Edward Dmytryk Research Articles

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” You Must Remember This

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” <i>You Must Remember This</i>

The Juggler (1953) in Galilee: Hollywood's Progressives and the Establishment of Israel

The history of Hollywood’s on-screen relationship with the State of Israel is often thought to have begun with Otto Preminger’s Exodus, an epic account of Jewish bravery in late-1940s Palestine released in 1960. This article takes an in-depth look at an earlier American movie about Israel, Edward Dmytryk’s The Juggler, released in 1953. The Juggler was Hollywood’s first film set and shot on location in modern Israel. Written by Michael Blankfort and produced by Stanley Kramer, The Juggler tells the story of a German-Jewish variety entertainer who has lost his family in the Holocaust and is struggling to settle in Israel in the aftermath of its war of independence in 1948. The film starred Kirk Douglas, who thanks to his work on The Juggler became one of Israel’s biggest supporters in Hollywood. The article uses Israeli and American archival evidence to explore why and how the film version of The Juggler differs markedly from the novel on which it was based. It shows that The Juggler represented a particular phase in Hollywood’s relationship with Israel, one in which a group of political progressives sought to use film as a way of introducing Americans to a Zionism that was left of centre and grounded in the life of the kibbutz. The article examines how those progressive ideals were diluted from script to screen as commercial imperatives took precedence over political ideals. At the same time, the article demonstrates how The Juggler inadvertently ‘documented’ a living symbol of the Nakba, the ‘disaster’ of the Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war.

"Anybody with a buck": Terry Turner and the Ecosystems of Film Promotion, 1920–1960

Terry Turner was one of the most influential film promoters of the twentieth century, but his achievements have been largely overlooked by film historians. As an exploitation man for RKO, he pioneered "saturation" releasing with his promotion of Hitler's Children (Edward Dmytryk, 1943)—more than three years before David O. Selznick's promotion of Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946). Turner created multifaceted, multimedia campaigns, and he was a significant creative force within the industry. Turner's ecosystemic approach to promotion integrated many dynamic elements into his campaigns as he fulfilled his stated goal of targeting "anybody with a buck."

Double Censorship: The Reception of Elia Kazan and Edward Dmytryk in SPAIN, 1946–77

The reception of American cinema in Spain after the Spanish Civil War was largely conditioned by the activity of censorship boards. American films were very popular in Spain in the decades following World War II. Yet they frequently reached the audience with mutilations, or with changes to the script. In fact, some directors who had already experienced problems with censorship in the United States suffered a ‘double censorship’ when their movies reached Spain. This article explores governmental responses to the cinematic production of Elia Kazan and Edward Dmytryk in Francoist Spain, between 1946, when Kazan’s and Dmytryk’s films were first released in Spain, until 1977, when censorship was abolished. Using the censorship files available at the Spanish General Administration Archive, we discuss how the censors’ moral, political and religious views affected the reception of Elia Kazan and Edward Dmytryk in this period. From a comparative perspective, it is interesting to see that, while American and Spanish censors basically agreed on moral issues, they had different views on the threat that racial and political matters entailed for the spectators.

Techniques Used to Establish the First Person Narrator and Perspective in Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet

Directed by Billy Wilder and Edward Dmytryk respectively, the films noir Double Indemnity (1944) and Murder, My Sweet (1944) each have a storyline that unfolds from a first person perspective as told by a narrator. The techniques used in the films establish this first person perspective through which the films are understood. Both films include voice over as a technique, which determines who the narrator is and the amount of information withheld or disclosed to the audience. Establishing the visual perspective of the narrator is portrayed through differently for each film. While, Double Indemnity utilizes camera angle, Murder, My Sweet uses camera filters and special effects. Lastly, to achieve the first person narration, the character narrating in each film must be present in every scene or give explanation of events that occur in his absence. The various techniques used in each film function cohesively to establish the narrator and achieve his perspective through which the plot is understood by the audience.

On Goldman’s &lt;em&gt;The American Jewish Story Through Cinema&lt;/em&gt;

On Goldman's The American Jewish Story Through CinemaEric A. Goldman, The American Jewish Story Through Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 254 pp., ISBN 978-0-292-74430-1 (hc), US $55.00; 978-0-29275469-0 (pb), US $25.00.Eric Goldman's cultural case studies of nine mainstream representative films join a growing body of key studies of the American Jewish experience(s) that portray the social history of reel Jews and Jewish issues. The book recounts the Zeligesque process of mimesis, adaptation, and assimilation, as represented throughout the twentieth century through film. The book is clearly written and places its subjects in a general historical context that incorporates primary documents as well as personal interviews with filmmakers such as Barry Levinson.Goldman's scope is limited to nine American-made films: The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk, 1958), The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, 1973), The Prince of Tides (Barbra Streisand, 1991), Avalon (Barry Levinson, 1990), Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson, 1999), and Everything Is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2005). This focus allows him to illustrate themes such as coming out of the ghetto (The Jazz Singer); anti-Semitism in the 1940s (Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire); guaranteeing acceptance (The Young Lions); the evolving Jewish woman as a strong, successful, assertive, and vibrant professional (The Way We Were, The Prince of Tides); the fragmentation of Jewish life, offered as a paradigmatic sketch of the American Jewish immigrant experience (Avalon, Liberty Heights); and the new trend whereby the search for home in Eastern Europe's pre-Holocaust shtetl represents the comfort of identifying with Jewish heritage, and the search for a usable past by which to construct a transcontinental multigenerational Jewish identity (Everything Is Illuminated).Goldman's book, which broadens our understanding of acculturated Jewishness as represented in American cinema, develops further the mid-1980s surveys of American Jewish film by Patricia Erens (The Jew in American Cinema, 1984) and Lester Friedman (The Jewish Image in American Film, 1987). However, Erens's and Friedman's surveys attempt to cover the entirety of American film history and deal in general outlines, whereas Goldman's focuses on a small number of case studies that specifically raise questions about the construction of Jewish identity, assimilation, and Jewish-gentile social and economic relations. (Further recent groundbreaking work has also appeared in print.)1Goldman, the author of Visions, Images, and Dreams: Yiddish Film-Past & Present (2011), is well positioned to draw on his experience as curator of film for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he supervised the preservation of archival Yiddish films. For many years Goldman also developed and moderated the film program at the Center for Jewish History and Yeshiva University, and in 2011 he served as film curator at the International Yiddish Theatre Festival in Montreal.A great strength of the book is Goldman's tracing of the ideological tensions behind adapting a book to film. The novel The Young Lions, for example, was published by Irwin Shaw in 1948. Its later film adaptation involved many differences of interpretation over how to represent the plot, which followed the lives of three soldiers during World War II. Shaw bitterly disagreed with Marlon Brando's sympathetic portrayal of Christian and with the playing down of the anti-Semitism that Noah encounters in the original book. Shaw felt Brando unjustifiably exculpated the perpetrators and bystanders in a way that did an injustice to the victims of the Nazis. The process and product of this contested adaptation would reveal a shift in the ways some Americans came to respond to images of the Holocaust. Goldman's analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), as adapted and directed by actor Liev Schreiber, also brilliantly reveals how the author revealed what it means for an American Jew without a known immediate connection to the Shoah to return to an annihilated European shtetl to confront unfinished business. …

William l. Shirer and the blacklist: the drive against a liberal radio commentator

By the spring of 1947, William L. Shirer, who at the time was a well-known radio news commentator, had lost his job at CBS in New York. The network provided no concrete reason for his firing yet Sh...

Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal (review)

