Daniel Taradash's gifts are adaptation and adaptability. He has over fifteen screenplays to his credit, and all but two were first stories, novels, or plays written by others. There is no one style or sort of film with which he is identified; his work includes a Western, a gangster film, thrillers, a musical, war movies, historical dramas, comedies, and romantic melodramas. Nor is there one era in which he seems inherently more comfortable than another. Taradash works with equal grace and knowledge in any setting: the heartland Kansas of Picnic (1955), the Greenwich Village of Bell, Book and Candle (1958), the Southwestern Badlands of Rancho Notorious (1952), or the nineteenth-century island of Hawaii (1966).

Since his work is so diverse and since it is, in part, the original creation of others, it is difficult to find a single, consistent, personal theme, although there is a situation which recurs periodically with varying degrees...