DMYTRYK'S HONORABLE MUTINY
SCHWARTZ, STEPHEN
DMYTRYK'S HONORABLE MUTINY by Stephen Schwartz EDWARD DMYTRYK HAD IT RIGHT. "When I die," he said, "I know the obits will first read, 'one of i Hollywood's Unfriendly Ten,' not director of The...
...From the maker of The Caine Mutiny, it was a comment to be prized...
...Who wouldn't it hurt...
...I had known two others of the Hollywood Ten, Alvah Bessie and Lester Cole, and found them extraordinarily unappealing...
...Stephen Schwartz is writing a book on the Kosovo war...
...I got to know Eddie in 1996 when I asked him to read the manuscript of my book, From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind...
...Crossfire, which dealt with the murder of a Jew by a racist soldier, included great performances by Robert Ryan, Robert Young, and Robert Mitchum, in addition to assorted dabs of propaganda...
...Even as a Hollywood lefty, he made better movies than the rest of the Ten, including Murder, My Sweet (1944), the noir classic written by Raymond Chandler, and Crossfire (1947), doubtless the best of all the self-consciously "progressive" films of that era...
...Because Dmytryk saw the Communists for the gangsters they were, a generation before this was politically acceptable, he suffered...
...For most readers today, the Hollywood Ten is a phrase without much context, so it's worth rehearsing the history...
...I don't much care about all these Beatnik poets and their weird behavior...
...Those who remained faithful to the cult of Joseph Vissarionovich, meanwhile, continued to style themselves martyrs for the freedom of the mind...
...Dmytryk was the opposite: a real mentor...
...He was an object of psychological assault for years, everywhere from academic seminars to Tinseltown nightclubs...
...All 19 were activists...
...These agents included members of the Hollywood Ten, as well as Bertolt Brecht and other luminaries of Hollywood's "Little Kremlin...
...When I die," he said, "I know the obits will first read, 'one of i Hollywood's Unfriendly Ten,' not director of The Caine Mutiny, The Young Lions, Raintree County, and other films...
...During his confinement, his thinking changed, and by the end of four months, the knowledge that he had sacrificed himself for Stalin was intolerable to him...
...Eddie was proud of it to his last breath...
...Adrian Scott worked with him on it...
...It hurt him...
...He refused to join those who, in refusing to testify, demonstrated their belief that, as he put it, "one must allow a seditious Party to destroy one's country rather than expose the men or women who are the Party...
...Scott said, had "contempt for informers...
...The first 10, Dmytryk included, made such a free-for-all of the hearing that they landed in jail for contempt of Congress...
...So he went back to the committee and described the Stalinist conspiracy as he knew it...
...In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee—spurred by really shocking evidence of Soviet spy activity in the film community supplied to the committee by the FBI—subpoenaed 19 prominent cinema Stalinists to testify in Washington...
...But Eddie knew it back then—knew he himself had been used by Stalin's spies—and did something about it...
...Her husband, Mrs...
...The L.A...
...paper led with a comment by Joan Scott, widow of Adrian Scott, a faithful leftist among the Ten and once Edward Dmytryk's creative partner...
...I hope [Dmytryk] had a bad life...
...Had the Communist party been what it claimed to be—a movement to rescue humanity from injustice—Eddie Dmytryk would have been loyal to it to the end...
...The difference between him and Scott was that Eddie hated most of all the agents of the Soviet secret police who informed to Moscow on anti-Communist liberals...
...But the Times was kinder than its Southern California counterpart...
...Eddie, too, hated informers...
...Ever the house organ for the reigning orthodoxies in Filmland, the Los Angeles Times put a knife in the dead man's back...
...When Dmytryk died July 1, at 90, the New York Times quoted this remark without apparent irony...
...He went on, "That's what I call the 'Mafia Syndrome,' and I find no shame or indignity in rejecting it...
...You know, Steve," he told me, "I want to like your book, but it's rough going for me...
...I care about movies...
...Dmytryk was not just a member of the Hollywood Ten but the only one among them to publicly break with Stalinism...
...But he had made great pictures, like Where Love Has Gone (1964), with Bette Davis and Susan Hayward...
...This is now public knowledge, thanks to the Venona intercepts of secret KGB communications published by the National Security Agency in the last three years...
...One might have thought Eddie Dmytryk wouldn't have cared about such things, because Eddie—whom I had the honor of knowing at the end of his life—was a fighter...
...Dmytryk, who had stood up for the party even though no longer a member, pulled six months in a federal prison camp at Mill Point, W. Va...
...In other words, naming names is a greater crime than subversion...
...I wanted out of my real imprisonment," he later wrote, "my association with the Hollywood Ten and my publicly perceived ties with the Communist Party...
...He was also brutally honest...
...Neither regretted a day in Stalin's service...
...He made movies about tests of will between men—the kind of pictures liberals were supposed to love, exposing the abuses of power that can occur even in worthy institutions...
Vol. 4 • July 1999 • No. 41
