Director Edward Dmytryk (1909-1999) made 53 movies during his long career, all dealing in some way with the American experience. He is, however, as well known as one of the Hollywood Ten as much as a noted film director who has been called the father of film noir. This paper will examine the films of Dmytryk, focusing on the 1945 ôCornered,ö with the purpose of determining whether DmytrykÆs films were used to send a ômessage,ö particularly one that furthered the ideology of Communism.
Movies are grounded in myth and as such offer great potential ôfor alteration of reality, which is why both Lenin and Stalin considered it the most important of all art formsö (Billingsley, Commie Dearest). By the mid-1930s, the Communist Party turned to the world of culture as a means of propagating its views, and Hollywood became a natural milieu for propaganda. The American branch of the Communist Party, based in New York, wanted to use art as a weapon, encouraging ôwriters, directors, and even actors to portray businessmen and clergy in the worst possible light, urging writers to smuggle anti-capitalist ideas subliminally into their dialogueö and actors to portray the ruling class ôas decadent and parasiticö (Billingsley, Commie Dearest). Both the New York and Hollywood branches of the Communist Party attempted to have agitprop scripts made into movies. ôCorneredö is an example of how this process worked.
To understand DmytrykÆs viewpoint, a brief history of
his involvement with the Communist Party and HUAC (House
Un-American Activities Committee) is material. The post
World War II attack on Hollywood began in 1945, and
ôHollywood itself was deeply divided on the issueö (Sklar
256). As cited in the report ôInfiltration in the United
States,ö Communists were allegedly trying to get control of
the entertainment industry, and they dominated the Screen
Writers Guild. Assuming this was true, H...