Borden Chase

Few screenwriters lived a life as pulpy as the stories they told, but Borden Chase did. He was born Frank Fowler in Brooklyn to English immigrant parents, left school at fourteen, and knocked around the New York underworld and its margins, reportedly driving for the gangster Frankie Yale and laboring as a sandhog deep beneath the East River digging the Holland Tunnel. He took his pen name, so the legend goes, off a passing Borden's milk truck and a Chase bank on a Manhattan corner.

The dangerous tunnel work gave him his first material, and he began selling muscular, authentic short stories to the pulp magazines, especially Argosy, before drifting west to write for the studios. His subject was men tested by hard country and harder circumstances, and he found his true home in the Western.

His masterpiece was Red River, adapted from his own novel of a brutal cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail. Directed by Howard Hawks, with John Wayne as a tyrannical rancher and Montgomery Clift as the surrogate son who defies him, the film turned a cattle drive into a mythic clash of wills and earned Chase an Academy Award nomination for its story. It helped prove that the Western could carry the weight of serious drama.

Under contract to Universal in the 1950s, Chase became the essential writer of the psychologically charged Westerns that director Anthony Mann built around James Stewart, films in which the hero is driven, vengeful, and morally scarred. Winchester '73, Bend of the River, and The Far Country gave the genre a new adult complexity, and Chase's tough, spare storytelling was central to it. A proud, combative man and an outspoken conservative in his politics, he kept writing hard-edged adventure into the television era. He died in 1971, remembered by connoisseurs as one of the indispensable architects of the modern Western.