A handsome contract player who was good at swagger and less good at whatever lay beneath it, and who spent his later years behind the camera, photographing the women he cast in films that critics did not care for.
Fi1m perspective
In All the King's Men (1949) John Derek walks into rooms the way Broderick Crawford does, chest first, chin up, and it takes a minute to notice that nothing is following the walk. That is Tom Stark, Willie's son, and we said at the time that Derek gives the boy the father's swagger with the substance taken out. It is the right performance for the part. It is also, as far as our reviews go, the most we have found to say about him as an actor.
He was a Hollywood boy, born there in 1926 and put under contract as a teenager, and the studios knew what he was for. Humphrey Bogart cast him in Knock on Any Door (1949) and he became a name, the brooding young lead the socially conscious dramas of the late 1940s wanted; All the King's Men followed the same year and brought him a Columbia contract. Through the 1950s he was the good-looking support in westerns and epics, Joshua in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), Taha in Preminger's Exodus (1960). Our review of the DeMille does not mention him, which tells its own story. He is on screen a good deal and he leaves very little behind.
From the mid-1960s he mostly stopped acting and went behind the camera, directing, writing, shooting and cutting his own low-budget films, with Ursula Andress in two of them and Bo Derek in four, among them Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981) and Bolero (1984). We have not reviewed them. The reviews elsewhere were poor, and the films were made to photograph their leading women rather than to tell stories. Whatever he learned standing in front of DeMille's camera, it seems to have been how a body looks in light, not how a scene is built.
We will own a small feeling. Watching Tom Stark again, in his scenes beside his father, we caught for a moment the boy the film needs, spoiled and glad and about to be ruined, and then Crawford spoke and the moment closed. That is Derek's career in a sentence, and it is not a cruel one. Some actors are made to be looked at, and know it, and he seems to have decided early that if looking was the job he would rather be the one doing it.
If you want to see him, see All the King's Men, for Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, and keep half an eye on the son while the father talks. Then decide whether to look any further.
Biography
John Derek (born Derek Delevan Harris, also credited as Dare Harris) was an American actor, filmmaker and photographer. Born in Hollywood, California, he began his career with uncredited roles in the mid-1940s before gaining notice in 1949. He played Nick Romano in Knock on Any Door and Tom Stark in All the King's Men.
Derek appeared in films including The Ten Commandments (1956) as Joshua and Exodus (1960) as Taha. He later worked as a director, writer and cinematographer on projects such as Tarzan the Ape Man (1981) and Bolero (1984). He was married to actresses Pati Behrs, Ursula Andress, Linda Evans and Bo Derek.