Reviewed by: Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal Doug MacLeod Alan Casty . Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal. Scarecrow Press, 2009. 376 pages; $50.00 Usually, when talking with my composition students about (in)tolerance in American culture, I briefly touch upon McCarthyism owing to its political, moral, and ethical significance. A paranoid time in American history, McCarthyism is considered by most as "a synonym for the anticommunist political repression of the early Cold War," although, the utter hatred for communism arrived well before McCarthyism existed. The reason for this hatred—according to one critic—was the irrational notion that outsiders threatened the nation from within. Projecting their own fears onto a demonized "other," many Americans found convenient scapegoats. In other words, the "other" was always an organized, well-oiled machine filled with a rebellious conglomerate of faiths, races, and cultures, but distinctly not "American" or democratic in its ideological make-up. And it is because of America's fear of "organized otherness" that McCarthy went after Communist Party members. What the Wisconsin senator didn't realize, however, was that the organized "others" were not always organized, an idea that Alan Casty [End Page 126] examines in Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal. The author hypothesizes that the meetings held to protest McCarthy's witch hunts representednot great moments but, instead, distorted idealism, while party members, who crusaded for free speech, submitted to censorship and accepted the denial of that very freedom. Casty further explains how silence in the face of freedom of speech does not equal loyalty and community. Meticulously researched andtightly organized, Communism in Hollywood examines the complex history of communism's origins, its influence in Tinseltown, and how, after time, it became much like McCarthyism, wherein trials were eventually held, judgments were hastily made, and misconceptions about the atrocities that were actually occurring in the Soviet Union were not fully recognized. Casty believes that this turmoil between individuals within the American Communist movement eventually led to profound "immediate effects" on "their lives and careers," as well as "long-term moral paradoxes...in their actions and [in] the enduring moral and character judgments based on their actions, shaped by the power of ideology and unrelenting feelings of betrayal." Casty shows these effects by using conversations, newspaper and magazine articles, interviews, historical texts, passages from other books in the field, biographies, and the films made at the time as evidence and he does so wisely and deftly. He speaks in-depth about Albert Maltz, Elia Kazan, Edward Dmytryk, John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Parker, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, amongst others; names that, in some way, will be remembered because of their involvement (and, in some instances, their betrayal) of the CPUSA. Particularly strong in Communism in Hollywood are Casty's chapters on Robert Rossen, whose career "in Hollywood provides a unique and significant case study, a quintessential narrative of a central figure's journey through these dynamic and crusading, idealistic and righteously deluded, tumultuous and troubled times." Having published The Films of Robert Rossen in 1969, Casty is certainly knowledgeable about Rossen's affiliation with the party, his testimony against the party, and the films that he wrote while going through his own personal trials and tribulations. More important, Casty seems to have a great deal of passion not only for Rossen but also for the other people affiliated with the party, the time period, the history, the documents, and the movement. He tries to understand (and, in turn, wants his reader to understand) why the CPUSA did not succeed, even if the individuals who stayed silent, or stated very little, thought they had. Hollywood's CPUSA contributed to its own [End Page 127] demise at a time when it could have been doing a lot of good for the American people and the Soviet Union. Doug MacLeod dm8600@albany.edu Copyright © 2011 Center for the Study of Film and History

