Charles Marquis Warren

Writer, director and producer of over a thousand Westerns

Charles Marquis Warren (pictured left in 1955), born 1912, died 1990, was an important contributor to our noble genre, the Western. I myself don’t actually like all the Westerns he wrote, directed or produced. Some were weak and some were even rather unpleasant. But there were a lot of good ones too. And remarkably he is credited with over a thousand oaters, big screen and small. We must certainly regard Warren as a major player in the wonderful world of the Western.

The godson of F Scott Fitzgerald almost naturally became a writer. While at college he developed an interest in the scribbling racket, resulting in a (non-Western) play entitled No Sun, No Moon, which was staged at Princeton University. Warren decided to go to Hollywood in 1933 when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer took an option on the play. With the help of his godfather, Warren secured a position as a staff writer for the studio. He contributed to pictures such as the Laughton/Gable Mutiny on the Bounty and the Astaire/Rogers Top Hat. But those aren’t Westerns so we shall ignore them.

In the late 30s Warren left Hollywood for New York where he found success as a fiction writer for various pulp magazines. Several of his writings were published in The Saturday Evening Post. The Argosy serial Bugles Are for Soldiers (1940) and one of his Post stories, Only the Valiant (1943) were published as novels and became best-sellers. The book-length version of Bugles Are for Soldiers was retitled Valley of the Shadow. Warren seemed to be specializing in cavalry Westerns.

During World War II, Warren joined the US Navy, rising to the rank of commander, and in the Pacific earned a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and five battle stars.

The first Western motion picture he worked on was the 1949 Streets of Laredo, with William Holden, a remake of the pre-war Fred MacMurray oater The Texas Rangers, Warren adapting and revamping the original screenplay by Mr & Mrs King Vidor. That was followed by a cavalry Western, Republic’s Oh, Susanna!, with Rod Cameron and Chill Wills, and The Redhead and the Cowboy, with Rhonda Fleming and Glenn Ford, both pictures released in March 1951, and Warners’ Only the Valiant, another cavalry picture, with Gregory Peck (who later said it was his least favorite picture, but still), released the following month, which screenwriters Edmund North and Harry Brown worked up from Warren’s novel. In 1952 Warren co-wrote the screenplay for the (rather ordinary but quite successful) Gary Cooper Western Springfield Rifle. So by the early 50s he was already established in the world of the Western movie.

The first Western he directed was the rather good Little Big Horn, another cavalry picture, for minor studio Lippert in 1951. It starred an excellent Lloyd Bridges and John Ireland. It was a much better picture than its budget warranted.

That was followed by Hellgate, also for Lippert, a Western/prison movie with Sterling Hayden. In 1953 he moved to Paramount, where he both directed and wrote a picture I don’t care for at all, Arrowhead, with Charlton Heston, purportedly about scout Al Sieber (renamed Ed Bannon) but in fact nothing to do with Sieber at all, and racist and rather hateful in tone.

The same year he wrote Pony Express, also starring Heston, a complete farrago of nonsense, really, and not very good.

He directed Raymond Massey in the John Brown biopic Seven Angry Men for Allied Artists in 1955 and the year after, Warren helmed RKO’s Tension at Table Rock, a good Western (like Arrowhead from a Frank Gruber novel) and The Black Whip, a Regal Films production released by Fox, written by Orville H Hampton, with the excellent Hugh Marlowe – a Western I can’t find, sadly, and don’t remember from way back when.

In 1957 he directed another Regal/Fox Western, this time with his own production company Emirau Productions (named after the Battle in World War Two in which Warren was injured), Copper Sky with Jeff Morrow and from ’57 he would become a regular producer. He produced two with Joel McCrea, Trooper Hook for United Artists (rather good) and Fox’s Cattle Empire  (enjoyable), and he produced, wrote and directed (so there’s no one else to blame really) Ride a Violent Mile with the less-than-stunning John Agar. The 50s ended, Westernwise, with Blood Arrow, another Emirau/Regal/Fox effort, which he directed and produced (but did not write), starring Scott Brady.

In 1955, while he was still writing, directing and/or producing big-screen Westerns, he was
one of the prime movers of Gunsmoke on TV. CBS offered him the job of producing and directing episodes. He was at first hesitant, wanting to concentrate on feature films, but he accepted the job when CBS offered to pay him $7000 per week. He produced the entire first season of the series and directed the first 26 of its 39 episodes. He continued as producer for the start of the second season in the fall of ’56 but left mid-season due to a difficult  relationship with the new producer of the series.

In 1959, Warren became producer and occasional writer and director for the series Rawhide. He used the diary written in 1866 by trail boss George C Duffield (which I’ve been meaning to read for some time) to shape the character of Gil Favor.

But in the 1960s he returned to features. You can’t count The Brazen Bell (1962) because that was two episodes of The Virginian edited together. But Day of the Evil Gun in 1968, released by MGM, and Charro! in 1969 (NGP) were definitely big-screen outings. The first starred Glenn Ford again, back with Warren after The Redhead and the Cowboy, and the second, Warren’s last Western, was an Elvis Presley picture. Sadly, neither was any good. Ford was a great Western actor and Elvis was excellent in Flaming Star but in these late pictures they could do nothing. It was, honestly, a sad end to Warren’s Western career.

He was responsible for some iffy pictures, and indeed some downright bad ones, but he could also do some really good work. For me, apart from Gunsmoke and Rawhide, I think Streets of Laredo, Tension at Table Rock, Little Big Horn and Trooper Hook were probably his best efforts.

Charles Marquis Warren died of a heart aneurysm in 1990 at the age of 77, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.