Cinema Concept & Practice

In this unique study of the process of filmmaking, director Edward Dmytryk blends abstract film theory and the practical realities of feature film production to provide an artful and elegant analysis of the conceptual foundations of filmmaking and film studies. Dmytryk explores the technical principles underlying the craft of filmmaking and how their use is effective in developing the viewer’s involvement in the cinematic narrative. Originally published in 1988, this reissue of Dmytryk’s classic book includes a new critical introduction by Joe McElhaney.

Edward Dmytryk (1908–1999) was an Oscar-nominated American filmmaker, educator, and writer. Over an acclaimed forty-year filmmak - ing career, Dmytryk directed over fifty award-winning films, including Crossfire (1947), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Raintree County (1957), and The Young Lions (1958). Entering academia in the 1970s, Dmytryk lectured on both film and directing, first at the University of Texas at Austin and later at the University of Southern California. He is the author of several classic books on the art of filmmaking, including On Film Editing, On Screen Directing, On Screen Writing, On Screen Acting, and Cinema: Concept & Practice, all published by Focal Press/Routledge.

Joe McElhaney (contributor) is the author of The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (2006) and Albert Maysles (2009), and the editor of Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (2009) and A Companion to Fritz Lang (2015). His numerous publications in major film journals and edited volumes include essays on the work of Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Roman Polanski, Chris Marker, and R.W. Fassbinder. He is Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

i Publisher’s Note

In the 1980s, Focal Press published five books on the art of filmmaking by legendary film director Edward Dmytryk (1908–1999), Oscar- nominated director of Crossfire, The Caine Mutiny, and The Young Lions, among many other films. Together, these five titles comprise a masterclass with one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed, storied, and controversial filmmakers. With most of these books long out of print, Focal Press/Routledge is pleased to reissue these classic titles with all new supplemental material for current day readers. Each book includes a new introduction, as well as chapter notes including exercises, discussion questions, and more. Mick Hurbis-Cherrier serves as coordinator for the series, which includes the following titles, all available from Focal Press/Routledge:

Cinema: Concept & Practice (originally published 1988, with new material by Joe McElhaney): On Film Editing (originally published 1984, with new material by Andrew Lund) On Screen Acting (with Jean Porter Dmytryk, originally published 1984, with new material by Paul Thompson) On Screen Directing (originally published 1984, with new material by Bette Gordon and Eric Mendelsohn) On Screen Writing (originally published 1985, with new material by Mick Hurbis-Cherrier)

We are grateful to the estate of Edward Dmytryk and Jean Porter Dmytryk, especially to Rebecca Dmytryk, for their assistance in bringing these important books back into print.

Focal Press/Routledge June 2018 Cinema Concept & Practice

EDWARD DMYTRYK Introduction by Joe McElhaney

iii This edition published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Originally published by Focal Press 1988 1988 text © Edward Dmytryk 2019 material © Joe McElhaney The right of Edward Dmytryk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dmytryk, Edward, author. | McElhaney, Joe, 1957– writer of introduction. Title: Cinema : concept & practice / Edward Dmytryk ; introduction by Joe McElhaney. Description: New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. | “Originally published by Focal Press 1988.” | Includes filmography and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018028270| ISBN 9781138584266 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138584273 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429506123 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Philosophy. Classification: LCC PN1995 .D54 2019 | DDC 791.4301—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028270

ISBN: 978-1-138-58426-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-58427-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50612-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Times by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK Contents

Edward Dmytryk: A Short Biography vii Introduction by Joe McElhaney xvii

1 The Collective Noun 1 2 The Indispensible Viewer 11 3 You’d Better Believe It 19 4 The Power of the Set-Up 33 5 Invisibility 45 6 Moving and Molding 53 7 Look at Him, Look at Her 61 8 The Art of Separation 71 9 Rules and Rule Breaking 79 10 The Modification of Reality 87 11 Symbols, Metaphors, and Messages 97 12 Auteurs, Actors, and Metaphors 107 13 Time and Illusion 115 14 The Force of Filmic Reality 127 15 About a Forgotten Art 137

Postscript 147 Filmography of Edward Dmytryk 149 Index 151

v

Edward Dmytryk A Short Biography

Within the industry and art form known as the cinema, the life of Edward Dmytryk is one of multiple journeys. Born September 4, 1908 in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Dmytryk was the second of four sons of Polish-Ukrainian immigrants. In 1915, the family moved to a small town in Washington called Northport. Dmytryk’s father was frequently abusive to his family, and the death of Dmytryk’s mother from a ruptured appendix prompted Dmytryk’s father to move the boys to San Francisco, where he placed them in an orphan home with a promise to return. He returned a year later, by which point he had remarried. In 1919, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Dmytryk was enrolled in Lockwood Grammar School. During his time at Lockwood, Dmytryk was tested by the Terman Group from Stanford University, in search of students with superior IQ. Dmytryk qualified for the study and became part of what was at the time the longest-running psycho- logical study ever conducted. Further abuse from his father drove Dmytryk to run away from home at age 14. For his safety, social workers placed him in a private home, but he was told he would need to get a job to help cover the rent. Thus, from a very early age, his was a life devoted to labor, to working hard: as a caddy or selling newspapers on street corners, or as a messenger and office boy.

vii viii CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE

It was the latter job, working evenings and weekends for Famous Players-Lasky studios (later Paramount Pictures), while attending Hollywood High School, that first brought him into contact with the motion picture industry. Through this job he first encountered the cutting room and taught himself to splice film while also becoming a cutting room projectionist. “It was in the cutting room,” he would later state, “that I learned the rudiments of filmmaking.” While working for Paramount and still in high school, Dmytryk was offered a scholarship at the California Institute of Technology. He accepted the scholarship, but continued to work as a projectionist on weekends and holidays. After a year in school, Dmytryk decided he wanted to make the film business his full-time career, and returned to Paramount. Soon thereafter, Dmytryk was working as an assistant editor and, eventually, editor, cutting films for such directors as (The Royal Family of Broadway and Zaza) and Leo McCarey ( and Love Affair). He made a short-lived directorial debut in 1935 with the low-budget western The Hawk, made for Monogram studios, but would spend the next few years directing sequences in B films without credit, while continuing to edit the films of others. It was his uncredited co-direction of Million Dollar Legs for Paramount in 1939 (the same year in which he became an American citizen) that led to his first director jobs, first for Paramount and then for Columbia. A contract with RKO Radio, beginning in 1942, dramatically changed the shape of his career. In 1943, he took over the direction from Irving Reis of the low-budget anti-Nazi film Hitler’s Children. The result was an unexpected critical and financial success. Later that year he graduated to A film budgets with the home front wartime melodrama (1943), written by and starring . A more significant turning point occurred with Murder, My Sweet (1944) one of the classic early examples of film noir, adapted from ’s Farewell, My Lovely, and starring cast against type as Philip Marlowe. The film was produced by and written by , two men who became central to Dmytryk’s career throughout the remainder of the decade. In Murder, My Sweet we see with a particular clarity a recurring type of protagonist in Dmytryk’s work, the investigative figure who moves through a sometimes enigmatic, sometimes hostile, and sometimes dreamlike environment in which he becomes enmeshed: losing consciousness, physically assaulted, falling from great heights. EDWARD DMYTRYK: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY ix

Paxton and Scott would collaborate again on another noir, Cornered (1945), this one with a wartime setting and an anti-fascist scenario, with Powell once more in the lead. Slightly interrupting the collaborative run with Paxton and Scott is the production Till the End of Time, adapted from Niven Busch’s novel, They Dream of Home, about Marines returning home after the War. The film had the misfortune to open the same year as a film on a similar subject, William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives. A comparatively “small” film, Till the End of Time has its own defining qualities, in particular its emphasis (in contrast to Wyler’s film) on middle-class and blue-collar men (often psychologically and physical damaged) resisting the process of being integrated back into “normal” American society. After this, though, Dmytryk would return to working with Scott and Paxton, on two films, both released in 1947, Crossfire and . The former was adapted from The Brick Foxhole, Richard Brooks’s novel about the investigation into the murder of a gay man by a homophobic and racist soldier. But due to censorship issues, the murder was changed to one provoked by the soldier’s anti-Semitism. Crossfire was made the same year as another major Hollywood film about anti- Semitism, Elia Kazan’s prestigious Gentleman’s Agreement. But Crossfire situates its social ambitions within a more explicit post-war environment of existential anxiety about the future of America at this particular moment in history in which, as one character states, “we don’t know what to fight.” A commercial success, Crossfire was perhaps the greatest critical triumph of Dmytryk’s career and the only film for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Director. (The film itself received five nominations overall, including one for Best Picture. It lost to Gentleman’s Agreement.) So Well Remembered has been neglected compared to Gentleman’s Agreement. Adapted from a James Hilton novel of the same name, set and shot in England with a primarily English cast and crew (the film was a co-production between RKO and J. Arthur Rank’s Alliance Productions, Ltd.), its American release was delayed due to Howard Hughes (a partial owner of RKO Radio) who believed that the film, with its emphasis on the resistance of factory workers to their corrupt owners, contained Communist ideology. For many years, the film was rarely screened and, in some quarters, believed to be lost. Now widely available, So Well Remembered is a major example of Dmytryk’s work and shows, as do all of his films of this period, signature Dmytryk touches, such as exploiting the expressive

ix x CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE properties of light and shadow, using highly varied camera angles, and taking full advantage of current developments in film technology, including optical effects and camera movement devices Shortly after the production of this film however, Dmytryk came under scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Attracted by ideals of economic justice and anti-fascism, Dmytryk had briefly joined the Communist Party in 1945, but claimed to have become quickly disillusioned with it, seeing the so called “party discipline” as a threat to the freedom of creative activity. Nonetheless, one of his earlier films, Tender Comrade, with its line of “share and share alike, that’s democracy” was held up by HUAC as an example of covert Communist ideology insinuating itself into a seemingly patriotic Hollywood film. Dmytryk and nine other industry screenwriters (including Scott and Trumbo), known as , appeared before the committee but refused to testify, believing that the Constitution protected private citizens from having to disclose their personal, religious and political choices. Dmytryk was the eighth of the ten to be called to testify and, like the others before him, he refused to answer the chairman’s questions. Charged with contempt of Congress and faced with an impending jail sentence, fired from RKO, and barred from working in the United States, Dmytryk accepted an opportunity to work abroad. Accompany - ing Dmytryk was his second wife, the actress Jean Porter, who he had married in 1948 and who had a supporting role in Till the End of Time. Dmytryk made two films in England during this period of exile, both released in 1949. The first of these is the marital revenge drama Obsession (adapted from ’s novel A Man About a Dog and released in the United States as The Hidden Room) and an adaptation of Pietro di Donato’s acclaimed 1939 novel of Italian-American work- ing class life, Christ in Concrete, released in Europe under the title Give Us This Day. Christ in Concrete’s screenplay was written by , who had already collaborated with Dmytryk on the war film (1945). Christ in Concrete is a central Dmytryk achievement. Reproducing New York City in the studio and through redressed British locations, the film is one of Dmytryk’s boldest visual exercises, with its extreme high and low angled shots, low-key lighting, and the use of walls, floors and ceilings to create spaces that are at once psychological and social. It is also a major example of the tendency of Dmytryk’s protagonists to engage EDWARD DMYTRYK: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY xi in agonized social struggles that are played out through gestures of self-inflicted physical pain, resisting the limited options given to them. Like So Well Remembered , however, Christ in Concrete received limited North American release, both in the U.S.A. and the U.K. His passport due to expire, Dmytryk returned to the United States in 1950 to face his sentence and was imprisoned for six months. This situation, combined with his belief that the Communist Party had done nothing for him, drove Dmytryk to eventually agree to appear a second time before HUAC. On April 25, 1951 he confirmed the names of people who had also been affiliated with the Communist Party, among them Adrian Scott, and Dmytryk chose to do it publicly, rather than behind closed doors. After Dmytryk’s recanting, it was the producer who became central in providing him with work in Hollywood. For Kramer (whose production company was releasing films through Columbia), he would make (1952), a skillful adaptation of Harry Brown’s play of World War II, A Sound of Hunting, and The Juggler (1953), with as a deeply traumatized Holocaust survivor (Michael Blankfort adapted his own novel here), The Juggler was the first Hollywood film to be shot in Israel. But this period in Dmytryk’s career is most notable for two remark - able films, the first and the last that he made for Kramer. The Caine Mutiny (1954), the last, was a commercial and critical triumph for him, the second highest-grossing film of 1954, and the recipient of seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Adapted from ’s 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning World War II novel, it is the first of a number of Dmytryk films made over the next decade adapted from lengthy, best-selling novels. In comparison with Dmytryk’s most notable films prior to this, The Caine Mutiny is restrained in its visual approach. Working in color for the second time (the first was the low-budget Mutiny from 1952) and for the first time with the gifted cinematographer Franz Planer, The Caine Mutiny employs a largely muted color palette and (unlike Dmytryk’s bold black-and-white films) soft lighting contrasts. But the core of the film’s formal interest are the extended sequences of meetings, conspiratorial conversations, and, most notably, the court martial sequence, with the paranoia of ’s Captain Queeg reaching a point of mental disintegration memorably played out through his recurring gesture of nervously fondling the ball bearings in his hands. Throughout all of these extended dialogue sequences, Dmytryk’s gift for framing and cutting among his actors in

