The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten

13. “Blacklisted”

13 “Blacklisted” 222 Rain was pouring down relentlessly at one minute after midnight on 9 April 1951, as John Howard Lawson ambled to an automobile that was to whisk him away from his home of recent months—federal prison in Ashland , Kentucky. But he “hardly knew” he was being drenched, so ecstatic was he about leaving.1 Lawson’s fellow left-winger and Williams alumnus, Carl Marzani, captured what this veteran screenwriter may have been feeling as he embraced lustily a new birth of freedom. “A man out of prison,” he says, “feels like a convalescent out of doors after a long illness. Sensations are heightened; the very air feels different. Prison air is brackish, tinged with yellow stone and black iron bars, laden with overtones of jangling key rings and arbitrary boss voices. It is a heavy ozone. The outside air,” he enthused expansively , “stretched illimitable, scrubbed by winds from the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, from Aden, Suez, Spitzbergen and Kamchatka, from Cape Hatteras and Luang Prabang.”2 But this freedom had a price. As a result of the Waldorf meeting of moguls in late 1947, hard on the heels of Lawson’s tumultuous testimony in Washington, he and virtually all of Red Hollywood were now “blacklisted ,” barred from the industry they had helped to construct. Unlike a director , such as Edward Dmytryk—and this may shed light on why he was one of the few of the Ten to renounce totally his previous beliefs—Lawson as a writer could continue trying to ply his trade, albeit being paid considerably less, hiding his light under a bushel of a “front.”3 Still, Lawson entered the netherworld of the “blacklist,” where credit could not be taken, though responsibility had to be shared, an experience he endured with perhaps his most powerful film, one that created a genre— the antiapartheid drama Cry, the Beloved Country, based on the novel by South African writer Alan Paton. Filmed on location in South Africa, it exposed audiences to the grimiest of ghettos, which made Harlem and Watts pale in comparison. It featured a narrative device familiar to Lawson’s movies—a voice-over narration that allowed for clearer explication for the audience’s sake and a more cogent flow to the narrative.A critical scene occurs as a train—another Lawson favorite—rattles through a barren moonscape as African workers explain in simple though profound terms the process of gold mining and its value to capitalism. Religion is portrayed positively—another Lawson staple, and ironic given that one strains to find similar positive portrayals of socialism in his movies, the “offense” for which he was pilloried—and a cleric, an admirable figure, is a leading character . But these elements are accompanied by a devastating portrait of apartheid and the slum conditions that were its handmaiden. Moreover, the church is critiqued for its weakness in dealing with temporal realities, though the movie is replete with liberal and Christian pieties.4 The heart of the plot concerns a young African leaving the countryside for the ugliness of the city and his brutal encounter with a white liberal. It “Blacklisted” / 223 figure 12. Carrying placard, John Howard Lawson protests his “blacklisting.” (Courtesy of Southern Illinois University) is more compelling dramatically than the second version of this classic, produced as apartheid was crumbling—which is a compliment to Lawson’s skills as a dramatist in that the later screenwriter obviously had more to draw from in sketching his plot and limning his characters. It is a film that made the reputation of one black actor—Sidney Poitier—as it destabilized another: Canada Lee. “I wrote the screenplay anonymously for my old friend, Zoltan Korda,” said Lawson. “Paton came to Hollywood and we discussed it in great detail .” His “final payment”—a hefty $12,500—arrived in April 1951, a handsome gift that greeted him as he walked out of prison.5 This was audacious , for an angry controversy would have erupted if it had been known that a “hard-line” Red had written this movie. Lawson’s agent, George Willner, told Sue Lawson in early 1951 that “the picture turned out great” and “there should be some monies coming thru” soon. But “naturally,” he warned, Lawson “is more frightened today than ever before and has urged extreme caution so no one should be told about your visit to him or about my conversations...