Clint Eastwood Photo Opportunity #36

Clint Eastwood Photo Opportunity #36

Kicking off the month of April is this great Photo Opportunity shot featuring Clint, Eric Fleming and the man in the middle, Rawhide creator and writer Charles Marquis Warren. It occurred to me that we have not really covered Warren a great deal here on the Archive, so a little information to support this photo. Charles Marquis Warren was a novelist and film scenarist whose fascination with frontier lore helped bring such Westerns as “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide” and “The Virginian” to television screens. 

Born in Baltimore, Warren was a vigorous and hardy youth who participated in athletics at McDonogh School and Baltimore City College, where he also began writing musical plays. 

A producer and director who as a writer considered himself the author of dramatic histories rather than a teller of Western tales, Warren’s talents spanned the entire range of things theatrical. He sold more than 250 articles of pulp fiction and became a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post. Three of his Post serials, “Only the Valiant,” “Bugles Are for Soldiers” and “Valley of the Shadow,” became best-selling novels. “Valiant,” which tells of a cavalry officer’s battles in the Indian wars, was made into a 1950 film starring Gregory Peck.

When World War II broke out, Warren joined the Navy, where he served in the Photo Science Laboratory, filming amphibious landings. He was wounded by a Japanese grenade in the South Pacific in 1944, and received a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and five battle stars and was recuperating in a hospital on Guadalcanal when he learned that Warner Brothers had purchased the rights to “Only the Valiant.”

Warren rose to the rank of commander and after the war returned to Hollywood as a writer and, eventually, director. His credits included “Beyond Glory,” “Streets of Laredo,” “Springfield Rifle,” “Pony Express,” “Seven Angry Men,” “Flight to Tangier,” “Trooper Hook” and “Arrowhead.”

Steeped in the tradition of the West, Warren was asked to craft the pilot production of “Gunsmoke” for CBS, and in 1955 he began to produce the classic TV series based on the radio programs that had starred William Conrad. He cast James Arness as Marshall Matt Dillon and hired Milburn Stone as Galen (Doc) Adams, Amanda Blake as Kitty Russell and Dennis Weaver as Chester Goode. Warren directed 26 episodes that first year while also writing five of the original teleplays, but he opted in 1956 to return to films.

In 1959, he came back to CBS to create “Rawhide,” finding an unknown actor named Clint Eastwood to portray Rowdy Yates in those tales of sprawling cattle drives. Three years later, he began what became the nine-year saga of “The Virginian,” which starred James Drury as the mysterious man who forced his version of law and order on a Wyoming Territory community in the 1890s.

He also wrote for “Playhouse 90” and was producer, director and writer for the “Iron Horse” television series about the travails of a railroad moving west. It starred Dale Robertson.

His last motion picture was Elvis Presley’s “Charro” in 1969. Warren said he came to celebrate his journeys between print, film and television, saying he had gained from each. Warren died on August 11th 1990 at Humana Hospital West Hills at age 77 after undergoing surgery for an aneurysm.