Background
Edward Dmytryk was born on 4 September 1908 in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada. He was a son of Ukrainian parents.
Edward Dmytryk was born on 4 September 1908 in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada. He was a son of Ukrainian parents.
Dmytryk entered the film industry at the age of fifteen. He rose from assistant to full editor and worked in that capacity throughout the 1930s: Only Saps Work (30, Cyril Gardner and Edwin Knopf); Million Dollar Legs (32, Edward Cline); Belle of the Nineties (34, Leo McCarey); Ruggles of Red Gap (35, McCarey); and Zaza (39, George Cukor). As a director he served a long apprenticeship in B pictures at Columbia and RKO—including two good horror movies, The Devil Commands and Captive Wild Woman.
Farewell My Lovely was his turning point—as it was for actor Dick Powell—and it established Dmytryk as a director of low-key thrillers: Till the End of Time and Crossfire, although less striking than some reports suggest, are still his best work. In the first postwar year, he was reckoned as one of the most promising young directors.
Then, in 1947, Dmytryk was one of the ten called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He went to England for three pictures but returned to a fine, six months' imprisonment, and an eventual recantation for the Committee. By 1951 he was cleared, and he worked on some of Stanley Kramer’s low-budget pictures at Columbia. The Sniper is one of the best of a bad bunch, but commercially Dmytryk was lucky enough to land the last and best financed of the series, its single success: The Caine Mutiny. That proved him as a director of expensive, dramatic material. Sadly, it also showed his characteristic waste of stories and leading actors. For the next ten years Dmytryk made one dud after another, mostly at Fox, polishing meanings until they were blunt and usually passing on his own solemnity to his players. Brando, Clift, Gable, Tracy, Widmark, and Bogart all passed through his wringer, but worst of all was the misuse of Stanwyck, Anne Baxter, Capucine, and Jane Fonda in such potentially enjoyable nonsense as Walk on the Wild Side. Against all reason, Dmytryk seemed more interested in the films putative male star, Laurence Harvey, and allowed Saul Bass and a cat to walk away with the picture. After that he worked less often but no more imaginatively. Indeed, there might be a case for a committee to investigate filmmakers capable of rendering the Bluebeard story dull.
In the eighties, Dmvtryk taught at USC and wrote several books on filmmaking, most notably On Directing.