Charles Marquis Warren

Novelist/scripter/director Charles Marquis Warren was a regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post almost before the ink on his Baltimore City College diploma was dry. A friend and protégé of jazz-age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, Warren acted as Fitzgerald's agent in the latter's final years. After serving as a naval officer in World War II, Warren gained a foothold in Hollywood as one of America's foremost experts on western lore (though his first scripting assignment was the contemporary court-martial drama Beyond Glory[1948]). Many of his western novels were adapted for the screen, beginning with Only the Valiant (1951). Warren was given his first opportunity to direct with 1951's Little Big Horn, a low-budget precursor to the adult-oriented, psychological westerns which proliferated during the next twenty years. Of his many subsequent directorial assignments, Blood Arrow (1958) is of special interest, inasmuch as many of its story elements were expanded upon in the Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves (1990). A prolific tiller of the TV-western field, Warren wrote and directed the pilot episode for the long-running series Gunsmoke (1955-75); he went on to create and produce the 1958 Eric Fleming-Clint Eastwood weekly Rawhide, and acted as executive producer of The Virginian, television's first 90-minute western. In recognition of his wartime service, Charles Marquis Warren is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide