Director John Berry got his big start as an actor in Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in 1937. Welles then introduced him to film in 1938 when he hired him as assistant director on a silent slapstick short made to accompany and introduce portions of the stage farce Too Much Johnson. (The farce never made it to Broadway, alas, and the short film was lost in a 1970 fire in Welles’s villa in Madrid.) In 1941, shortly before the release of Citizen Kane, Berry acted in and was stage manager on Welles’s adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son when it reopened in New York and then went on a national tour, where he redesigned the production for each location.
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Berry directed six features in Hollywood over a five-year period (1946-’51) before fellow director Edward Dmytryk identified him as a communist. Blacklisted, Berry moved to Paris, where he basically had to start his life over. He moved around a lot to find jobs, even back to Hollywood in the 70s to make movies as diverse as Claudine (a wonderful romantic comedy matching James Earl Jones as a garbage man with Diahann Carroll as a ghetto mother) and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (which I haven’t seen, but nobody seems to like). But Paris remained his base of operations until his death at 82 in December 1999; he even found occasion to work there for Welles, dubbing some of the voices in The Trial in the early 60s. (The only French film of his that I know—the 1957 Tamango, which turned up at Navy Pier three summers ago—pairs Dorothy Dandridge and Curt Jurgens on a slave ship, which was more than American distributors could contemplate at the time; it isn’t one of Berry’s best, though it’s still a lot more interesting than Amistad.) One little-known fact about Berry is that he was the father-in-law of Jean Seberg and Anna Karina (they each married his son Dennis, who had a role in Jacques Rivette’s L’amour fou); the last time I saw Berry he was traveling with Karina.
I never saw any of Berry’s theater work, which was extensive and included productions of another Fugard play, Blood Knot, in London and New York. (The well-received New York productions of both Blood Knot and Boesman & Lena starred James Earl Jones, and thus helped him become better known.) The New York Times obituary says Berry made more than 50 films, but this seems pretty unlikely—the first edition of Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia lists only 18 titles through 1978. I’ve seen only eight or nine of his works, and one striking way that Boesman & Lena—a French-South African production filmed exclusively in Cape Town—differs from the others is in its unabashed theatricality, which gives it an experimental flavor.
If you’re looking simply for a driving narrative, you aren’t likely to feel satisfied by Boesman & Lena. It premiered in this country last fall at the New York film festival, and when it opened in theaters soon afterward, it was sourly received in some quarters, judging by reviews such as Michael Atkinson’s in the Village Voice. “Long a race-relations flag-waver” was his ungenerous way of describing Berry—a man I can’t imagine waving any flag under any circumstance—and his verdict on the film, which he called “no challenge to middlebrow sanctimony,” was “I haven’t suffered such overcooked caterwauling since my first Rangers game.”
Directed by John Berry
Written by Athol Fugard and Berry
With Danny Glover, Angela Bassett, and Willie Jonah.
