Despite a long and varied career, in which he made several excellent films noirs, westerns, thrillers and war dramas, and a fair number of superior television movies, it was the wry fate of the film and television director Paul Wendkos, who has died of a lung infection aged 87, that his death was announced widely with the words "Gidget director dies".
The popular teen surf movies – Gidget (1959), Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) – directed by Wendkos, are interesting documents of pre-hippy conservative California youth culture. Gidget, a contraction of girl and midget, is the nickname of a 16-year-old adolescent (played in succession by Sandra Dee, Deborah Walley and Cindy Carol) trying to cope with the problems of growing up, mainly defined by her relationship with her boyfriend, Moondoggie (James Darren).
According to the Variety review of the first Gidget film: "Paul Wendkos's direction is ingenious in delineating the youthful characters, not so easy in presenting normal youngsters of no particular depth or variety." But the Gidget trilogy was a far cry from most of Wendkos's other, edgier movies, beginning with his short documentary Dark Interlude (1953), about a school for blind children.
His first feature was the shamefully underestimated film noir, The Burglar, starring Dan Duryea as a jewel thief and Jayne Mansfield as his sexy accomplice. Mansfield was unknown at the time of shooting in 1955, but the film was released two years later by Columbia Pictures to cash in on her rise to fame. Written by David Goodis, from his own novel, it was atmospherically photographed in urban landscapes, ending with an exciting chase through the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey. After the belated release of The Burglar, Wendkos moved to Hollywood, where he made 15 more feature films, at the same time as TV films, from 1957 to 1971, until he gave himself up to television exclusively, the sort of move that tends to diminish directors' standing among film critics.
Wendkos was born in Philadelphia and served in the US Navy during the second world war, which gave him a special sympathy with war movies such as Hell Boats (1970). He attended Columbia University, in New York, and later, at the New School for Social Research in New York, studied film history and aesthetics, two subjects that he applied to his work as a film director.
Some of the more familiar movies in his genre-hopping career were the westerns Face of a Fugitive (1959), with a dour Fred MacMurray framed for murder, and two big-budget actioners set in Mexico, Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), the second sequel, and Cannon for Cordoba (1970). Arguably, his best movie was Angel Baby (1961), about an evangelist (George Hamilton) who "cures" a mute woman (Salome Jens), but it was held back for release by Columbia because of the same studio's glossier, and more starry, Elmer Gantry (1960) on a similar subject. Wendkos's last feature, The Mephisto Waltz (1971), suffered in comparison with Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), in which there was also the devil to pay.
In between the many episodes of TV series, such as The Untouchables, Dr Kildare and The Big Valley, Wendkos went in mainly for TV biopics, notably the Emmy-award winning The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975), a gleefully macabre drama starring Elizabeth Montgomery; A Woman Called Moses (1978), about the life of the African-American abolitionist and slave escape leader, Harriet Tubman, played by Cicely Tyson; and The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story (1988), with Lindsay Wagner as the flight attendant on the hijacked airliner.
Wendkos is survived by his second wife and a son.