Jules Furthman

Furthman is the great invisible man of the golden age, a writer beloved by directors and unknown to the public. A Chicago-bred college man, he entered pictures in the 1910s and, briefly changing his byline during the anti-German feeling of the First World War, spent decades quietly building one of the most impressive bodies of work in Hollywood.

His specialty was the exotic and the erotic rendered with hard-boiled economy. In partnership with Josef von Sternberg he wrote the smoky, fatalistic vehicles that made Marlene Dietrich a legend, including Morocco, with its unforgettable final image of a woman kicking off her heels to follow a soldier into the desert, and the fever dream Shanghai Express. Furthman understood the woman who has seen everything and expects nothing, and he gave her lines that curled off the tongue.

For Howard Hawks he became indispensable. He shaped the camaraderie and stoic banter of Only Angels Have Wings, co-wrote To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep alongside William Faulkner, taming Hemingway and Chandler into brisk Hawksian dialogue, and returned decades later to help build the leisurely masterpiece Rio Bravo. In between he adapted the seafaring epic Mutiny on the Bounty, earning an Academy Award nomination, and wrote the pitiless carnival noir Nightmare Alley.

Furthman had no interest in fame. He was famously difficult, ferociously well paid, and happiest tending his celebrated collection of orchids on his ranch, growing rare flowers with the same patience he brought to a scene. He worked steadily into the 1950s and died in 1966. Directors knew exactly what he was worth. The public never learned his name, which is precisely why he deserves rediscovery as one of the supreme technicians of the American screenplay.