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Edward Dmytryk was born in British Columbia, Canada, on 4th September, 1908. After an education at the California Institute of Technology, he became a messenger boy at Paramount.

Dmytryk became a film editor in 1929 and directed his first film, The Hawk, in 1935. Over the next eight years he directed 23 films. Dmytryk, who joined the Communist Party in 1944, was involved in making several politically oriented films such as the anti-fascist Hitler's Children (1943) and Crossfire (1947), one of the first Hollywood movies to tackle anti-Semitism.

After the Second World War the House of Un-American Activities Committee began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. In September 1947, the HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named several people who they accused of holding left-wing views.

Dmytryk appeared before the HUAC on 29th October, 1947, but like Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., Samuel Ornitz and John Howard Lawson, refused to answer any questions. Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The House of Un-American Activities Committee and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of Congress and Dmytryk was sentenced to twelve months in Mill Point Prison, West Virginia.

Blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, he moved to England where he directed two films, The Hidden Room (1949) and Give Us This Day (1949). However, Dmytryk had financial problems as a result of divorcing his first wife. Faced with having to sell his plane and encouraged by his new wife, Dmytryk decided to try to get his name removed from the blacklist.

Dmytryk's first move was to meet with a journalist, Richard English, who specialized in writing anti-communist articles for the American press. With English's help, Dmytryk wrote What Makes a Hollywood Communist? for the Saturday Evening Post (17th May, 1951). This explained how he now completely rejected his communist past.

On 25th April, 1951, Dmytryk before the House of Un-American Activities Committee again. This time he answered all their questions including the naming of twenty-six former members of left-wing groups. He also revealed how people such as John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott and Albert Maltz had put him under pressure to make sure his films expressed the views of the Communist Party. This was particularly damaging as several members of the original Hollywood Ten were at that time involved in court cases with their previous employers.

Dmytryk then resumed his Hollywood career and directed 25 more films including The Sniper (1952), The Caine Mutiny (1954), The Young Lions (1958), Walk on the Wild Side (1962), The Carpetbaggers (1963), Mirage (1965) and The Battle for Anzio (1968). His autobiography, It's a Hell of a Life, was published in 1978. Edward Dmytryk died in Encino, California, on 1st July, 1999.

 

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(1) Edward Dmytryk, interviewed by the House of Un-American Activities Committee (25th April, 1951)

John Howard Lawson settled all questions. If there was a switch in the Party line, he explained it. If there were any decisions to be made, they went to John Howard Lawson. If there was any conflict within the Communist Party, he was the one who settled it. We had a third meeting at which Adrian Scott brought Albert Maltz, who was a more liberal Communist, to defend us. These meetings ended in a stalemate.

Albert Maltz had been concerned about the lack of freedom of thought in the Communist Party for some time, and this was the trigger for the article he wrote for the New Masses on freedom of thought which was so widely discussed. So he wrote the article which he later had to repudiate or get out of the Party, and he chose to repudiate it.

 

(2) Edward Dmytryk wrote about his decision to testify before the House of Un-American Activities Committee in his autobiography, It's a Hell of a Life (1978)

I had long been convinced that the fight of the Ten was political; that the battle for freedom of thought, in which I believed that I was being forced to sacrifice my family and my career in defense of the Communist Party, from which I had long been separated and which I had grown to dislike and distrust. I knew that if it ever got down to a choice between the Party and our traditional democratic structure I would fight the Party and our traditional democratic structure I would fight the Party to the bitter end.

 

(3) Edward Dmytryk, interview on television (1973)

Not a single person I named hadn't already been named at least a half-dozen times and wasn't already on he blacklist. Because I didn't know that many. I only knew a few people, literally a handful of people, al of whom had been in the Party long before I was, all of whom were known by the FBI and were known to the Committee. There was no question about that. With me it was that defending the Communist Party was something worse than naming the names. I did not want to remain a martyr to something that I absolutely believed was immoral and wrong. It's as simple as that.

 

(4) The Daily Telegraph, Edward Dmytryk's Obituary (10th July, 1999)

His prospects began to improve when he arrived at RKO in 1942. His first success came the next year with Hitler's Children, one of the earliest Hollywood films to tackle conditions in Nazi Germany. The plot concerned a German girl educated in America who returns to visit her native country and is caught up in the new ideology; it made a star of Bonita Granville and became a "sleeper" (a small picture that performs much better than expected). It pulled in $7.5 million at the box office and earned Dmytryk a seven-year contract.

Dmytryk's first 'A' picture was Tender Comrade (1944), behind which many later detected Communist propaganda. About war widows who set up a commune along socialist lines, it was written by Dalton Trumbo (another member of the Hollywood 10). In fact, the film was in line with contemporary thinking on Soviet Russia, which was then America's wartime ally.

More sinister was Cornered (1945), made the next year, an apparently innocuous picture about a Canadian pilot who travels to Argentina in search of the Nazi who killed his wife during the war. It was written by the "radical" John Wexley and, according to Dmytryk, the original script was full of anti-Fascist speeches that "went to extremes" in following the Communist Party line. Dmytryk found them undramatic and advised the producer, Adrian Scott, to bring in a second writer, whereupon Wexley requested a meeting at Dmytryk's house.

As Dmytryk told it, "I was surprised to see the meeting was of Communists and the whole meeting was along Communist lines. The attack on us was that by removing Wexley's lines, we were making a pro-Nazi picture instead of an anti-Nazi picture. We refused to admit any of the charges."

In the same year, 1945, also with Adrian Scott as producer, Dmytryk had his first critical success. Called Murder, My Sweet, it was an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel Farewell, My Lovely, under which title it played in Britain. It was one of the first of what came to be known as films noirs and revitalised the fading career of its star, Dick Powell, a song-and-dance man of the 1930s, who was transformed as Chandler's tough private eye, Philip Marlowe.

Working with Scott again, Dmytryk achieved even greater acclaim in 1947 with Crossfire, which was nominated for five Oscars, including best picture and best director, losing out to Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement on a similar theme. Based on The Brick Foxhole, a novel by Richard Brooks, the film was a study of anti-Semitism in the US Army.

The original novel was about homophobia and the victim a homosexual rather than a Jew. Under prevailing censorship, this could not be discussed in 1947, but it is one of the film's strengths that in "betraying" its source, it substituted an alternative theme of equal, if not greater resonance.

 

Last updated: 16th August, 2002

 

 

 

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