[3] Although he hated vaudeville, he loved the theatre and developed a career as a stage actor, appearing in such plays as Home of the Brave, The World We Make, Key Largo, Golden Boy, and Nature Son.

[citation needed] Beginning with Shakedown (1950),[3] Pevney became a film and television director, with a directing career that spanned over 80 productions from 1950 to 1984.

Among his films were Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Door (1951) with Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff, Meet Danny Wilson (1952) with Frank Sinatra, Desert Legion (1953) with Alan Ladd, 3 Ring Circus (1954) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Female on the Beach (1955) with Joan Crawford and Jeff Chandler, Tammy and the Bachelor (1957) with Debbie Reynolds, Walter Brennan, and Leslie Nielsen, Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) with James Cagney as Lon Chaney, Cash McCall (1959) with James Garner and Natalie Wood, The Crowded Sky (1960) with Dana Andrews, and Westerns such as The Plunderers (1960).

Pevney also directed multiple episodes of noted television series, including Bonanza, Star Trek, The Paper Chase, and Trapper John, M.D..

He tied with Marc Daniels for directing the largest number of original Star Trek episodes (14 in total), including "The Devil in the Dark, "Arena", Harlan Ellison's "The City on the Edge of Forever", "Amok Time", "Journey to Babel", and "The Trouble with Tribbles".