Philip Yordan

Philip Yordan was one of the most talented and enigmatic screenwriters of the 1950s and 1960s, with a multitiered career that is still not understood in its entirety by most film historians. On the most superficial level, he was one of the most well-known writers in Hollywood during the 1950s, and especially highly regarded in the industry as a script doctor, called in to rewrite and repair flawed screenplays. He also wrote many scripts that were refreshing in their approach to their subjects, as well as several daring and groundbreaking works that helped open up Hollywood to freer approaches to storytelling. And he produced some unusual genre films in Europe as well. But Yordan also led a mysterious life on the fringe of the Hollywood blacklist, employing writers who were officially banned from the industry. All of that, and a Broadway hit, figured in an extraordinary career.

Philip Yordan was born in 1914 to a Polish immigrant family. He attended the University of Illinois as an undergraduate, and earned a law degree from Kent College in Chicago. In the late '30s, he entered the movie business as a writer employed by director/producer William Dieterle. He earned a reputation in Hollywood during the 1940s for his ability to synopsize and pitch story ideas, and later for packaging the writing and production work on movies. Yordan's earliest screen credit was on the 1942 feature Syncopation, which was produced and directed by Dieterle at RKO -- the latter has since become a "lost" movie, the Library of Congress possessing the only known copy. In 1943, he began a three year relationship with Monogram Pictures that saw Yordan writing the screenplays for mysteries such as Kurt Neumann's The Unknown Guest, comedies like Joe May's Johnny Doesn't Live Here Any More, and a handful of thrillers. His best works of the period were Max Nosseck's Dillinger (1945), an extraordinarily frank and violent telling of the notorious criminal's career, which earned Yordan an Oscar nomination, and Frank Tuttle's Suspense (1946). Both movies were produced by Frank and Maurice King, and Suspense was the most expensive movie in the entire history of Monogram Pictures.

Yordan's early Hollywood success was interrupted in 1944 when he enjoyed a stage hit with his play Anna Lucasta. Influenced to some degree by Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, the play told the tale of a prostitute and her attempt to leave her past behind and rejoin respectable society. It was written for and staged with an all-black cast at Harlem's American Negro Theater, and later moved to Broadway for a successful run -- it was a major breakthrough in that venue, as the first successful Broadway play with an all-black cast whose subject didn't hinge on race.

Yordan never slackened the pace of his career in Hollywood, and by 1947 had moved on to Nero Films and producer Seymour Nebenzal, for whom he wrote The Chase, one of the finest adaptations ever of one of Cornell Woolrich's novels (The Black Path of Fear). In 1949, he moved up to 20th Century Fox, where he adapted Jerome Weidman's novel into the movie House of Strangers, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Edward G. Robinson. Although he would periodically return to Fox in the 1950s, Yordan seldom stayed long in any one studio situation, and when he joined the studio for the first time, he already had more irons in the fire than most screenwriters. In 1949, he formed Security Pictures and, in a joint venture with Columbia Pictures, produced the first of two film adaptations of Anna Lucasta. Because of the racial sensibilities of the time, and the widespread segregation laws enforced around the country, it was impossible to film the play as written or originally staged with any hope of its finding success -- Yordan collaborated on the screenplay with playwright Arthur Laurents, transforming the characters into white Polish immigrants and casting Paulette Goddard and Oscar Homolka as the leads. Later that same year, he was back working for the King brothers and with Kurt Neumann on Bad Men of Tombstone, and then authored the screenplay for Reign of Terror, an underrated Anthony Mann thriller set amid the bloodshed that followed in the wake of the French Revolution.

The start of the 1950s saw Yordan moving back into the film noir territory that he brushed up against with The Chase, as he authored the screenplay to Edge of Doom (1950), one of the strangest and most daring movies ever produced by Samuel Goldwyn (though it was a failure in its time), and Detective Story (1951), based on the play by Sidney Kingsley. The latter was a huge hit at the time (so much so that it even ended up being parodied by the Three Stooges), and gave Kirk Douglas, William Bendix, Lee Grant, Joseph Wiseman, Frank Faylen, and Horace McMahon some of the best roles of their careers.

It was during the early to mid-'50s that the hidden, more controversial side of Yordan's career began. He had always been good at pitching ideas, and during the mid-'50s, he was so successful at it that he began overreaching and found himself faced with too many writing commitments. At the time, there was also a considerable body of unused screenwriting talent floating around Hollywood, by virtue of the Red Scare and the studio blacklist, which had left writers, actors, and technicians out of work by the thousands. Some of these writers soon found their way to Yordan's door. He served as a "front" in perhaps dozens of instances, paying these writers a share of the fees for scripts of theirs that he signed his name to. It was a strange symbiotic relationship, as the blacklistees were grateful for the work, even at the reduced rate of pay that they were receiving, while Yordan's commitments were met. At the same time, it meant that Yordan was getting credit for other men's work, engendering considerable resentment from some of the people he fronted, and it was only decades later that the Screenwriters Guild began trying to sort out the genuine authorship of many screenplays attributed to Yordan. Johnny Guitar, for example, is now usually attributed to blacklistee Ben Maddow, rather than to Yordan, despite the latter's name appearing on the actual film. According to the book Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, Yordan claimed that it was producer Sidney Harmon who got him involved in this activity. Yordan himself professed to never relating to or comprehending the logic behind or around the Red Scare or the studio blacklist, and seemed oblivious to politics; when asked in the late '90s about his work as a "front," he denied that he had ever taken credit for any script that was not his own work.

