, especially in Young Guns of Texas (1962), which had the gimmick of casting Jody McCrea with two other Hollywood juniors who failed to make a mark on acting, James Mitchum (son of Robert) and Alana Ladd (daughter of Alan).
Then Beach Party (1963) came to the rescue. Directed by William Asher, it concerned an anthropology professor, Robert Cummings, studying the "mating habits" of the teenage denizens of Malibu beach. In the next two years, there followed Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.
Though his dimwitted beach bum character was gradually given some love scenes, McCrea was pleased to abandon the series' typecasting by making two biker pictures, The Girls from Thunder Strip (1966) and The Glory Stompers (1968), the latter featuring him and Dennis Hopper as heads of rival motorcycle gangs.
His final film was the substandard western Cry Blood, Apache (1970), in which his father played a cameo. He retired from acting the same year, when he married Dusty Iron Wing, a Native American woman. The couple ran a cattle and elk ranch in Hondo, New Mexico. She died in 1996. McCrea is survived by his two younger brothers, David and Peter, and two stepchildren.