The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (117 page)

I once argued with an Ivy League dean about whether nuclear weapons or television had most seriously affected the world since 1945. The weapons, said the dean, because of the Damocles danger in the air. Television, I said, an attack that has been carried on “safely,” day after day.

So here is the question: can film stay a mass medium—or should it? Do we face a time when movies resemble theatre or the novel? Must we give up the hope of films that reach “everyone”? Can great filmmakers still redeem the hope? Or was it, simply, an historical curiosity that for a few decades (or a few movies) the hope was alive?

Richard Dix
(Ernest Brimmer) (1894–1949), b. St. Paul, Minnesota
Although Dix’s greatest popular success was a sound film,
Cimarron
(31, Wesley Ruggles), he is a striking example of a major star of silents who clung to more than fifteen years of sound B pictures, unable or unwilling to retire. He was big and gruff and very masculine, even if sometimes he seemed too heavy. A medical student, he gave up that career for the theatre and, by 1921, was in movies:
Not Guilty
(21, Sidney Franklin);
Poverty of Riches
(21, Reginald Barker);
The Sin Flood
(22, Frank Lloyd);
Yellow Men and Gold
(22, Irvin V. Willat);
Fools First
(22, Marshall Neilan); and
The Bonded Woman
(22, Phil Rosen). After going to England to make
The Christian
(23, Maurice Tourneur), he was put under contract by Paramount as a replacement for Wallace Reid. He stayed with that studio until 1929, very successful if seldom in their most notable films:
Racing Hearts
(23, Paul Powell);
The Woman with Four Faces
(23, Herbert Brenon);
To the Last Man
(23, Victor Fleming);
The Call of the Canyon
(23, Fleming); in the modern section of
The Ten Commandments
(23, Cecil B. De Mille);
The Stranger
(24, Joseph Henabery);
Sinners in Heaven
(24, Alan Crosland);
Unguarded Women
(24, Crosland);
Too Many Kisses
(25, Paul Sloane);
Men and Women
(25, William De Mille);
Lucky Devil
(25, Frank Tuttle); and
The Vanishing American
(25, George B. Seitz). He was in a handful of Gregory La Cava’s films:
Womanhandled
(25);
Let’s Get Married
(26);
Say It Again
(26);
Paradise for Two
(27); and
The Gay Defender
(27). But by the late 1920s, Dix and Paramount were already on bad terms, partly because he preferred to work in New York:
Knockout Reilly
(27, Malcolm St. Clair);
Man Power
(27, Clarence Badger);
Sporting Goods
(28, St. Clair);
Easy Come, Easy Go
(28, Tuttle);
Redskin
(29, Victor Schertzinger); and
Nothing But the Truth
(29, Schertzinger). He moved on to RKO and thrived briefly:
Seven Keys to Baldpate
(29, Barker);
Lovin’ the Ladies
(30, Melville Brown);
Shooting Straight
(30, George Archainbaud); Edna Ferber’s adventurer in
Cimarron; Young Donovan’s Kid
(31, Fred Niblo);
The Public Defender
(31, J. Walter Ruben);
The Lost Squadron
(32, Archainbaud);
The Roar of the Dragon
(32, Ruggles);
Hell’s Highway
(32, Rowland Brown); and
The Conquerors
(32, William Wellman). Only rarely thereafter did he have lead parts or big films:
The Great Jasper
(33, J. Walter Ruben);
Stingaree
(34, Wellman);
The Arizonian
(35, Charles Vidor);
The Tunnel
(35, Maurice Elvey) in Britain;
Blind Alley
(38, Vidor);
Here I Am a Stranger
(39, Roy del Ruth);
Reno
(39, John Farrow);
Badlands of Dakota
(41, Alfred E. Green);
American Empire
(42, William McGann); and
The Ghost Ship
(43, Mark Robson).

At the end of his career, he played the title role in a series of cheap thrillers, made by William Castle, and based on the radio character:
The Whistler
(44);
The Mark of the Whistler
(44); then the
Power
(45),
Voice
(45); and
Secret of the Whistler
(46). His last film was
The Thirteenth Hour
(47, William Clemens).

Edward Dmytryk
, (1908–99) b. Grand Forks, Canada
1935:
The Hawk
. 1939:
Television Spy
. 1940:
Emergency Squad; Mystery Sea Raider; Golden Gloves; Her First Romance
. 1941:
The Devil Commands; Under Age; Sweetheart of the Campus; The Blonde from Singapore; Confessions of Boston Blackie; Secrets of the Lone Wolf
. 1942:
Seven Miles from Alcatraz; Counter Espionage
. 1943:
The Falcon Strikes Back; Hitler’s Children; Captive Wild Woman; Behind the Rising Sun; Tender Comrade
. 1945:
Murder My Sweet/Farewell My Lovely; Back to Bataan; Cornered
. 1946:
Till the End of Time
. 1947:
Crossfire; So Well Remembered
. 1949:
Give Us This Day
. 1950:
Obsession/The Hidden Room
. 1952:
Mutiny; The Sniper; Eight Iron Men
. 1953:
The Juggler
. 1954:
The Caine Mutiny; Broken Lance; The End of the Affair
. 1955:
Soldier of Fortune; The Left Hand of
God
. 1956:
The Mountain
. 1957:
Raintree County
. 1958:
The Young Lions
. 1959:
Warlock; The Blue Angel
. 1962:
Walk on the Wild Side; The Reluctant Saint
. 1964:
The Carpetbaggers; Where Love Has Gone
. 1965:
Mirage
. 1966:
Alvarez Kelly
. 1968:
The Battle for Anzio; Shalako
. 1972:
Bluebeard
. 1975:
The “Human” Factor
.

