Cinema
Concept & Practice
In this unique study of the process of filmmaking, director Edward Dmytryk blends abstract film theory and the practical realities of feature film production to provide an artful and elegant analysis of the conceptual foundations of filmmaking and film studies. Dmytryk explores the technical principles underlying the craft of filmmaking and how their use is effective in developing the viewer’s involvement in the cinematic narrative.
Originally published in 1988, this reissue of Dmytryk’s classic book includes a new critical introduction by Joe McElhaney.
Edward Dmytryk (1908–1999) was an Oscar-nominated American filmmaker, educator, and writer. Over an acclaimed forty-year film mak -ing career, Dmytryk directed over fifty award-winning films, including Crossfire (1947), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Raintree County (1957), and The Young Lions (1958). Entering academia in the 1970s, Dmytryk lectured on both film and directing, first at the University of Texas at Austin and later at the University of Southern California. He is the author of several classic books on the art of filmmaking, including On Film Editing, On Screen Directing, On Screen Writing, On Screen Acting, and Cinema: Concept & Practice, all published by Focal Press/Routledge.
Joe McElhaney (contributor) is the author of The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (2006) and Albert Maysles (2009), and the editor of Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (2009) and A Companion to Fritz Lang (2015). His numerous publications in major film journals and edited volumes include essays on the work of Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Roman Polanski, Chris Marker, and R.W. Fassbinder. He is Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Publisher’s Note
In the 1980s, Focal Press published five books on the art of filmmaking by legendary film director Edward Dmytryk (1908–1999), Oscar-nominated director of Crossfire, The Caine Mutiny, and The Young Lions, among many other films. Together, these five titles comprise a masterclass with one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed, storied, and controversial filmmakers.
With most of these books long out of print, Focal Press/Routledge is pleased to reissue these classic titles with all new supplemental material for current day readers. Each book includes a new introduction, as well as chapter notes including exercises, discussion questions, and more.
Mick Hurbis-Cherrier serves as coordinator for the series, which includes the following titles, all available from Focal Press/Routledge:
Cinema: Concept & Practice (originally published 1988, with new material by Joe McElhaney):
On Film Editing (originally published 1984, with new material by Andrew Lund)
On Screen Acting (with Jean Porter Dmytryk, originally published 1984, with new material by Paul Thompson)
On Screen Directing (originally published 1984, with new material by Bette Gordon and Eric Mendelsohn)
On Screen Writing (originally published 1985, with new material by Mick Hurbis-Cherrier)
We are grateful to the estate of Edward Dmytryk and Jean Porter Dmytryk, especially to Rebecca Dmytryk, for their assistance in bringing these important books back into print.
Focal Press/Routledge
June 2018
Cinema
Concept & Practice
EDWARD DMYTRYK
Introduction by Joe McElhaney
This edition published 2019
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Originally published by Focal Press 1988
1988 text © Edward Dmytryk
2019 material © Joe McElhaney
The right of Edward Dmytryk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dmytryk, Edward, author. | McElhaney, Joe, 1957– writer
of introduction.
Title: Cinema : concept & practice / Edward Dmytryk ; introduction by
Joe McElhaney.
Description: New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. |
“Originally published by Focal Press 1988.” |
Includes filmography and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028270| ISBN 9781138584266 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138584273 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429506123 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC PN1995 .D54 2019 | DDC 791.4301—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028270
ISBN: 978-1-138-58426-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-58427-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-50612-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times
by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
Contents
Edward Dmytryk: A Short Biography
Introduction by Joe McElhaney
1 The Collective Noun
2 The Indispensible Viewer
3 You’d Better Believe It
4 The Power of the Set-Up
5 Invisibility
6 Moving and Molding
7 Look at Him, Look at Her
8 The Art of Separation
9 Rules and Rule Breaking
10 The Modification of Reality
11 Symbols, Metaphors, and Messages
12 Auteurs, Actors, and Metaphors
13 Time and Illusion
14 The Force of Filmic Reality
15 About a Forgotten Art
Postscript
Filmography of Edward Dmytryk
Index
Edward Dmytryk
A Short Biography
Within the industry and art form known as the cinema, the life of Edward Dmytryk is one of multiple journeys. Born September 4, 1908 in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Dmytryk was the second of four sons of Polish-Ukrainian immigrants. In 1915, the family moved to a small town in Washington called Northport. Dmytryk’s father was frequently abusive to his family, and the death of Dmytryk’s mother from a ruptured appendix prompted Dmytryk’s father to move the boys to San Francisco, where he placed them in an orphan home with a promise to return. He returned a year later, by which point he had remarried.
In 1919, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Dmytryk was enrolled in Lockwood Grammar School. During his time at Lockwood, Dmytryk was tested by the Terman Group from Stanford University, in search of students with superior IQ. Dmytryk qualified for the study and became part of what was at the time the longest-running psycho -logical study ever conducted.