xi xii CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE various singles, two-shots, group shots, and then breaking up a com - position by having a character suddenly rise or lower themselves into a shot, is strongly apparent. However The Sniper (1952), the first of the Kramers, while not a notable success at the time, is arguably the more striking of the two films and one that bears comparison with the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. In his autobiography, Dmytryk shrugs the effort off as a “piece of cake” in terms of the challenges the film presented to him. When seen today, however, the savage, unsentimental depiction of a city under siege (the script is by Harry Brown from a story by Edna and Edward Anhalt) gives the film a bold, modern quality, fore- shadowing David Fincher’s serial killer film Zodiac (2007), both films making imaginative use of San Francisco locations. In The Sniper, Dmytryk repeatedly draws attention (as he so often does throughout his work) to levels, heights, and staircases, creating a cold and indifferent urban environment. In the midst of this is an anguished killer who, in an indelible moment, deliberately burns his hand on a hot plate in his apartment. After the split with Kramer, Dmytryk’s career took a varied, but no less prolific, path. The End of the Affair (1955), shot in England and released by Columbia, was a simplified version of Graham Greene’s great novel of Catholic salvation. This “small” black and white film stands in contrast to his other films of the decade that find him embracing new developments in widescreen technology. Between 1954 and 1959, he shot six films in CinemaScope for 20th Century Fox, including two melodramas from 1955, both set in post-War China. (1955), reunited Dmytryk with Bogart, and Soldier of Fortune (1955) with and Susan Hayward. There was a remake of The Blue Angel (1959). There were also two “adult” westerns, (1954), the first of two films with and first of three with Richard Widmark, and Warlock (1959), also with Widmark, which are standouts from this period. Whereas Broken Lance (a remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1949 gangster melodrama House of Strangers transposed to a western setting) was the more financially and critically successful of the two westerns from this period, Warlock, a box office failure, when seen today is arguably the stronger film. Dmytryk had already received producing credit on The Mountain (1956), but he began work on that film fairly late in its pre-production schedule. Warlock, on the other hand, was the first film in which he exercised his production duties from the very beginning of the process, EDWARD DMYTRYK: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY xiii and his firm control over the project is evident. Adapted from Oakley Hall’s 1958 novel of the same name, Warlock eliminates a crucial aspect of Hall’s novel that focused on the labor disputes of silver miners (had it been retained, this could have given the film some suggestive links with So Well Remembered) and instead focuses on the tensions between an ironically positioned “civilized” community and the outlaw forces that threaten to disrupt it. The moral ambiguities in the film are, typically for Dmytryk, played out through a tense conception of exterior and interior spaces and of the tortured movements of the psychologically and physically damaged characters within these spaces. The late 1950s are otherwise dominated by two films starring , Raintree County (1957), Dmytryk’s only film for MGM, shot by Robert Surtees in the MGM Camera 65 format (the first film to be shot in this process, which later became Ultra Panavision 70), and one of Dmytryk’s favorites, The Young Lions (1958), shot in black and white CinemaScope for Fox. Both were based on long novels, the first by Ross Lockridge, Jr. and the second by Irwin Shaw, and both were published in 1948. If Till the End of Time has unfairly lived in the shadow of The Best Years of Our Lives, Raintree County has suffered a similar fate in relation to another Hollywood Civil War roadshow epic, Gone with the Wind. But the films are quite different in intent, the romantic and often impulsive behavior of the protagonists of Gone with the Wind is replaced in Raintree County by characters either more philosophical (and thus hesitant to take action), or marked by trauma and internalized racial anxiety. The result is a rather more somber epic, where images of fire and burning are central, and shots are dominated by Dmytryk’s use of crowded, widescreen frames, with numerous primary and secondary points of interest. The Young Lions made changes to Shaw’s World War II novel that displeased the author. The most fundamental change was in relation to the German protagonist, a ski instructor (played by ), who in the novel gradually transforms into a Nazi whereas in the film he is a member of the Nazi Party from the very beginning but ethically torn and ambivalent. But such a change is consistent with Dmytryk’s recurring interest in characters facing ethical struggles that are often tied to specific political and historical situations, such struggles ultimately enacted through punishing physical action and confrontations with individuals who embody the forces of oppression. By the 1960s though, the dramatic changes in the funding, production and distribution of films in Hollywood were making themselves felt on

