John Howard LawsonFilmography

Born:: September 25, 1894 in New York City, NY
Occupation:: Screenwriter
Biography:: John Howard Lawson had an exciting life before becoming a screenwriter and a playwright. As a young man during WW I, he was a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross; there his peers were Ernest Hemingway, Dos Passos, and E.E. Cummings. Following the war, he began editing a newspaper in Rome...Read More

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Hollywood on Trial

Actors: John Huston, Edward Dmytryk, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Jr., Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Joseph McCarthy

Synopsis: Combining familiar newsreel footage with freshly shot material, David Helpern's Hollywood on Trial is a documentary concerning the "communist witch-hunt" era. In the years following World War II, several ambitious Washington politicos were anxious to dissipate the last traces of Roosevelt's New Read More

1976
Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Susan Hayward, Lee Bowman, Eddie Albert, Marsha Hunt, Carl Esmond

Synopsis: A woman struggles to reassemble her broken life in this drama that features Susan Hayward in her first starring role. The woman started out as a night-club singer, but abandoned her career after marrying a budding radio star. At first she does everything she can to insure his success, but when he Read More

1947
Counter Attack

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Paul Muni, Marguerite Chapman, Larry Parks, Philip Van Zandt, George Macready

Synopsis: This drama is based on a Broadway play, One Against Seven, which in turn is based on the Russian play Pobyeda. Set during WW II, it centers on a Russian officer, a Russian woman, and seven German soldiers who have been trapped in the ruined cellar of a bombed out factory in a Nazi-controlled town. Read More

1945
Action in the North Atlantic

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Humphrey Bogart, Raymond Massey, Ruth Gordon, Alan Hale, Julie Bishop

Synopsis: Action in the North Atlantic is solid wartime propaganda with a rather endearing inner lining of left-wing politics, courtesy (no doubt) of scenarist John Howard Lawson, who based his screenplay on a novel by maritime specialist Guy Gilpatric. While running war goods to America's Russian allies, a Read More

1943
Sahara

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Bennett, Lloyd Bridges, Rex Ingram, J. Carrol Naish, Dan Duryea

Synopsis: Humphrey Bogart considered this World War II action epic from director Zoltan Korda one of his finest films. Sergeant Joe Gunn (Bogart) is the commander of an American M-3 tank crew allied to the British Eighth Army, which is defeated by the Germans at Tobruk. Joining the scattered retreat across Read More

1943
Four Sons

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Don Ameche, Eugenie Leontovich, Mary Beth Hughes, Alan Curtis, George Ernest

Synopsis: This remake of John Ford's classic WW1 drama Four Sons has been updated to the Europe of the late 1930s. At the time of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, four sons of German-Czech parentage go off in separate ideological directions. Chris (Don Ameche) remains loyal to the concept of a free Read More

1940
Earthbound

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Warner Baxter, Andrea Leeds, Lynn Bari, Charles Grapewin, Henry Wilcoxon

Synopsis: Future blacklistee John Howard Lawson co-wrote this remake of Samuel Goldwyn's 1920 drama Earthbound, presented here as a rather more straightforward morality tale/fantasy. Warner Baxter and Andrea Leeds star as Nick and Ellen Desbrough, a seemingly happily-married couple celebrating their fifth Read More

1940
They Shall Have Music

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Jascha Heifetz, Andrea Leeds, Joel McCrea, Gene Reynolds, Walter Brennan

Synopsis: This musical drama follows a young ghetto kid who dreams of being a classical musician like his idol Jascha Heifetz. He first hears the renowned violinist after finding a ticket to Carnegie Hall on the sidewalk one day. The young man is so inspired by what he hears that he enrolls in Professor Read More

1939
Algiers

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Charles Boyer, Hedy Lamarr, Sigrid Gurie, Joseph Calleia, Gene Lockhart

Synopsis: This Hollywood remake of the French Pepe le Moko adheres so slavishly to its source that it utilizes stock footage from the original film, and even picked its actors on the basis of their resemblance to the French cast. Contrary to legend, star Charles Boyer never says "Come wizz me to zee Read More

