Background
John Berry was born on 6 September 1917 in New York.
John Berry was born on 6 September 1917 in New York.
Berry was a victim and antagonist of the blacklist who never managed to find stability or to vindicate his early promise outside America. He was an actor and assistant with the Mercury Theater in the late 1930s and was assistant director on Welles’s lost movie, Too Much Johnson (38).
It was his Broadway production of Cry Havoc that won him a contract with Paramount. His first film there was a Veronica Lake movie. But by far his most interesting work was From This Day Forward, an RKO comedy with Joan Fontaine and Mark Stevens as a couple attempting to settle after the war.
Thereafter, Berry was replaced on Caught by Max Ophuls, made Tension at MGM, and directed John Garfield’s excellent last picture, He Ran All the Way. He settled in Paris but proved unable to string satisfactory pictures together.
He returned to America in the early 1970s for a very mixed bag: Claudine and Sister, Sister were groundbreaking treatments of black life; Angel on My Shoulder was a remake of the old Paul Muni movie; and Honeyboy was a cliché boxing picture with Erik Estrada. A Captive in the Land is a heartfelt but rather hokey story about political enemies who need each others help, set in Siberia