Yordan won his only Oscar in 1954, for his screenplay for Broken Lance, directed by Edward Dmytryk at Fox, which was a Western remake of House of Strangers. In his rewrite of his earlier script, Yordan emphasized elements that brought out the similarities to Shakespeare's King Lear much more than House of Strangers had. Yordan wrote another, much more direct Shakespeare adaptation in 1955 with Joe Macbeth, in which the Scottish play's plot was retold with 1930s gangsters as its players. He also crossed paths once more with Anthony Mann on The Man From Laramie (1955), a Western for which he authored the script. He took on the role of producer once more, along with that of screenwriter, for The Harder They Fall (1956), which was Humphrey Bogart's final movie. The middle of the decade also saw him involved with a number of smaller films, several of them made at Fox, including Street of Sinners, and one major Western, The Bravados (1958), directed by Henry King, and starring Gregory Peck and Joan Collins.

During this period, Yordan also revived Security Pictures for two major projects, both of them groundbreaking in their way. The first was God's Little Acre (1958), a screen adaptation of an Erskine Caldwell book that had been considered impossible to film because of its earthy depiction of sexuality. The movie, originally distributed by United Artists, was issued in uncensored and a censored versions, but either was still a vital step in freeing Hollywood up to do more controversial subjects and stories -- the film was also the first of five movies in which Yordan employed the services of Robert Ryan in important roles. That same year, with Sidney Harmon producing and United Artists distributing, Yordan did a new screenplay of Anna Lucasta that was filmed -- this time in the manner of the original Broadway hit -- with an all-black cast led by Eartha Kitt, Sammy Davis Jr., and Rex Ingram. At the end of the 1950s, he wrote a few inventive Western scripts such as The Fiend Who Walked the West (a remake of Fox's Kiss of Death), Day of the Outlaw (1959) (starring Robert Ryan), and one major independent production, The Bramble Bush (1960), made by Milton Sperling.

Most of Yordan's activity after that, however, was confined to Europe. He became involved as a screenwriter and producer with Samuel Bronston. A former film executive and photographer, Bronston had set up his own production company in Spain and had started making historical films with largely American casts (augmented with some British actors and lots of Spanish extras). Bronston's whole operation was the subject of endless speculation at the time (and, in the years that followed immediately after, several lawsuits), as to where his money was coming from and where it went, and to this day no one has ever come up with a precise answer; indeed, it's not even clear that Bronston knew all of those answers, or that he was fully in charge. Officially, all Yordan did was write (or co-write) the screenplays of movies such as El Cid (1961), King of Kings (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963), and Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), as well as the plot for Circus World (1964), but he seemed to some observers to be far more connected to the day-to-day matters of production than Bronston was -- he was sufficiently involved at an executive level to have brought aboard such Hollywood blacklistees as Bernard Gordon and Julian Zimet to work on several of these films in various capacities.

In the midst of this flurry of activity in Spain, Yordan's Security Pictures became active again with the movie The Day of the Triffids (1962), which became a major cult favorite, and he was involved -- in tandem with Sperling -- as a producer on the all-star World War II epic The Battle of the Bulge (1965), which may be the most enduringly popular of all of the movies that he produced (despite some glaring flaws); alas, the latter has been handed down to us in several different editions, none of them complete as of the 1990s. He also made a successful venture into science fiction with Crack in the World (1965), a doomsday thriller whose plot anticipated 2003's The Core. It was possible, amid the many and varied scripts that he worked on and films that he produced across his career, to find some consistent themes -- he resonated strongly as a writer to stories of heroes (and anti-heroes and villains) who fought their battles in essentially lawless, chaotic environments; these characters turn up regularly amid the 61 movies he worked on, from The Chase and Broken Lance right up through El Cid and Custer of the West; in some cases, as with Battle of the Bulge, the stories of the heroes seem contrived and insignificant amid the larger arc of the epic tale, whereas in El Cid or Fall of the Roman Empire, the hero's story is as compelling as the spectacle. What's more, Yordan was very much of a chameleon-like presence as a writer; he could translate the raw sexuality of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre to the screen in starkly realistic terms, and turn around and give Robert Ryan (the star of the earlier movie) another magnificent and compelling role -- as John the Baptist. And in between them, he could give Gregory Peck an extraordinary role as a man driven to hunt down and kill a band of wanted outlaws, all for the wrong reasons, as it turns out, and who must then struggle with his guilt over his actions and his horror at being hailed a hero.

In the years that followed the 1965 collapse of Bronston's Spanish operation, Yordan produced the semi-revisionist historical epic Custer of the West (1968), starring Robert Shaw, and The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), for which he adapted Peter Shaffer's play about Pizzaro's explorations. In the 1970s however, both his working capital and his luck both seemed to run out, following Bad Man's River, for which Yordan only wrote the screenplay. Europe was no longer as hospitable as it had been to his kind of productions or the multi-national financing that he usually put together. He scripted a couple of movies in the early '80s and went back into production later in the decade with Cry Wilderness and Bloody Wednesday (both 1987), but Yordan's heyday was clearly past. The Bronston movies and films like Battle of the Bulge and Crack in the World kept his name visible on television, but by the end of the 1990s, Yordan was as forgotten as most of the blacklistees that he had helped out back in the '50s. At the time of Yordan's death in the early spring of 2003, it seemed as though only one of the prominent survivors in those ranks, Bernard Gordon, who was a friend and business associate, knew anything about this incredibly creative yet strangely mysterious man.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide