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4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent memoir of the Hollywood witch hunts, 30 Jan 2002
By A Customer
On September 23, 1947, Dmytryk, director of such films as 'Murder My Sweet', 'Crossfire' and 'Cornered' received a subpoena to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUAC). It was, he says, a moment his "whole life changed". Dmytryk had, in fact, been a member of the American Communist Party, although he joined almost on a whim, and was hardly an active one. As one of those ten who stood up against the intimidation, the director was eventually cited for contempt of Congress an event which, he says "led to four years of hell" and his appearance on the Hollywood blacklist. Dmytryk was promptly fired by RKO and spent three years in England. He then returned to the US to serve a six month jail sentence, during which he recanted, testifying against several of his former colleagues and attempted to pick up his career.'Odd Man Out' is Dmytryk's account of his life before and after the Washington witch hunts. An attractive aspect about this book, subtitled 'A Memoir of The Hollywood Ten', is his candidness both about his reasons for making such an allegiance, and his naivety in dealing with the covert manipulations of the party hierarchy. Meetings were often secretive, rescheduled at the last minute to forestall FBI 'tails' and, at the height of persecution, were held in bathrooms with the faucet and taps running to evade eavesdropping. For those interested in the noir style and its exponents, the irony of such events, and of the director's eventual spell in jail, will not be lost. Written many years after events towards the end of Dmytryk's life (he died in 1999), 'Odd Man Out' takes advantage of hindsight and cool reflection to produce a balanced and self-critical assessment of a painful period. Besides describing the events that engulfed him, the director throws in interesting sidelights on the films he worked on, although for more details one is better off turning to his memoirs proper: 'It's a Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living' (1979), to which this current book can be seen as a complement. His attempts at rehabilitation and ensuing successes with such films as 'The Caine Mutiny' round off a personal account which is recommendable to genre fans as well as film students generally. As befits a man who later became a teacher, Dmytryk writes well, and his book has several interesting pages of reproduced documents and photographs.
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