 While Pichel was ultimately not called to testify, he was blacklisted, forcing him eventually to leave the United States in order to direct his final pictures.Pichel's friend Joseph C. Youngerman, a prop handler and assistant director in Hollywood, later confirmed that Pichel was in fact a member of the Communist Party.Irving Pichel married Violette Wilson, daughter of Jackson Stitt Wilson, a Methodist minister and Socialist mayor of Berkeley, California.