Christ in Concrete
Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the Chicago Reader

In some respects this is Edward Dmytryk’s best film, but sadly it’s also his least known. After he was blacklisted in Hollywood, and before he recanted and named names for the HUAC, Dmytryk went to England to direct this powerful 1949 story of an Italian bricklayer and his immigrant family struggling in New York during the Depression. Budgetary restrictions account for some awkwardness, yet this is a moving and durable work. Screenwriter Ben Barzman (another victim of the blacklist) adapted a novel by Pietro di Donato; coproducer Rod E. Geiger was the enterprising American who also brought Rossellini’s Open City to the U.S. With Sam Wanamaker, Lea Padovani (Orson Welles’s original choice for Desdemona in his Othello), Kathleen Ryan, and Charles Goldner. Also known as Give Us This Day and Salt to the Devil.

Well, you did say yourself Tony that this was Dmytryk’s best film after you saw it! Looks like great minds think alike.

Mr. Yablonsky’s contributions here are as always most enlightening.

The movie which is decidedly secular, ends just after the death of Geremio, with Annunziatio receiving insurance compensation. The screenplay is essentially agnostic, with the Church and religious belief absent. By the same token, the film is also not political propaganda, with the story focused on personal webs of affiliation and not organised action. The suffering of the depression and inequality are elemental and integral to the story, but melodrama not polemics carries the narrative. Indeed Dmytryk’s imagery is more subtle than the novel’s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Dmytryk

Work, Hollywood Ten, HUAC
His best known films from the pre-McCarthy period of his career were film noirs Crossfire, for which he received a Best Director Oscar nomination, and Murder, My Sweet, the latter an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely.

Summoned to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), he refused to cooperate and was sent to jail. After spending several months behind bars, Dmytryk made the decision to testify again, and give the names of his fellow members in the American Communist Party as the HUAC had demanded. On April 25, 1951, Dmytryk appeared before HUAC for the second time, answering all questions. He spoke of his own Party past, a very brief membership in 1945, including the naming of twenty-six former members of left-wing groups. He explained how John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott, Albert Maltz and others had pressured him to include communist propaganda in his films. His testimony damaged several court cases that others of the so-called “Hollywood 10″ had filed.

For a time, Dmytryk moved to England, and Stanley Kramer hired him to direct a trio of low-budget films before handing Dmytryk The Caine Mutiny. He made films for major studios Columbia, 20th Century Fox, MGM and Paramount Pictures, including, among others, Raintree County, The Left Hand of God, The Young Lions, a remake of the Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel, and The Carpetbaggers.

These films were made with expensive stars of the calibre of Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Gene Tierney, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, but apart from the memorable Western Warlock (1959), which he also produced, his work had lost much of the emotional urgency and psychological thrust represented by his early film noir Crossfire.

After his film career tapered off in the 1970s, he entered academia and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of Southern California. He wrote several books on the art of filmmaking (such as “On Film Editing”) and lectured at various colleges and theaters, such as the Orson Welles Cinema. Dmytryk died in 1999, aged 90.

Fred L. Gardaphe, in his introduction to Christ in Concrete, comments that DiDonato “…points to the failure of American Catholicism as a force that controls and subdues the immigrants’ reactions to the injustices of the capitalist system that exploits as it maims and kills the Italian immigrant” (xvi). Religion, rather than inciting the immigrants to object to injustice, instead encourages them to forbear and accept fate while waiting patiently for their rewards in the next world.

The southern brand of Italian Catholicism is transplanted here as is indicated with the interview with the cripple. This brand is an alloy of the elements of paganism as well. Note the quote:

This seemingly incongruous act is, however, actually typical of the southern Italian brand of Catholicism. Mangione and Morreale describe this Catholicism as “…based on awe, fear, and reverence for the supernatural, ‘a fusion of Christian and pre-Christian elements of animism, polytheism, and sorcery along with the sacraments prescribed by the Church’” (
This is indicative of the mixture made by the indigenous cultural mix of catholicism and paganism.

My family spent Easter with my 96yo father at his nursing home. I sat with him in the garden on a beautifully mild Autumn afternoon. It was bitter-sweet. He has slowed down a lot over past few months, and I missed my late mother. A 101yo still agile resident lady passed by, and Dad and I spoke about her age. He said when you reach 100 you should start life anew! Easter: redemption and renewal.

And what a timely post here with Edward Dmytryk’s CHRIST IN CONCRETE, a relatively obscure film that I have owned on DVD for years. It has since gone out of print. I am close to your summary judgement, but perhaps I have a few quibbles with it’s occasional “stiltedness.” But it most certainly is a ‘powerful denunciation of capitalism’ as you rightly proclaim, and your celebration of it’s strongest elements are dead-on. I enjoyed the quote from Variety and Matthew Kennedy, the latter of whom brought out some superlative films that followed in its technical prowess.

I appreciate the infectious enthusiasm that you have informed on this film, and I plan to watch it again later this week, as I’m off from school.

(Because I sometimes purchase films on vhs, from ebay or amazon.com as a last resort…especially,when the film is Out of Print or will never be released on dvd.)
The cinematography by C.M. Pennington-Richards, do look great!..especially, the 1st and 3rd photographs, but I have to admit that I’am not familiar with him and his work on film yet.
(But, I’am quite sure that other true film noir “aficionados” have mentioned his (C.M. Pennington-Richards,) name in my presence.)
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“The Typo Princess” Strikes Again!
Hi! Tony,
G’Day, or is it G’Night, and a very Happy Easter, to you, and your family…or a “happy springtime,” if you, and your family don’t celebrate the Easter holiday(s).

Take care!
Dcd

Dcd