Jo Eisinger

Who was Jo Eisinger?

Jo Eisinger was a film and television writer whose career spanned more than forty years from the early forties well into the eighties. He is widely recognized as the writer of two of the most psychologically complex film noirs: Gilda and Night and the City.

His credits also include The Sleeping City and Crime of Passion, a coda to the films of the noir style, for which he wrote the story as well as the screenplay. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, it is a strikingly modern commentary about how women were driven mad by the limitations imposed upon them in the postwar period.

Jo Eisinger started writing for radio penning numerous segments for the Adventures of Sam Spade series. He returned to thriller and private eye adventure series in the 1960s writing for ITV television program Danger Man and the mid-1980s HBO series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. His script for an episode of the latter show, "The Pencil", earned him a 1984 Edgar Award.

Eisinger's credits also include several films that departed from his accustomed genres of mystery, adventure and crime. Among them are Oscar Wilde, starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Robert Morley, The Rover, from a novel by Joseph Conrad and starring Rita Hayworth and Anthony Quinn, and The Jigsaw Man, starring Laurence Olivier and directed by Terence Young.