SCFZ

Polling the films of Edward Dmytryk

The rules:

- your list can include no more than half* of the Dmytryk films you've seen, up to a maximum of 8. So if you've seen 6 films, you can vote for 3, and if you've seen 20, you can vote for up to 8.

* If you've seen an odd number, you can round up when deciding the length of your ballot -- e.g if you've seen 7, you can vote for 4, and if you've seen 15, you can vote for the maximum of 8.

- i'll assume ballots are ranked unless you tell me otherwise. unranked ballots are fine.

- deadline for ballots: next Friday, in seven days, whatever day that is

umbugbene created an index on letterboxd of all of our previous polls here: letterboxd.com/umbugbene/list/index-of-all-scfz-director-polls/

Cornered
Murder, My Sweet
Crossfire
Warlock
The Sniper
The Caine Mutiny

seen 11

4.

Warlock
The Sniper

Walk on the Wild Side
Murder My Sweet
The Mirage
Raintree County
Caine Mutiny
Warlock
Cross Fire
Broken Lance

That last slot was tough, wanted to go with Young Lions for Brando and Clift, but frickin' Dean Martin is the third wheel. I'll never understand his stardom.

So far, 2 masterpieces, one dud:

01. Shalako (1968)
02. Broken Lance (1954)

Dmytryk seen: 3

need to watch more Dmytryk, obviously.

seen 8

CHRIST IN CONRCRETE!!! (aka GIVE US THIS DAY)
walk on the wild side
murder my sweet
the sniper

Only seen 5:

Warlock
The Caine Mutiny

greg x wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 11:57 am

That last slot was tough, wanted to go with Young Lions for Brando and Clift, but frickin' Dean Martin is the third wheel. I'll never understand his stardom.

I`m sure Dean Martin was mafia singer/actor in Godfather, not Sinatra.

I saw 22.
My choice:
Murder, My Sweet
Crossfire
Warlock
Raintree County
The Young Lions
Mirage
Shalako

1. Crossfire
2. Murder, My Sweet
3. Cornered

I've seen 9 by Dmytryk, but don't remember much about several. I tend to agree with Daniel Mainwaring's opinion in the interview in Film Noir Reader 3, in which he credits "real strict supervision" for the quality of Dmytryk's early films (he also admits he hated Dmytryk). Murder, My Sweet was one of the movies responsible for my love of movies and of film noir, so it was shocking to me that the same person could have directed The Left Hand of God. I feel the same way about Robert Wise, but not as strongly.

murder my sweet
sniper
warlock
give us this day
the broken lance

seen 9

1. Warlock
2. The Caine Mutiny
3. Cornered
4. Crossfire
5. The Hidden Room

so dmytryk made roughly 20 films in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and none of those got a single vote, and then he makes the film that is the clear #1 in our poll. so he made a string of duds and then seemingly out of nowhere his best film, per scfz balloting. dmytryk was twice nominated for best pic, and those films finished #3 and #8 in our poll (and crossfire at #3 also won a prize at cannes). and i never hear much about later dmytryk films (post-warlock or so) but a lot of them got some support in this poll, so maybe i'll try to watch one or two more of those:


results
1. Murder, My Sweet (1944) — 22 pts
2. Warlock (1959) — 18 pts
3. Crossfire (1947) — 12.5 pts
4. Cornered (1945) — 9 pts
5. Walk on the Wild Side (1962) — 8 pts
6. The Sniper (1952) — 7 pts
7. Give Us This Day (1949) — 6 pts
8. The Caine Mutiny (1954) — 5.5 pts
9. Raintree County (1957) — 4 pts
10. Mirage (1965) — 3.5 pts
11. Shalako (1968) — 2.3 pts
11. Broken Lance (1954) — 2.3 pts
13. The Hidden Room (1949) — 1 pt
13. The Young Lions (1958) — 1 pt

Those 30s and 40s films haven't been as readily available to view as the others, for the same reasons so many movies from that era are basically forgotten or ignored, few "stars" and low budgets. The history of mass popularity film making is as much the history of money as anything else. People like movies where money is visible basically, where they can see what the ludicrous amounts of dough went for, big names, special effects/production design, and all the craftwork big studio budgets provide. That's the main secret of US filmmaking success worldwide, money is more important than art.

is there an auteurist case to be made for dmytryk? if i recall he does not even get a mention in sarris big american cinema book, and the only mention of him i can find in my older film books is manny farber ripping apart tender comrade.

