EDWARD DMYTRYK HAD IT RIGHT. “When I die,” he said, “I know the obits will first read, ‘one of Hollywood’s Unfriendly Ten,’ not director of The Caine Mutiny, The Young Lions, Raintree County, and other films.” When Dmytryk died July 1, at 90, the New York Times quoted this remark without apparent irony. But the Times was kinder than its Southern California counterpart. Ever the house organ for the reigning orthodoxies in Filmland, the Los Angeles Times put a knife in the dead man’s back. Dmytryk was not just a member of the Hollywood Ten but the only one among them to publicly break with Stalinism. 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. Her husband, Mrs. Scott said, had “contempt for informers. I hope [Dmytryk] had a bad life.”
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. 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. 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.
Eddie, too, hated informers. 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. These agents included members of the Hollywood Ten, as well as Bertolt Brecht and other luminaries of Hollywood’s “Little Kremlin.” 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. But Eddie knew it back then — knew he himself had been used by Stalin’s spies — and did something about it.
For most readers today, the Hollywood Ten is a phrase without much context, so it’s worth rehearsing the history. 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. All 19 were activists. The first 10, Dmytryk included, made such a free-for-all of the hearing that they landed in jail for contempt of Congress.
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. 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. “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.”
So he went back to the committee and described the Stalinist conspiracy as he knew it. 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. In other words, naming names is a greater crime than subversion.” He went on, “That’s what I call the ‘Mafia Syndrome,’ and I find no shame or indignity in rejecting it.”
Because Dmytryk saw the Communists for the gangsters they were, a generation before this was politically acceptable, he suffered. He was an object of psychological assault for years, everywhere from academic seminars to Tinseltown nightclubs. Those who remained faithful to the cult of Joseph Vissarionovich, meanwhile, continued to style themselves martyrs for the freedom of the mind.
It hurt him. Who wouldn’t it hurt? But he had made great pictures, like Where Love Has Gone (1964), with Bette Davis and Susan Hayward. 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. 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. Adrian Scott worked with him on it. Eddie was proud of it to his last breath.
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. I had known two others of the Hollywood Ten, Alvah Bessie and Lester Cole, and found them extraordinarily unappealing. Neither regretted a day in Stalin’s service. Dmytryk was the opposite: a real mentor.
He was also brutally honest. “You know, Steve,” he told me, “I want to like your book, but it’s rough going for me. I care about movies. I don’t much care about all these Beatnik poets and their weird behavior.”
From the maker of The Caine Mutiny, it was a comment to be prized.
Stephen Schwartz is writing a book on the Kosovo war.