1938
Blockade

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Madeleine Carroll, Henry Fonda, Leo Carrillo, John Halliday, Vladimir Sokoloff

Synopsis: Since the United States was officially neutral in the Spanish Civil War, the struggle of the Loyalists against Franco's forces didn't find much favor in Hollywood; this drama, produced by Walter Wanger, was one of the few films to deal with the conflict, albeit in watered-down terms. Marco (Henry Fonda Read More

1938
Party Wire

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Jean Arthur, Victor Jory, Helen Lowell, Charles Grapewin

Synopsis: In one of his few movie leading roles, Victor Jory plays an unmarried small-town creamery owner. Jory falls in love with Jean Arthur, daughter of the town's favorite citizen (Charley Grapewin). Jean's former boy friend disconsolately leaves town, leaving behind an unbalanced church budget which Read More

1935
Goodbye Love

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Veree Teasdale, Mayo Methot, Sidney Blackmer, Phyllis Barry, Ray Walker

Synopsis: Goodbye Love is a lampoon of what was once designated the "alimony racket." Refusing to meet his wife's exorbitant alimony demands, Sidney Blackmer volunteers to go to jail, where he finds that his cellmate is his own valet (Charlie Ruggles), incarcerated because he can't make his alimony Read More

1934
Success at Any Price

Crew: Play Author, Screenwriter

Actors: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Genevieve Tobin, Frank Morgan, Colleen Moore, Edward Everett Horton

Synopsis: An amoral capitalist is the protagonist of this drama written by one of Hollywood's famous "Ten" (the first people in the American film industry to be black-listed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities). The capitalist in question will stop at nothing to have the lion's share of the Read More

1934
Treasure Island

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Lionel Barrymore, Otto Kruger, Lewis Stone

Synopsis: This fifth film version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island boasts an all-star MGM cast, headed by Wallace Beery as Long John Silver and Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins. The screenplay, by John Lee Mahin, John Howard Lawson and Leonard Praskins, remains faithful to the Stevenson original...up Read More

1934
Bachelor Apartment

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Lowell Sherman, Irene Dunne, Mae Murray, Norman Kerry, Claudia Dell

Synopsis: A typical pre-code era comedy, Bachelor Apartment was the creation of its leading man, silent screen matinee-idol Lowell Sherman. He plays Wayne Carter, a Park Avenue roué, whose dalliances with a series of women are beginning to catch up with him. Enter a brunette and rather drab Irene Dunne Read More

1931
Dynamite

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Conrad Nagel, Kay Johnson, Charles Bickford, Julia Faye, Muriel McCormac

Synopsis: Filmed in 1929 and released early in 1930, Dynamite was Cecil B. DeMille's first all-talking feature. As one observer has noted, this 128-minute opus has enough plots for seven pictures. The basic storyline here involves spoiled heiress Cynthia Crothers (Kay Johnson) who will lose her fortune if Read More

1930
Our Blushing Brides

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery, Anita Page

Synopsis: Having starred in Our Dancing Daughters (28) and Our Modern Maidens (30), the next logical step for Joan Crawford was Our Blushing Brides (30). Crawford is featured with her Dancing Daughters costars Dorothy Sebastian and Anita Page in this tale of three roommates trying to make good in the Big Read More

1930
The Sea Bat

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Charles Bickford, Raquel Torres, Nils Asther, George F. Marion, John Miljan

Synopsis: "Sea Bat" is another name for the poisonous sting rays that trouble swimmers in warmer ocean climes. The story is set upon a tropical island and centers on the sister of a reef diver who was attacked under water by another diver and left to be eaten by an enormous sea bat (in reality the rays eat Read More

1930
The Ship from Shanghai

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Conrad Nagel, Kay Johnson, Carmel Myers, Holmes Herbert, Zeffie Tilbury

Synopsis: In this high-seas adventure, a ship's steward goes 'round the bend, mutinies, throws the captain into the briny, and turns into an utter tyrant. He is protected by the simple-minded, enormously strong cook. Fortunately for the crew, the crazed steward goes completely mad and ends up leaping to his Read More

1930