A protégé of John Houseman and Orson Welles, who guided the Mercury Theatre player in his career transition from actor to director, John Berry ran afoul of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, after being named by Edward Dmytryk as a Communist. Though he had begun to enjoy the trappings of life as a studio director (and had just completed He Ran All the Way, starring another victim of the black list - John Garfield), Berry was sent to prison for contempt of Congress. Following his release, Berry relocated to Paris and made a number of films on the Continent, among them Tamango (1958), a tale of interracial love between Dutch slaver Curd Jurgens and African beauty Dorothy Dandridge, and Maya (1966), a Boy's Own adventure set in the jungles of India. Recently unemployed TV stars Clint Walker (of Cheyenne fame) and Jay North (three years out from his last season of Dennis the Menace) play a famed hunter traumatized by a near fatal mauling and his estranged son, whose attempts to form a new bond of understanding is disrupted when North joins a Hindu boy (Sajid Khan) on a quest to shepherd two elephants to sanctuary. Shot on location in Bombay (now Mumbai) with a script by novelist John Fante, Maya was a hit with critics and matinee crowds, prompting a short-lived NBC-TV series of the same name that reunited North and Khan for 18 episodes.

By Richard Harland Smith