Further abuse from his father drove Dmytryk to run away from home at age 14. For his safety, social workers placed him in a private home, but he was told he would need to get a job to help cover the rent. Thus, from a very early age, his was a life devoted to labor, to working hard: as a caddy or selling newspapers on street corners, or as a messenger and office boy.
It was the latter job, working evenings and weekends for Famous Players-Lasky studios (later Paramount Pictures), while attending Hollywood
High School, that first brought him into contact with the motion picture industry. Through this job he first encountered the cutting room and taught himself to splice film while also becoming a cutting room projectionist. “It was in the cutting room,” he would later state, “that I learned the rudiments of filmmaking.”
While working for Paramount and still in high school, Dmytryk was offered a scholarship at the California Institute of Technology. He accepted the scholarship, but continued to work as a projectionist on weekends and holidays. After a year in school, Dmytryk decided he wanted to make the film business his full-time career, and returned to Paramount. Soon thereafter, Dmytryk was working as an assistant editor and, eventually, editor, cutting films for such directors as George Cukor (The Royal Family of Broadway and Zaza) and Leo McCarey (Ruggles of Red Gap and Love Affair). He made a short-lived directorial debut in 1935 with the low-budget western The Hawk, made for Monogram studios, but would spend the next few years directing sequences in B films without credit, while continuing to edit the films of others. It was his uncredited co-direction of Million Dollar Legs for Paramount in 1939 (the same year in which he became an American citizen) that led to his first director jobs, first for Paramount and then for Columbia.
A contract with RKO Radio, beginning in 1942, dramatically changed the shape of his career. In 1943, he took over the direction from Irving Reis of the low-budget anti-Nazi film Hitler’s Children. The result was an unexpected critical and financial success. Later that year he graduated to A film budgets with the home front wartime melodrama Tender Comrade (1943), written by Dalton Trumbo and starring Ginger Rogers. A more significant turning point occurred with Murder, My Sweet (1944) one of the classic early examples of film noir, adapted from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, and starring Dick Powell cast against type as Philip Marlowe. The film was produced by Adrian Scott and written by John Paxton, two men who became central to Dmytryk’s career throughout the remainder of the decade. In Murder, My Sweet we see with a particular clarity a recurring type of protagonist in Dmytryk’s work, the investigative figure who moves through a sometimes enigmatic, sometimes hostile, and sometimes dreamlike environment in which he becomes enmeshed: losing consciousness, physically assaulted, falling from great heights.
Paxton and Scott would collaborate again on another noir, Cornered (1945), this one with a wartime setting and an anti-fascist scenario, with Powell once more in the lead. Slightly interrupting the collaborative run with Paxton and Scott is the Dore Schary production Till the End of Time, adapted from Niven Busch’s novel, They Dream of Home, about Marines returning home after the War. The film had the misfortune to open the same year as a film on a similar subject, William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives. A comparatively “small” film, Till the End of Time has its own defining qualities, in particular its emphasis (in contrast to Wyler’s film) on middle-class and blue-collar men (often psychologically and physical damaged) resisting the process of being integrated back into “normal” American society. After this, though, Dmytryk would return to working with Scott and Paxton, on two films, both released in 1947, Crossfire and So Well Remembered. The former was adapted from The Brick Foxhole, Richard Brooks’s novel about the investigation into the murder of a gay man by a homophobic and racist soldier. But due to censorship issues, the murder was changed to one provoked by the soldier’s anti-Semitism. Crossfire was made the same year as another major Hollywood film about anti-Semitism, Elia Kazan’s prestigious Gentleman’s Agreement. But Crossfire situates its social ambitions within a more explicit post-war environment of existential anxiety about the future of America at this particular moment in history in which, as one character states, “we don’t know what to fight.” A commercial success, Crossfire was perhaps the greatest critical triumph of Dmytryk’s career and the only film for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Director. (The film itself received five nominations overall, including one for Best Picture. It lost to Gentleman’s Agreement.) So Well Remembered has been neglected compared to Gentleman’s Agreement. Adapted from a James Hilton novel of the same name, set and shot in England with a primarily English cast and crew (the film was a co-production between RKO and J. Arthur Rank’s Alliance Productions, Ltd.), its American release was delayed due to Howard Hughes (a partial owner of RKO Radio) who believed that the film, with its emphasis on the resistance of factory workers to their corrupt owners, contained Communist ideology. For many years, the film was rarely screened and, in some quarters, believed to be lost. Now widely available, So Well Remembered is a major example of Dmytryk’s work and shows, as do all of his films of this period, signature Dmytryk touches, such as exploiting the expressive properties of light and shadow, using highly varied camera angles, and taking full advantage of current developments in film technology, including optical effects and camera movement devices
Shortly after the production of this film however, Dmytryk came under scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Attracted by ideals of economic justice and anti-fascism, Dmytryk had briefly joined the Communist Party in 1945, but claimed to have become quickly disillusioned with it, seeing the so called “party discipline” as a threat to the freedom of creative activity. Nonetheless, one of his earlier films, Tender Comrade, with its line of “share and share alike, that’s democracy” was held up by HUAC as an example of covert Communist ideology insinuating itself into a seemingly patriotic Hollywood film. Dmytryk and nine other industry screenwriters (including Scott and Trumbo), known as the Hollywood Ten, appeared before the committee but refused to testify, believing that the Constitution protected private citizens from having to disclose their personal, religious and political choices. Dmytryk was the eighth of the ten to be called to testify and, like the others before him, he refused to answer the chairman’s questions.
