During a career that began in the recesses of silent film history, bridged the transition to sound, and concluded with the script for Rio Bravo in 1959, Jules Furthman epitomized the Hollywood screenwriter whose reputation as a collaborative writer obscured his distinctive talents. His current reputation began to develop amid the analytic interest in screenwriters that supplemented auteurism in the early 1970s. Critics have isolated Furthman's patterns of authorship across various acting and directing styles, distinct correspondences of characterization, incident, and dialogue connecting his scripts for such radically different filmmakers as Josef von Sternberg and Howard Hawks. Furthman, as Hawks said, "did things differently," but did them recognizably.

Throughout his career he wrote fictional screen narrative, either based upon original story treatments or adapted from other sources. His earliest scripts for silent films were comedies or melodramas, often blended with other genres such as the Western. Most of these...