xiii xiv CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE the nature of Dmytryk’s output. Such films as Walk on the Wild Side (1962), (1966), Anzio (1968), and Shalako (1968), produced under chaotic circumstances, were less-than-happy creative experiences for Dmytryk, although all contain elements (and individual sequences) of interest. In 1964, Dmytryk directed two films produced by Joseph E. Levine for Paramount, both adapted from novels, Where Love Has Gone (reuniting Dmytryk with Susan Hayward) and The Carpetbaggers. The latter of these, a fictional imagining of the life of Howard Hughes, while critically derided, was a huge commercial success and inspired the ambivalent admiration of Andy Warhol who, reveling in the film’s “plastic” falseness, claimed to have seen The Carpetbaggers multiple times. Two films from this decade, though, stand apart. The first of these is (1962), made for Columbia. A partially fictionalized version of the life of the sixteenth century saint, Joseph of Cupertino, this small, black and white film, shot in Italy and seen by very few people on its initial release, is one of Dmytryk’s most unusual achievements. If in so many other Dmytryk films, the male protagonist uncertainly stumbles through treacherous, dimly lit, and often hostile environments, here he is a childlike innocent whose literal stumbling achieves a saintly comic dimension, culminating in his metaphysical act of levitating, and in which the film ends in a vision of the blinding white light of God. The second major film of the decade is Mirage (1965). Working with an original screenplay by , two years after Stone had written Charade for director Stanley Donen, both films are self-conscious attempts to produce a Hitchcockian film, minus the still active Hitchcock. (Mirage was, like all of Hitchcock’s films of this period, made for Universal.) If Charade attempts this exercise by referring to Hitchcock’s lighter, more romantic escapades, such as North by Northwest (1959), Mirage draws upon Hitchcock’s more somber films, in particular Vertigo (1958). Both Vertigo and Mirage link the male protagonist’s trauma to the witnessing of a man falling from a tall building. (Albert Whitlock, who did the special effects for Vertigo, executed the recurring image of a falling man that was very similar to the one he had done for Hitchcock) Particularly memorable in the film is its opening sequence, with its striking use of light and shadow, of a New York skyscraper in which the electricity has suddenly been cut off. The cinematographer, working in black and white, was Joe MacDonald, who had shot numerous films for Dmytryk up to this point and would go on to shoot Alvarez Kelly. EDWARD DMYTRYK: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY xv

In the 1970s, Dmytryk’s output dwindled to one final theatrical film, The “Human” Factor (1975) and a TV movie, He Is My Brother (1976). Bluebeard (1972), though, an R-rated sex romp with Richard Burton as the title character, updated to a post-World War I setting, is marked by a tongue-in-cheek humor rare in Dmytryk and by its spirited absorption of various formal tendencies of the period in its use of zooms and fast, elliptical montage. Dmytryk once stated that editing is “the only film craft that is entirely indigenous to the cinema” and in Bluebeard, with its non-linear organization, he seems to be giving it his all in one final (almost) valiant effort in the midst of a rapidly changing cinematic and social landscape. For the remainder of his career, Dmytryk worked in academia teaching film production at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California. In the 1980s, he wrote several textbooks on the art of filmmaking. In 1984 he published On Film Editing, On Screen Directing and On Screen Acting; in 1985 On Screen Writing was published; and in 1988, Cinema: Concept and Practice. During this later phase of his life and career, he also authored two memoirs, It’s a Hell of a Life, But Not a Bad Living (1978) and Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten (1996) that chronicles his experiences during the Hollywood Black List era. Edward Dmytryk died in 1999, at the age of 90.