Charged with contempt of Congress and faced with an impending jail sentence, fired from RKO, and barred from working in the United States, Dmytryk accepted an opportunity to work abroad. Accompany -ing Dmytryk was his second wife, the actress Jean Porter, who he had married in 1948 and who had a supporting role in Till the End of Time.
Dmytryk made two films in England during this period of exile, both released in 1949. The first of these is the marital revenge drama Obsession (adapted from Alec Coppel’s novel A Man About a Dog and released in the United States as The Hidden Room) and an adaptation of Pietro di Donato’s acclaimed 1939 novel of Italian-American working class life, Christ in Concrete, released in Europe under the title Give Us This Day. Christ in Concrete’s screenplay was written by Ben Barzman, who had already collaborated with Dmytryk on the John Wayne war film Back to Bataan (1945). Christ in Concrete is a central Dmytryk achievement. Reproducing New York City in the studio and through redressed British locations, the film is one of Dmytryk’s boldest visual exercises, with its extreme high and low angled shots, low-key lighting, and the use of walls, floors and ceilings to create spaces that are at once psychological and social. It is also a major example of the tendency of Dmytryk’s protagonists to engage in agonized social struggles that are played out through gestures of self-inflicted physical pain, resisting the limited options given to them. Like So Well Remem bered, however, Christ in Concrete received limited North American release, both in the U.S.A. and the U.K.
His passport due to expire, Dmytryk returned to the United States in 1950 to face his sentence and was imprisoned for six months. This situation, combined with his belief that the Communist Party had done nothing for him, drove Dmytryk to eventually agree to appear a second time before HUAC. On April 25, 1951 he confirmed the names of people who had also been affiliated with the Communist Party, among them Adrian Scott, and Dmytryk chose to do it publicly, rather than behind closed doors. After Dmytryk’s recanting, it was the producer Stanley Kramer who became central in providing him with work in Hollywood. For Kramer (whose production company was releasing films through Columbia), he would make Eight Iron Men (1952), a skillful adaptation of
Harry Brown’s play of World War II, A Sound of Hunting, and The Juggler (1953), with Kirk Douglas as a deeply traumatized Holocaust survivor (Michael Blankfort adapted his own novel here), The Juggler was the first Hollywood film to be shot in Israel.
But this period in Dmytryk’s career is most notable for two remark -able films, the first and the last that he made for Kramer. The Caine Mutiny (1954), the last, was a commercial and critical triumph for him, the second highest-grossing film of 1954, and the recipient of seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Adapted from Herman Wouk’s 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning World War II novel, it is the first of a number of Dmytryk films made over the next decade adapted from lengthy, best-selling novels. In comparison with Dmytryk’s most notable films prior to this, The Caine Mutiny is restrained in its visual approach. Working in color for the second time (the first was the low-budget Mutiny from 1952) and for the first time with the gifted cinematographer Franz Planer, The Caine Mutiny employs a largely muted color palette and (unlike Dmytryk’s bold black-and-white films) soft lighting contrasts. But the core of the film’s formal interest are the extended sequences of meetings, conspiratorial conversations, and, most notably, the court martial sequence, with the paranoia of Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg reaching a point of mental disintegration memorably played out through his recurring gesture of nervously fondling the ball bearings in his hands. Throughout all of these extended dialogue sequences, Dmytryk’s gift for framing and cutting among his actors in xi various singles, two-shots, group shots, and then breaking up a com -position by having a character suddenly rise or lower themselves into a shot, is strongly apparent.
However The Sniper (1952), the first of the Kramers, while not a notable success at the time, is arguably the more striking of the two films and one that bears comparison with the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. In his autobiography, Dmytryk shrugs the effort off as a “piece of cake” in terms of the challenges the film presented to him. When seen today, however, the savage, unsentimental depiction of a city under siege (the script is by Harry Brown from a story by Edna and Edward Anhalt) gives the film a bold, modern quality, fore -shadowing David Fincher’s serial killer film Zodiac (2007), both films making imaginative use of San Francisco locations. In The Sniper, Dmytryk repeatedly draws attention (as he so often does throughout his work) to levels, heights, and staircases, creating a cold and indifferent urban environment. In the midst of this is an anguished killer who, in an indelible moment, deliberately burns his hand on a hot plate in his apartment.
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