The 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 meaty 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 film’s 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, Dmytryk taught at USC and wrote several books on filmmaking, most notably
On Directing
.

Andrew Dominik
, b. Wellington, New Zealand, 1967
2000:
Chopper
. 2007:
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
.

Dominik was trained at the Swinburne Film School (in Melbourne) and not long after he graduated from there he made
Chopper
, a biopic of a real-life Australian killer (played with relish by Eric Bana).
Chopper
was violent, disturbing but full of talent. Fade out/fade in … after a seven-year interlude, the quite haunting
The Assassination of Jesse James …
, a cool, if not deadpan study of fame in the context of the James story. It should be said that Dominik’s 160-minute film did not always surpass or match Sam Fuller’s
I Shot Jesse James
(49), which is 81 minutes, with John Ireland as Bob Ford. But the Fuller film is amazing—they would make a great double bill.

Dominik’s James film did no business, and there are signs that he has trouble putting projects together. For several years he was adapting Jim Thompson’s
The Killer Inside Me
, and then that project was reassigned to Michael Winterbottom. As for now, Dominik has said he would like to make Cormac McCarthy’s
Cities of the Plain
. So it’s all the more worthwhile to study the nearly abstract ironies of
Assassination
. If Dominik is able to develop, he may have great films to come. If he is thwarted, he may be a man with tormenting dreams—like Robert Ford.

Robert Donat
(1905–58), b. Manchester, England
The son of a Pole, in twenty-five years as a film actor, Donat made only nineteen pictures. Illustrious as his record is, the list of parts he had to decline—either because of his chronic asthma, or because of a more profound tentativeness, itself at the root of his stammer and nervous breathlessness—is even more striking: it includes Peter Ibbetson, Chopin, Lawrence of Arabia, Romeo, Mr. Darcy, the Chorus in
Henry V
, and the James Stewart part in
No Highway
. By the end of the war, illness had seriously restricted Donat; but in the late 1930s he might have become a major international star, more masculine than Leslie Howard, more restrained than Olivier. He acted then with a sense of contained riches that is rare in English stage-trained actors. Donat had a great quality: that he could draw us further into himself by his very modesty.

Elocution lessons to conquer his stammer led Donat toward the stage and in his late teens he joined Sir Frank Benson’s company. By the early 1930s he was earning a name in London and in 1932 he made his screen debut for Korda in
Men of Tomorrow
(Leontine Sagan). Korda gave him a few more parts
—That Night in London
(32, Rowland V. Lee) and
Cash
(33, Zoltan Korda)—before he won special attention as Culpeper in
The Private
Life of Henry VIII
(33, A. Korda). At this, Hollywood redoubled earlier efforts to hire him and Donat went to America to play
The Count of Monte Cristo
(34, Lee). Back in England, he was a very cool Richard Hannay in Hitchcock’s
The Thirty-nine Steps
(35), and in the dual role in
The Ghost Goes West
(36, René Clair). At this stage, there was a special romantic aura about Donat, enhanced by the diffident way he moved from one prestige project to another. He followed with a silly but amusing Russian revolution confrontation with Marlene Dietrich in
Knight Without Armour
(37, Jacques Feyder), a good performance as the young doctor in
The Citadel
(38, King Vidor), and an Oscar in the prewar weepie,
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
(39, Sam Wood).

Rather than stay in America during the war, Donat returned to London to work on the stage and in 1942 made
The Young Mr. Pitt
(Carol Reed). Next year he was in
The Adventures of Tartu
(Harold S. Bucquet), and in 1945 he was with Deborah Kerr in
Perfect Strangers
(A. Korda). His career now was invaded by doubts and obstacles, and his asthma was a perpetual handicap. In 1947 he appeared briefly as Parnell in
Captain Boycott
(Frank Launder), and he followed this with his last serious bout of film work:
The Winslow Boy
(48, Anthony Asquith);
The Cure for Love
(49, which he directed himself); as Friese-Greene in the Festival of Britain project,
The Magic Box
(51, John Boulting).

He was a harrowed man, his face drawn and the superb voice gruff. When, in 1955, he appeared in the play
Murder in the Cathedral
, oxygen cylinders were maintained off-stage. Only two more films were to come:
Lease of Life
(54, Charles Frend) and, in 1958, the mandarin in
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
(Mark Robson). That part is startlingly raw amid so much sentiment: a dying man as he acted, his presence seems to awe the rest of the film into respect.

Stanley Donen
, b. Columbia, South Carolina, 1924
1949:
On the Town
(codirected with Gene Kelly). 1951:
Royal Wedding/Wedding Bells; Love Is Better Than Ever
. 1952:
Singin’ in the Rain
(codirected with Kelly);
Fearless Fagan
. 1953:
Give a Girl a Break
. 1954:
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Deep in My Heart
. 1955:
It’s Always Fair Weather
(codirected with Kelly). 1957:
Funny Face; The Pajama Game
(codirected with George Abbott);
Kiss Them for Me
. 1958:
Indiscreet; Damn Yankees/ What Lola Wants
(codirected with Abbott). 1959:
Once More, With Feeling
. 1960:
Surprise Package; The Grass Is Greener
. 1963:
Charade
. 1966:
Arabesque
. 1967:
Two for the Road
. 1968:
Bedazzled
. 1969:
Staircase
. 1974:
The Little Prince
. 1975:
Lucky Lady
. 1978:
Movie Movie
. 1980:
Saturn 3
. 1984:
Blame It On Rio
.