Daniel Fuchs was born in New York City and grew up in the poor section of Brooklyn that became the setting for his early novels. His parents were Jacob Fuchs, a newsstand owner, and Sara (Cohen) Fuchs. Fuchs's writing talent developed early; after serving as editor of his high-school paper, he went on to City College of New York, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1930. Soon after that, he sent a long account of growing up in Williamsburg to the New Republic, where editor Malcolm Cowley encouraged Fuchs to turn it into a novel and also published part of it in the magazine as "Where Al Capone Grew Up" (1931). During this time Fuchs was working as a permanent substitute teacher in the Brooklyn public school system. He wrote his first two novels during summer vacations. In 1932 he married Susan Chessen; they have two sons. Fuchs's first novel, Summer in Williamsburg (1934), was the story of a young writer's struggle in the ghetto. His second, Homage to Blenholt (1936), was lighter in tone, the story of a young man's plans to attend the funeral of Blenholt, the sewer commissioner. Fuchs's third novel, his last before going to Hollywood, was Low Company (1937), set in Neptune Beach (a fictional representative of Brighton Beach).
In 1937 Fuchs received his first Hollywood offer, a thirteen-week contract with RKO. Disgusted by the poor sales of his books, he accepted the offer and left for California. Like most Eastern novelists, Fuchs was horrified by the studio system, feeling that quality work was rejected and mediocrity encouraged. He wrote several satiric essays about his experiences, notably "A Hollywood Diary" and "Dream City or the Drugged Lake". When his contract expired without his accomplishing much, he went back East, vowing never to return. But he changed his mind in 1940, and with the exception of a few years in the military and two stints in Europe working for Sam Spiegel, he has been in California ever since.
Despite the fact that Fuchs has worked at several different studios, his work contains a thematic unity; his most successful scripts, like his novels, are concerned with the underside of life. The characters he fashioned for the screen are not the debonair, elegant individuals that his fictional characters dream about, but troubled people who have their own frustrations, fears, and disappointments. His heroes rarely win out; his endings are not happy, the plots never escapist.
Fuchs's name appears on fourteen films, although he worked on many others. He received his first film credit for the story to The Day the Bookies Wept (1939)--an adaptation of his short story "Crazy over Pigeons"--but he did not work on the script. His first screenplay credit was for The Big Shot (1942), a Warner Bros. film starring Humphrey Bogart as a man who is convicted of robbery and escapes from prison. Fuchs's characteristic sense of inescapable fate is enforced by the flashback device of the hero narrating the events of the story from his deathbed.
The Hard Way (1942) was the first of Fuchs's show-business films. These films have more in common with his work in the crime genre than with the usual Hollywood success story, for even the characters who manage to succeed in Fuchs's world do so at a price that nullifies their achievements. The Hard Way, like The Big Shot, is narrated from a deathbed, and its protagonist, like the characters in many of Fuchs's gangster films, will die as punishment for a misspent life. The story centers on two sisters (Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie) who escape from a dreary mining-town existence by joining a pair of itinerant dancers, whom they later abandon when offered a chance at "the big time." One of the sisters claws her way up to the top, ruining the lives of everyone around her until at last, having failed in an attempt at suicide, she tells her story from her deathbed.
After adapting Sutton Vane's fantasy play Outward Bound into Between Two Worlds (1944), Fuchs wrote three more crime films. The Gangster (1947) was taken from his novel Low Company and presents the most tormented of Fuchs's criminal protagonists. He is not obsessed with success but content with his small prostitution business. Unlike the typical motion-picture gangster, he does not drive a car or carry a gun. At the end, he is killed not because of overreaching ambition but because he himself wishes to be killed; his sense of despair has convinced him that death is the only exit from an empty existence.
Another Fuchs film interesting for the complex characterization of its protagonist is Hollow Triumph (1948). A former medical student (Paul Henreid) has turned to crime and almost gets away with impersonating a psychiatrist who strongly resembles him. The personalities of the criminal and psychiatrist are well developed and the criminal's efforts in plotting his hoax are ingeniously worked out. Fuchs's characters, however, never escape the forces of fate, and the student, too, is trapped and destroyed by forces beyond his control.
The air of impending doom is most effectively handled in Criss Cross (1949). The film presents two rival gangsters, Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) and Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), involved in a robbery scheme. Thompson is in love with Dundee's wife, Anna (Yvonne De Carlo), and this relationship provides the essence of the film's fatalistic mood. Thompson changes his mind about the robbery and turns Dundee in. Then he tries to run away with Anna, but they are both killed by Dundee. Criss Cross is a very skillfully written film noir, well directed by Robert Siodmak.
In Panic in the Streets (1950) Fuchs deals with a claustrophobic, closed situation; the working title of his version, "Quarantine", emphasizes this no-exit theme. (Despite the fact that most of Fuchs's ideas are retained in the final version, Fuchs only received credit for adapting the story by Edward and Edna Anhalt; Richard Murphy is credited with the screenplay.) The film centers on the efforts of a public-health official (Richard Widmark) and a police captain (Paul Douglas) to find two murderers who unknowingly came into contact with pneumonic plague. Naturally the criminals (Zero Mostel and Jack Palance) evade the authorities who cannot announce the presence of plague lest they create widespread panic. Fuchs was nominated for a Writers Guild award for his work on this film.
Fuchs followed Panic in the Streets with Storm Warning (1951), a violent film about rape and a small town terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan. Next came Taxi (1952), an entertaining but slight comedy about a New York cab driver (Dan Dailey) trying to help an Irish girl find her husband; the film is enlivened by the effective dialogue characteristic of Fuchs's best screen work. The Human Jungle (1954), with its documentary like treatment of a typical day at a precinct station, is in keeping with Fuchs's interest in the underside of life.
Love Me or Leave Me (1955) won Fuchs an Academy Award for best original story (he also co-wrote the screenplay with Isobel Lennart) and is probably his best-known film. It is a study of 1930s singer Ruth Etting (Doris Day) and her relationship with Martin Snyder (James Cagney), the small-time racketeer who takes charge of her career and eventually marries her. The film succeeds mainly because of the realistic portrayal of its two main characters, whose relationship is examined unsparingly, and for the crisp, tense dialogue that is Fuchs's hallmark as a writer. The picture won the Writers Guild award for best written American musical and received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Cagney was also nominated as best actor.
The success of Love Me or Leave Me was followed by Interlude (1957), about a married composer in love with another woman, and Jeanne Eagels (1957), another, less effective film about show business. As in Love Me or Leave Me, the heroine in Jeanne Eagels (Kim Novak) is given a break by a tough male (Jeff Chandler). She rises to the top, has an unhappy marriage, becomes dependent on alcohol and drugs, and finally dies. The film suffers from poor characterizations and an episodic, loosely organized script. Although Fuchs received screen credit, most of his original script was discarded.
Fuchs's last film was Oceans Eleven (1960), a caper film on which he worked with Harry Brown and Charles Lederer. At his own request, he received no credit. Since then he has continued to write fiction and has published two essays about his Hollywood experiences: "Writing for the Movies" and "Days in the Gardens of Hollywood". His Hollywoodnovel, West of the Rockies, was published in 1971, and a collection of short stories, The Apathetic Bookie Joint, was published in 1979.
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