Jules Furthman

  • Born: March 5, 1888
  • Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
  • Died: September 22, 1966
  • Place of death: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

Biography

Jules Furthman was the son of a German immigrant, Edmond Furthmann, who became a prominent attorney in Chicago and named his son Julius Grinnell Furthmann after a law colleague, Julius Grinnell. Subsequently, the son dropped the final “n” and changed his first name to Jules. For his early screenplays, he assumed the pen name Stephen Fox in order to avoid being thought German when strong anti-German sentiments arose during World War I.

Furthman contributed to the writing of nearly one hundred films between 1915 and 1959, a career that spanned the silent movie era, the time of the talkies, and the Technicolor age. He also worked with such notable directors as Josef von Sternberg and Howard Hawks. Almost all of his work was done in collaboration so that it is somewhat difficult to isolate his particular, personal style. Moreover, a great many of the films for which he wrote in the teens and twenties have been lost.

Furthman began his career publishing short stories in various magazines but quickly turned to selling stories to film companies. He was soon on the writing staff of Twentieth Century Fox and nine years later he became a prominent writer for Paramount. It was in that connection that he worked with von Sternberg, writing with his brother, Charles, the screenplays for The Dragnet and The Docks of New York. Furthman also wrote the screenplay for the last silent film von Sternberg directed, The Case of Lena Smith. All of these films deal with working-class characters and criminals. Prints of two of these films, The Dragnet and The Case of Lena Smith, are now lost.

When von Sternberg returned to Hollywood after filming Blue Angel in Germany, he brought its star, Marlene Dietrich, with him. Furthman scripted three of the films for them: Morocco, Shanghai Express, and Blonde Venus. All three deal in some way with the theme of the fallen woman with a heart of gold.

In the mid-1930’s, Furthman was working at Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, where one of his most successful films was produced under the direction of Frank Lloyd: Mutiny on the Bounty, for which the Academy nominated him and coauthors Talbot Jennings and Carey Wilson for best script; the movie itself won best picture. Furthman next did a series of scripts for Howard Hawks.

They include some of the most successful films Furthman worked on: Come and Get It!, based on an Edna Ferber novel; Only Angels Have Wings, based on Hawks’s experiences as a pilot; To Have and Have Not, adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s novel by Furthman and William Faulkner; The Big Sleep, a script based on Raymond Chandler’s novel and abandoned by several other writers before Furthman managed to finish it and clear the censors; and finally Rio Bravo, a Western starring John Wayne and the last film for which Furthman collaborated on the script. In between were two movies done with Howard Hughes, neither very successful: The Outlaw, famous for the appearance of Jane Russell; and Jet Pilot, famous for Hughes’s obsession with airplanes. He also did one last film with von Sternberg: The Shanghai Gesture, based on John Colton’s stage melodrama set in a brothel.

Furthman earned a reputation as a flexible and quick writer, capable of producing material in any of several different genres. He retired from writing and spent his time in raising orchids and collecting rare books. He was in pursuit of a particular book in Oxford, England, when he suffered a mortal stroke in 1966.