Remembering Philip Yordan

Philip Yordan was born on April 1, 1914, Chicago, Illinois. Philip was an American screenwriter active in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s who also produced several films. He was also known as a highly regarded script doctor. Born to Polish immigrants, he earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois and a law degree at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

 
Some of his films include “The Chase” (1946), “Whistle Stop” (1946), “House of Strangers” (1949), “Houdini” (1953), “Broken Lance” (1954), “Johnny Guitar” (1954), “The Big Combo” (1955), “The Harder They Fall” (1956), “The Bravados” (1958) and “God's Little Acre” (1958, official credit, but actually written by Ben Maddow). He worked several times in collaboration with independent producer Samuel Bronston and contributed to the screenplays of such films as “King of Kings” (1961), “El Cid” (1961), “55 Days at Peking” (1963), “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964) and “Circus World” (1964). One of the ongoing problems is the fact that Yordan was a front for friends and other writers who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Living in Paris during the blacklist days, his basement was often filled with blacklisted writers working in cubicles, churning out screenplays. So which screenplays and scripts he actually wrote and worked on is hard to decipher.
 
Yordan co- produced the Euro-western “Custer of the West” (1967), and co-wrote the screenplay for “Bad Man’s River” (1972).
 
Yordan died of pancreatic cancer in LaJolla, California on March 24, 2003.
 
Today we remember Philip Yordan on what would have been his 100^th birthday.