Borden Chase

Prior to his career as a writer, Chase was employed as chauffeur for notorious prohibition-era gangster Frankie Yale -- until Yale was 'rubbed out' by Al Capone's mob in July 1928. Chase, then still going by the more prosaic name Frank Fowler, as well Yale's other regular driver, James Caponi, were lucky to be alive: Yale, having received a strange phone call, was in a panic about something that had happened to his wife Lucy, and decided to drive his coffee-coloured Lincoln himself. The car was machine-gunned near Tenth Avenue by the occupants of a black Nash and crashed into a curb. For good measure, one of the gunmen jumped out and shot Yale in the head with a .45. After that adventure, Chase went in for tamer pursuits, first working as a digger on the Holland Tunnel and then as a taxi driver. His first idea for a story occurred to him, when working as a tunnel digger and one of his co-workers died as the result of an accident. His resulting novel "Sandhog", was picked up by 20th Century Fox and later filmed as Under Pressure (1935). At this time, Frank Fowler became Borden Chase (the name an amalgam of a milk company and the famous bank). Over the next three decades, Chase published numerous short stories for the pulp magazine Argosy, several novels and dozens of Hollywood screenplays. He free-lanced for most of the major studios, except for a period under contract to Universal, from 1950 to 1958. Many of his best films were westerns, featuring anti-heroes with flawed characters, long before these were re-invented in the Spaghetti westerns of the 1960's. His scripts also stood out for being unusually complex for this particular genre, with strong emphasis on powerful emotions (ie. greed or revenge) and relationships. In addition to classic motion pictures, such as Red River (1948), Winchester '73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952) and the superlative Vera Cruz (1954), Chase also penned the TV pilots for the western series Laredo (1965) and Daniel Boone (1964). During the 1950's, Chase was very much a part of the conservative Hollywood establishment, as a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. On a lighter note, he lent his name to a famous cocktail made from Scotch whiskey, vermouth, Pernod and orange bitters.