John Berry (September 6, 1917 - November 29, 1999) is an American film director, who went into self-imposed exile in France when his career was plagued by a Hollywood blacklist.
Video John Berry (film director)
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John Berry was born Jak Szold in The Bronx, New York, son of a Polish Jewish father and a Romanian mother. He is a child player in vaudeville, first performing on stage at the age of four. In his teenage years he worked as a boxer by the name of Jackie Sold. Berry's father is a restaurant owner who at one point had 28 restaurants around New York City, but he was out of business during the Great Depression and Berry was trying to support himself by working as a comedian and actor.
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Mercury and Hollywood Theater
The first big cut of Berry came when he was hired by Mercury Theater for his debut production, Caesar (1937). Berry acted in another role with the theater and helped Orson Welles in directing production in 1942 Native Son . In a live-ending interview with The New York Times, Berry spoke positively of his relationship with Welles and John Houseman, who co-founded Mercury. "It's like living near the center of a volcano creating inspiration and anger, glamor and excitement, filled with the kind of theatrical that seem to be lost forever," he said.
In 1943, Houseman produced a movie in Hollywood at Paramount Pictures and hired Berry to direct the movie Miss Susie Slagle's starring Veronica Lake and Lillian Gish. Berry lives in Hollywood and directs other features, especially From This Day Forward , starring Joan Fontaine, Cross My Heart (all 1946) with Betty Hutton, musical Casbah (1948) with Tony Martin and Yvonne De Carlo, and He Ran All the Way (1951) starring John Garfield and Shelley Winters.
Blacklist
In 1950, Berry agreed to direct a short documentary about Hollywood 10, a group of directors and writers who refused to cooperate with the Unuclamped Activities Committee (HUAC) in their search for alleged infiltration of the Communist Party in the US film industry. After directing the drama crime of He Ran All the Way (1951), Berry was named a communist by fellow director and former member of Edward Dmytryk's party, one of the Ten Hollywood, who had been jailed for an insult to Congress for refusing working with HUAC. After his release from prison, Dmytryk went into exile in England, but he later attempted to re-enter the Hollywood film industry and volunteered to testify before the HUAC in April 1951, cleansing himself with a "naming name."
By naming Berry and 25 others allegedly communists, Dmytryk can then continue his career in Hollywood. Berry was also named by former Communist Party member Frank Tuttle, who testified before the HUAC in 1951 after returning from Austria, to clear his name and regain a job in Hollywood. Unable to secure work, Berry left the US and moved to his family in Paris. He Ran All the Way will be the last American film directed by Berry for nearly a quarter of a century.
In France, Berry was hired to direct the Atoll K (1951), the last comedy of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. However, blacklisted Berry does not accept screen credits; only French director LÃÆ' Â © o Joannon is credited as a director.
During the 1950's, Berry directed two films starring Eddie Constantine, ÃÆ'â € a va barder (1953) and Je sentimental sentimental (1955), and he also directed Tamango (1958), a film about a slave rebellion starring Dorothy Dandridge.
Exile Return
The blacklist was broken in 1960 by releasing two films written by ten Blacklist members, Dalton Trumbo; Output and Spartacus , which gave Trumbo - one of the most prominent of the Ten - his first screen credits since being sacked by Hollywood. With the missing black list, Berry returned to the US in the early 1960s, where he directed the episodes of East Side/West Side/Seaway TV shows and Seaway.
He continued to work in France but returned to the US in the 1970s and directed several films, including Claudine (1974), starring Diahann Carroll, where he received an Academy Award nomination, and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978). At the time of his death in Paris, he was editing the movie version (released in 2000, starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett) of the 1969 drama Athol Fugard Boesman and Lena , which he had directed in the US premiere in Circle in the Square Theater in 1970.
Legacy
John Berry split the rest of his career between the direction of theater in London and the direction of the movie in Paris. His experience during the Hollywood blacklist era was the inspiration of the character played by Robert De Niro in the movie Guilty by Suspicion (1991). Berry has played Ben, the owner of a nightclub, in the movie Round Midnight (1986), produced by Irwin Winkler, writer-director Guilty by Suspicion.
Berry, looking back on his career for an interview with Newsday, commented: "I will not give up my life for anything, I have become a blessed individual despite everything I live."
Dennis Berry, also a film director, is his son.
Selected filmography
- Miss Susie Slagle's (1946)
- Start from Next Day (1946)
- Cross My Heart (1946)
- Casbah (1948)
- Suspense (1949)
- The Hollywood Ten (1950)
- He Ran All the Way (1951)
- Occurred in Paris (1952)
- Don Juan (1956)
- Tamango (1958)
- ÃÆ'â,¬ tout casser (1968)
- Claudine (1974)
- Thief (1977)
Reference
External links
- John Berry on IMDb
- John Berry at AllMovie
- John Berry at EncyclopÃÆ'Â|dia Britannica
- The John Berry obituary at The Philadelphia Inquirer
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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