John Howard Lawson Remembered
by Andre Soares
"First Writers Guild president. Playwright. Screenwriter. Oscar nominee. Organizer. Teacher. ‘Premature antiracist.’ Blacklistee. ‘Dean of the Hollywood Ten.’ Jailbird. ‘Tinseltown’s cultural commissar.’ Film theorist. ‘Grand Pooh-Bah of the Communist movement.’ Author. ‘Gauleiter of the Hollywood Communist Party.’
"Who was this ‘man of outstanding courage and integrity,’ as Charlie Chaplin stated, standing ‘resolute against those . . . attempt[ing] to control thought and desecrate the true American spirit’? As the 60th anniversary of the Hollywood Ten and blacklist approaches, a new biography rescues John Howard Lawson from a cultural exile decreed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hollywood historian Gerald Horne’s The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (University of California Press) brings back into focus a life ‘[that] illustrates the necessity for political engagement and organizing.’"
That’s Ed Rampell in the article "Our Founding Father," from the October issue of the Writers Guild of America’s magazine Written By. That issue has been out for a while, but I only saw the article today.
Lawson, by the way, wrote or co-wrote nearly two dozen films. Among them are the risqué melodrama Bachelor Apartment (1931), directed by and starring Lowell Sherman, with Irene Dunne as a working girl who refuses the easy way to riches (though considering that Dunne would need to have sex with Sherman’s unappealing playboy millionaire, that way could hardly be called "easy"); the politically undecided Spanish Civil War drama Blockade (1938), directed by William Dieterle, and starring Henry Fonda and Madeleine Carroll; the moody romantic drama Algiers (1938), directed by John Cromwell, with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr; Counter-Attack (1945), a war drama directed by Zoltan Korda, and starring Paul Muni as one of many Russians fighting the Nazis; and Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, a 1947 melodrama directed by Stuart Heisler, and starring Susan Hayward as a dipsomaniac.
I’ve seen about half of Lawson’s films. Only one of them truly impressed me — The Pagan, a 1929 silent film set in the South Seas.
Directed by W. S. Van Dyke, The Pagan boasts paradisiacal location shots (courtesy of cinematographer Clyde de Vinna), a melodious score (from the "Pagan Love Song" by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown), and one of MGM star Ramon Novarro’s best performances. For the type of film it is — male sarong meets female sarong, but male pants create obstacles — Howard’s insightful and socially conscious intertitles almost seem out of place. Well, almost but not quite. In fact, Howard’s work on The Pagan helps turn what could have been a trifling film adaptation (credited to Dorothy Farnum) of a John Russell story into a heartfelt tale of social injustice.
John Howard Lawson died of Parkinson’s disease in 1977. He was 82.
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