DVD Chronicle

DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Desert Victory (Roy Boulting and David Macdonald, directors, 1943), Koch Vision; Open City (Roberto Rossellini, director, 1945), Image Entertainment; Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, director, 1946), in the Vittorio De Sica Collection Three, Dawoori Entertainment; The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, director, 1945), Warner Home Video; Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, director, 1947), Turner Home Entertainment; Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, director, 1947), Fox Home Video. In my last Chronicle I followed Graham Greene's lead to films that he reviewed in the 1930s and that still seem worth watching today. Here, I'll do the same with Greene's American counterpart, James Agee, who did his reviewing in the 1940s for The Nation and Time. Agee the film critic could be tersely dismissive when confronted with out-and-out trash. In a 1948 review for The Nation ("Midwinter Clearance"), he cleared one silly musical away simply by listing its title and adding four words: "You Were Meant for Me. That's what you think." For that matter, he could be terse when dealing with a flawed masterpiece like Odd Man Out (1947). Carol Reed's film could scarcely be better described than in Agee's summations "a series of passive elegiac tableaux," "uses allegory wrong end to." But the essential Agee was expansive, not terse. The Nation indulged him with a lot of column inches; his mind worked in a naturally allusive way ("as nihilistic as Céline," "as deeply humane as Dickens," he wrote of Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek); he was greatly in love with words and their effects. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is for Agee not just gay, but "inviolably, genuinely, and intelligently gay." The twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet is not just beautiful, but "rapturously beautiful" ("if I may resort to conservative statement," he added). Prose pours out of him, on occasion prose as finicking and alliterative as Henry James's (Lewis Allen's 1945 haunted house melodrama The Unseen "generates sporadic wincing qualms of excitement without ordering them into anything constant and cumulative") or, at other moments, as comically inventive as the orotundity of W. C. Fields, one of his onscreen heroes. Listen to Agee on Till the Clouds Roll By, for instance. This 1946 biopic about Jerome Kern is a little like sitting down to a soda-fountain de luxe atomic special of maple walnut on vanilla on burnt almond on strawberry on [End Page 108] butter pecan on coffee on raspberry sherbet on tutti frutti with hot fudge, butterscotch, marshmallow, filberts, pistachios, shredded pineapple, and rainbow sprills on top, go double on the whipped cream. Some of the nuts, it turns out, are a little stale, and wandering throughout the confection is a long bleached-golden hair, probably all right in its place but, here, just a little more than you can swallow. After this colossal simile the reviewer pulls himself together to find the single word that is unexpected but exactly right for Kern's music in the movie: "nacreous." Whether playing for laughs or writing in deadly seriousness, and whether an enthusiastic approver of some film or a diehard naysayer, Agee brings to his movie reviews the passionate eloquence which fills the pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his great documentary report (with Walker Evans photographs) on the lives of dirt-poor cotton sharecroppers at the end of the Depression. Bourbon-soaked eloquence, one is sometimes tempted to say about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: language toppling over itself or being heaped into gargantuan lists in the effort to be loving enough to those appallingly damaged families in north Alabama. Agee the film reviewer is more controlled than Agee the documentary artist, more aware of what language can and cannot do, and more conscious of ordinary readers' needs; he was of course a little older when he wrote the reviews. Eloquence in his film criticism is usually unforced, and arises from both attention to detail and an awareness of what the art of the cinema might actually be expected to accomplish. The creative imagination, he commented in one review, is "merely an intensification of good sense to the point...

Cinematic representations of diaspora: Italians and Jews

In this article we consider recent re-evaluations of the concept of diaspora and extend the notion of diasporic space using cinematic representations of two diasporic experiences, Italian and Jewish. The first film selected is the work of Edward Dmytryk, a controversial member of the Hollywood Ten (prominent film-makers who refused to disclose their political affiliations during the McCarthy period). The second film is the work of Joan Micklin Silver, who, starting her career in the 1970s, draws particular attention to female experiences of diaspora. The two cases and their respective filmic treatments show significant divergences. However, they are both concerned with the complex tasks of trying to retain elements of the old ways while finding legitimate cultural and social expression in the New World. Our analysis of the films also demonstrates the complex ways in which the New and Old Worlds are spatially and imaginatively linked in the diasporic consciousness.

Controversy and Compromise in the Code's Waning Years: Hollywood Takes a Walk on the Wild Side

This essay focuses on a curious and overlooked film, Walk on the Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk, 1962), released on the eve of the classical Hollywood studio system era and noteworthy in two main respec...

"Un-American" Hollywood: politics and film in the blacklist era

concept of un-Americanism, so vital to the HUAC crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, was resoundingly revived in the emotional rhetoric that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today's political and cultural climate makes it more crucial than ever to come to terms with the consequences of this earlier period of repression and with the contested claims of Americanism that it generated.Un-American Hollywood reopens the intense critical debate on the blacklist era and on the aesthetic and political work of the Hollywood Left. In a series of fresh case studies focusing on contexts of production and reception, the contributors offer exciting and original perspectives on the role of progressive politics within a capitalist media industry.Original essays scrutinize the work of individual practitioners, such as Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Edward Dmytryk, and examine key films, including The Robe, Christ in Concrete, The House I Live In, The Lawless, The Naked City, The Prowler, Body and Soul, and FTA.

Elia Kazan's first testimony to the house committee on Un-American activities, executive session, 14 January 1952

The controversy surrounding Elia Kazan's testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in particular in 1999 when Kazan was awarded a Life Achievement Award at that year's Academy Awa...

Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete

Focusing our understanding of Hollywood and HUAC on questions of presence and content is to apply paradigms of authorship and genre which were critical by-products of the cultural transformation to which HUAC contributed, and will as a result have limited critical purchase on its causes. What might break this critical impasse would be the discovery of something outside the circle; something not easily, or at least not yet, assimilated into its cycle of repetitions. Such a remainder can be found in a film which is arguably one of the most important productions of the period: Edward Dmytryk‘s ‘lost’ film of Italian/American author Pietro di Donatos novel Christ in Concrete (1949).

Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir

More than any other writer, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) is responsible for raising detective stories from the level of pulp fiction to literature. Chandler's cynical private eye Philip Marlowe set the standard for rough, brooding heroes with strong moral conviction in a cruel, indifferent world. In this book, Gene Phillips explores the intersection of Chandler's fiction and film, from his novels and short stories to his Hollywood screenplays. Through interviews with Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Edward Dmytryk, Phillips probes Chandler's notoriously difficult personality and demonstrates the debt that both detective fiction and today's neo-noir films owe to Chandler's stark vision.

Notorious: Hitchcock’s good neighbor film

The New York release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious occurred in August 1946, one month after the Bikini atomic explosions, and one year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Is mankind dying of curiosity?” asked a double page Time magazine ad, in the same issue that published a review of the film. “Time’s Science department noted recently,” readers were told, “that people everywhere have one great Fear: will the curiosity of nuclear physicists someday set off a giant chain reaction which will flash-bum the world to a clinker?”l To overcome that fear of the nuclear apocalypse, according to the add, readers should learn more and more about “the big mysteries of our atomic age,” beginning by checking her or his score in the “Time’s Quiz on Science.” If they happened to go to Radio City Music Hall, Notorious would reassure them that the U.S. was doing well in preventing obstinate Nazis from making an atomic bomb, though at that moment of the nuclear espionage war, former Manhattan Project insider Klaus Fuchs had actually passed on to a Soviet contact in London classified information about the Manhattan Project and American atomic plans.2 Indeed, in that transitional period between World War II and the Cold War, the major political villains were still Nazis, not Communists, as exemplified by other 1946 films like Orson Welles’ The Stranger, Charles Vidor’s Gilda, and Edward Dmytryk’s Cornered.

Looking for the Public in the Private: American Lives, Un-American Activities

Book Reviews Review Essay Looking for the Public in the Private: American Lives, Un-American Activities Thomas W. Benson Whittaker Chambers. By Sam Tanenhaus. New York: Random House, 1997; pp. 638. $35.00. Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten. By Edward Dmytryk. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996; pp. 210. $34.95 cloth; $14.95 paper. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. By Walter Bernstein. New York: Knopf, 1996; pp. 292. $24.00. Anything Your Little Heart Desires. By Patricia Bosworth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; pp 416. $27.50. Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties. By Sally Belfrage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994; pp. 263. $22.50. fohn Wayne's America. By Garry Wills. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; pp. 380. $26.00. American politics, according to its own myths, is the definitive enactment of the democratic promises of the public sphere. At the same time, participants in American politics, from left, right, and center, necessarüy conduct their own political activities in what are at best only approximations of genuinely accessible public settings and in language that appeals as much to personal identity, virtue, religious or ideological conviction, and tribal hostilities as to civic ideals. Where can we look to find the public? One answer suggested by a diverse collection of recent accounts is that public and private are necessarüy fuzzy, partial, approximate, and simultaneous. According to our actual practices, it appears that Thomas W. Benson is Edwin Erie Sparks Professor of Rhetoric atPenn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1,No. 1,1998, pp. 117-141 ISSN 1094-8392 118 Rhetoric & Public Affairs we often enact, affirm, or critique our public life from the perspective of the private, or the reverse, or find one in the other, or mistake one for the other, or ruin one for the sake of the other. I propose to read as a rhetorical critic some recent accounts of the intersection of a great public event with a series of private lives. These accounts offer themselves both as political enactments—that is, as rhetorical appeals—and as, at least implicitly, political theories—that is, theories of the relations of public and private experience as revealed in biography and autobiography. These stories recall the time we now call the McCarthy era, though McCarthy himself was an opportunistic intruder on territory first exploited by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and its most junior member, Richard Milhous Nixon.1 Fifty years after the House Committee on Un-American Activities launched its October 1947 investigations of communism in Hollywood, and fifty years after Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss, before the same committee, in August of 1948, of having been part of Chambers's Soviet spy ring in the 1930s, the echoes of those painful days continue to resound. Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of Chambers (19011961 ), whose autobiography, Witness, was for years a bible of postwar American conservatism.2 Alger Hiss (1904-1996) had been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and a star among young New Deal bureaucrats. Hiss transferred to the State Department in 1936; in 1945 he served as secretary-general of the conference that created the United Nations. In 1946 he became the president of the Carnegie Endowment. In 1948 the seemingly patrician Hiss was accused by Chambers, then a senior editor at Time, of having participated in a Soviet espionage ring in Washington in the 1930s. In a confrontation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Hiss, who had at first denied knowing Chambers, said that he had known Chambers slightly, but under the pseudonym George Crosley. As a result of his testimony before HUAC and a grand jury, Hiss was eventually tried for two counts of perjury. A first trial resulted in a hung jury; the second jury convicted Hiss for having "lied twice to the grand jury, first in saying he had not seen Chambers after July 1, 1937, second in saying he had not transmitted the spy papers to Chambers" (431). Hiss denied until his death that he had been guüty. For decades, many liberals believed...

