The Word Cloud

I got around to watching Johnny Guitar and to be honest I wasn't that impressed. I can see why it caused interest, its malice fuelled plotline was unusual at the time and the edge of surreality it boasts also marked it out as a bit different. But I don't think any of that, at least when viewed today, elevates it above its endless dialogue scenes and stilted performances. This week's pick is Heaven Knows Mr. Allison (1957) directed by John Huston and on... sometime this week I think on More4 (I'm away from home at the moment and don't have a Radio Times to hand, but trust me it is on). It's another film I haven't seen and one I would like to and it gives me a chance to look at a very different type of screenwriter to those I usually write about. I don't know how many times I've mentionned the Blacklist in writing these blogs and always from the point of view of the left-wing writers whose careers it ended, but there were right-wing screenwriters too. John Lee Mahin was a staunch conservative who was convinced that the original screenwriters guild had been infiltrated by communists. To his credit (and I'm once again relying on a Patrick McGilligan interview) Mahin had no time for McCarthy and had the good sense to acknowledge that many of the films accused of having communist subtext simply did not, but, like so many others, he did nothing to help those who were accused and suffered the consequences; in Mahin's view they had made their own bed. As you might expect, Mahin was mainly a writer of 'men's films', adventure pictures often in exotic locales. A favourite of Victor Fleming he also worked repeatedly with W. S. Van Dyke and Jack Conway, as well as occasional jobs for Howard Hawks and John Ford. He was prolific and was responsible for such classics as Scarface, Red Dust, Captains Courageous and John Wayne's North to Alaska. But he also had range as a writer, making uncredited contributions to A Star is Born, Gone with The Wind, and The Wizard of Oz, as well as having a flair for comedy (he co-wrote The Devil is a Sissy; best film title ever!). The other way in which Mahin was different to many of the writers I've looked at is that he was generally happy in what happened to his work after it left his typewriter, possibly because he ws friendly with so many of his directors. He was that rarest of beasts; a contented screenwriter. I'd also like to mention briefly how Mahin startd in pictures (according to him at least), he was a journalist and through that he met Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (ex-journalists beginning to make good as writers), they asked him to ghost write Unholy Garden (1931) for them while they worked on a play and guaranteed him more screenwriting work at the end of it. I wish it was still that easy to get into the industry!