Not a traditional one, I've seen nothing but shredding of his films from old school auteurists or auteurist-adjacent critics. But the post-auteurist auteurists run by different sets of criteria that should be more forgiving to dmytryk, so I would imagine there is some attempts made somewhere to build him up.

up at letterbox

https://letterboxd.com/fliptrotsky/list ... -poll-296/

nrh wrote: ↑Thu Nov 18, 2021 4:21 pm is there an auteurist case to be made for dmytryk? if i recall he does not even get a mention in sarris big american cinema book, and the only mention of him i can find in my older film books is manny farber ripping apart tender comrade.

I just picked up an old German cinema magazine yesterday, totally by chance (it was from 1998, I think) and the central piece of the whole magazine was a Dmytryk appreciation, where the German critic writes that Dmytryk was mentioned in one breath as one of the great american directors by US(!) critics during the 1950s, alongside names like Wyler, Hitchcock et al. and that he seems totally and utterly forgotten right now (so 23 years ago). He also speculated that the "erasure" of Dmytryk from critical talk might have to do with him naming "communists" under HUAC.

I just skimmed the piece, need to read it yet, but it seems not much has changed since then?

Yah, but the auteurists went after Wyler too, so it wasn't just the HUAC crowd that got booted from the "pantheon".

I can't find much evidence that Dmytryk was considered one of the great American directors by US critics in the '50s. Obviously the auteurists didn't much care for him, but they were somewhat oppositional to mainstream film criticism at this time, so that doesn't rule it out. But I also can't find much praise from Bosley Crowther and he only had two nominations for Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle, winning neither. I expect he was generally considered something like the Ron Howard of his day.

greg x wrote: ↑Wed Nov 24, 2021 2:50 pm Yah, but the auteurists went after Wyler too, so it wasn't just the HUAC crowd that got booted from the "pantheon".

What do you mean? Wyler hasn't an auteurist consensus for like one of the 10 best US directors of all time?
I'm really asking for serious, cause I thought that was kinda the consensus...

Evelyn Library P.I. wrote: ↑Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:34 pm But I also can't find much praise from Bosley Crowther and he only had two nominations for Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle, winning neither. I expect he was generally considered something like the Ron Howard of his day.

Ron Howard has nominations for Best Director from... wait, doesn't he even have an Oscar?
I always forget Howard is/used to be critically acclaimed, so to speak.

It's really mind-blowing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_a ... Ron_Howard

No, Wyler wasn't really well regarded by the post-Cahiers crowd of "serious" critics, probably in part because his movies were so popular among reviewer type mass market writers and audiences. Farber called it white elephant art, and that kinda encapsulates the general tone from the crowd that was busy re-evaluating crime thrillers from post WWII and turning them into "noirs" and celebrating termite art auteurs. By the time Ebert became the head of the popular critic class, much of that had subsided outside "art film" circles I guess, but then that isn't exactly the same kind of respect as it is a headlong love of commercial cinema without much meaningful differentiation and that where I think the current generation started from and is still figuring out how to replace/react to, coming at the question from a lot of different angles (which is a broadly a good thing, even if often still kind of a mess at times individually)

with wyler i'd also say there has been a much healthier interest in melodrama in the last decade or two, which flatters wyler's best movies. i think ben-hur did a lot of damage to his reputation, and the ubiquity of that movie kind of fading in the culture has made it a lot easier to approach him.

Yeah, Ben Hur and Funny Girl probably didn't help, but I think it's as much the difficulty in a kind of intellectual class assessment of art, where what's perceived as, horrors, middle class art is hit from both the "arthouse" interested intelligentsia and the mass market genre loving crowd, and Wyler falls pretty firmly in that middle class section, just one of the best of them where there is obviously a lot of crap too, but that's true of the "upper" and "lower" class films as well. Wyler did tend to at least get grudging respect for that part at least, if not love from the "arthouse" group.

I mean this is still an issue, with the genre critics currently ascendant and the arthouse gang more just theoretically respected by largely ignored save for moments of crossover success like Parasite or whatever. Movies are tough that way because they aren't individual works, but take a considerable investment of cash and personnel to get made, making response trickier to align with class/politcal/art/entertainment interests.