Review: Odd Man out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten by Edward Dmytryk

Book Review| October 01 1997 Review: Odd Man out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten by Edward Dmytryk Odd Man out: A Memoir of the Hollywood TenEdward Dmytryk Eric Smoodin Eric Smoodin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1997) 51 (1): 64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213546 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Eric Smoodin; Review: Odd Man out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten by Edward Dmytryk. Film Quarterly 1 October 1997; 51 (1): 64. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1213546 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

: Odd Man out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten . Edward Dmytryk.

Book Review| October 01 1997 Review: Odd Man out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten by Edward Dmytryk Odd Man out: A Memoir of the Hollywood TenEdward Dmytryk Eric Smoodin Eric Smoodin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1997) 51 (1): 64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213546 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Eric Smoodin; Review: Odd Man out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten by Edward Dmytryk. Film Quarterly 1 October 1997; 51 (1): 64. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1213546 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Whiteness of Film Noir

In the final moments of Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944), the police offer private dick Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) the priceless jade necklace Marlowe has at last recovered for his wealthy client. The chief object of mercenary desire in the film and therefore a figure for the corruption and deceit of its dramatis personae, the necklace also suggests an Oriental(ist) languor whose fruits could now be all Marlowe's. Marlowe declines: No thanks, he says; it's wrong for my complexion.' We are given to understand complexion first and foremost in the moral sense; Marlowe has beaten the forces of greed and graft that threaten to swamp him no less than the roues, quacks, idle rich, and petty mobsters who surround him. In another and equally pressing sense, though, Marlowe has remained true to a racial physiognomy, that of whiteness, which indexes his pristine soul. Film noir-black film, as French critics first dubbed it in 1946-has long fascinated observers with its interest in darkened frames and darkened lives. But the specifically racial means of noir's obsession with the dark side of 1940s American life has been remarkably ignored. Perhaps this should come as no surprise: raced metaphors in popular life are as indispensable, and rendered as invisible, as the colored bodies who give rise to and move in the shadows of those usages. Yet not to call attention to film noir's fairly insistent thematizing of spiritual and cinematic darkness by way of bodies beyond the pale is to persist in a commonsense exploitation enacted by films (running from roughly the early 1940s to the mid '50s) that stress the unwholesome predicaments of whites and have been accepted by a rich history of commentary. I would enlarge the frame of recent work by Toni Morrison, Kenneth Warren (10-11), William Boelhower (109), and others on the ways in which racial tropes and the presence of African Americans have shaped the sense and structure of American cultural products that on their face have nothing to do with race.1 The informing presence of racial difference in the American imaginary, which amounts to little less than a constitutive condition of cultural articulation, not surprisingly suffuses a cinematic mode known to traffic in black hearts and minds. At