Film Studies: Next time, pay closer attention to the credits...

Philip Yordan died last week at the age of 90. His name cannot be known now to a large public. But that's their loss, for Yordan was a lot of things – a good writer, adept at churning out tough-guy material, such as he had seldom encountered in real life. He was also a small factory for organising scripts by other writers who had fallen foul of the "black list". (As in the Woody Allen movie from 1976, written by Walter Bernstein, a black list victim himself, Yordan was "the front" for illicit screenplays.) These delicate, secret arrangements suited him because he was a natural conniver and cynic, as well as a heartfelt accumulator of money. Philip Yordan was the kind of hard-boiled, mocking scriptwriter who has only sour, deflating words for everything he has ever written. If he can remember it.

He was from Chicago where he trained as a lawyer – in later years, he must have been a master at drawing up contracts with ghostly writers. He didn't practice law much because he was an actor and a would-be writer at the Goodman Theatre. But to make ends meet, he fashioned a mail-order business – beauty supplies manufactured by his father. It's intriguing that so many film-makers began in clothes or cosmetics.

Anyway, Yordan had a play running off-Broadway and it was seen by a movie director, William Dieterle, who invited him to try his hand on scripts.

He wrote a dreadful picture called Syncopation for Dieterle – allegedly about jazz – but he survived that and in a few years he was on his way with a brutal B-movie called Dillinger (1945) that got nominated for an Oscar. Yordan said he was later told that Dillinger had won but that the Academy refused to give it the Oscar because gangster pictures were in such bad taste.

Even with that movie, stories arose that maybe Yordan hadn't written all of it himself – that another screenwriter, Robert Tasker, who was then in prison, had written it and it had been sold under Yordan's name. Despite such rumours, Yordan turned out so many scripts – and so many of them in the same hard-bitten vein – that he has to be given credit for The Chase (1946), Anna Lucasta (1949), an adaptation of his own play, The Black Book (1949) (a beautiful little movie about the French Revolution, directed by Anthony Mann), Detective Story (1951), Houdini (1953), and Blowing Wild (1953).

The next year, Yordan had his name on that bizarre Western, Johnny Guitar, made by Nicholas Ray, and sometimes interpreted as a parable about the black list. Researchers later came up with the theory that Yordan had merely signed a script by the black-listed writer, Ben Maddow. But then Patrick McGilligan, the best academic authority on screenwriting, sent Maddow a tape of Johnny Guitar (when he said he couldn't remember it) and Maddow replied that he was sure he hadn't written one word of it.

On the other hand, Yordan and Maddow were in agreement that Anthony Mann's Men in War – a masterpiece – credited to Yordan, was actually written by Maddow. The plot thickened because Yordan plainly relished the intrigue in which no one could be sure who had written what. Though he got an Oscar for the Western, Broken Lance, he boasted that all 20th Century Fox had done was get his old treatment out of the files and give it to another, cheaper writer.

He may have begun the rumours that a surrogate got his law degree at Chicago – and that he used ghosts for all things except making love.

Yordan was still writing big pictures in the late Sixties, when he co-wrote and co-produced such diverse things as Custer of the West and The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Though it was said at the time that actor Robert Shaw (who played Custer) had rewritten most of that picture, Yordan was also involved (on large salaries) on films producer Samuel Bronston made in Spain – King of Kings and 55 Days at Peking (by Nicholas Ray), El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire (by Anthony Mann). Almost certainly, Bernard Gordon did a lot of the writing on those pictures – not that Nicholas Ray, for one, paid much heed to the script.

It's easy to laugh at the Yordan story, and his dark humour encouraged mirth. But in truth, the confusion he cultivated was a natural response to the abject dislocation between the credits on a picture and the people who have done the real writing. And that is as true now as it ever was. It was Yordan's achievement to alert us to the farcical status of the writer, while earning $2,500 a week.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk