 Pichel worked steadily as a character actor throughout the 1930s, including the early version of the Theodore Dreiser novel, "An American Tragedy" (1931), "Madame Butterfly" (1932), in a low budget version of "Oliver Twist" (1933) as Fagin, in "Cleopatra" (1934), alongside Leslie Howard in Michael Curtiz's "British Agent" (1934), as the servant Sandor in "Dracula’s Daughter" (1936), in the Bette Davis film " Jezebel" (1938), as the proprietor of a seedy roadhouse in the once scandalous "The Story of Temple Drake" (1933) and as a Mexican general in "Juarez" (1939).Pichel also performed on radio, played small parts in several of the films that he later directed, often without credit, and was the narrator in the John Ford films "How Green Was My Valley" (1941) and the Western, "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949).Pichel was a friend of the screenwriter George S. Kaufman and joined the circle of those witty and iconoclastic friends who had abandoned the Algonquin Round Table in New York to make small fortunes in the talkies.