xv

Introduction

Cinema: Concept and Practice, published in 1988, was the last of a series of books written by Edward Dmytryk that addressed various fundamentals of filmmaking. Five books preceded it: On Film Editing, On Screen Directing and On Screen Acting in 1984 and On Screen Writing in 1985. In sheer volume, this is an astounding achievement from an American filmmaker, in particular one whose career—first as a film editor, then as a director—originates in the traditional Hollywood studio system. The history of cinema has given us numerous examples of filmmakers explicating, in prose form, the nature of their own filmmaking practice and theorizing about the cinema as a whole. Prior to Dmytryk, we have the notable examples of Soviet cinema after the Bolshevik Revolution and of French cinema almost immediately after the emergence of projected motion pictures. Such continuities are notably in short supply in Hollywood during the same period. The ties between commercial filmmaking and industrial modes of production create for the Hollywood that shaped Dmytryk a very different creative atmosphere. Pragmatism (however imaginatively articulated) reigned and major statements from directors on the nature of their craft (if any) were largely confined to the occasional article in a trade journal or in a newspaper or magazine designed for general readers.1 “Before the advent of film schools,” Dmytryk writes in Cinema: Concept and

xvii xviii CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE

Practice, “most of the terms used by theorists and academicians were quite unknown to the great majority of Hollywood filmmakers.” Dmytryk’s entry into academia did not take place until after he had effectively retired from film directing. Whereas Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov could, in the midst of their own productions, find themselves teaching at the Moscow Film School, Dmytryk did not extensively explore similar options in the United States, nor would he have been expected to. The University of Southern California had formed a School of Cinematography as early as 1926, but as Robert Parrish (like Dmytryk, an editor turned director) would later claim, the class he attended there was “taught in a sub-basement at the university” by a “gentle, long-since retired cameraman” of no particular note.2 In Dmytryk’s autobiography, It’s a Hell of a Life, But Not a Bad Living (1978), he writes of his unsalaried chairmanship in an orientation class in film directing at The People’s Educational Center in Los Angeles in the 1940s to which he invited various guest lecturers from the film industry such as George Cukor (for whom he had previously served as a film editor) and Lewis Milestone. This was something of an anomaly for him, though, and he otherwise devoted himself to directing. By the late 1970s, however, the study of cinema in the U.S., both theoretical and practical, had become widespread and courses in editing or directing were part of regular curriculums in a way that would have been unimaginable during the period when Dmytryk began his Hollywood career. Such skills were acquired “on the job” and not through classroom instruction or refined through theoretical essays. One of the great values of Cinema: Concept and Practice is that it shows an artist who now finds himself transitioning from one mode of thought, apprenticeship, and practice of the cinema to another. There are several reasons why this should be of interest. By the time of his retirement, Dmytryk had been directing films for over 40 years and some of these, such as Crossfire (1947), The Caine Mutiny (1954), and The Young Lions (1958) were great critical and financial successes. Also by this time, the ongoing fascination with film noir had led to Murder, My Sweet (1944), his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, becoming an essential contribution to the crime and detective genre. Even so, in the critical literature, Dmytryk’s own creative interventions on such projects tended to be downplayed. Dmytryk was not considered to be an auteur. When Andrew Sarris’s influential early text of American auteurism, The American Cinema, was published in 1968, Hollywood directors were INTRODUCTION xix ranked by Sarris within various categories relative to their aesthetic value. But Dmytryk did not even receive an entry, let alone a ranking. In 1972, the auteurist British magazine Movie published its own rank- ing of American and British filmmakers and here Dmytryk was consigned to the fifth category from the top, “Competent or Ambitious.” (It should be noted that Dmytryk is in impressive company here, sharing this ostensibly dubious category with such diverse figures as John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Michael Curtiz, Billy Wilder and William Wyler.) Cinema: Concept and Practice can be taken as a final declaration by Dmytryk of his own importance as a filmmaker, articulating a vision that is at once expressive and practical while also displaying a breadth of knowledge about the cinema and its various critical and theoretical figures. Dmytryk cites, among others, Sarris, Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer while also brandishing names of wider cultural significance, such as Henri Matisse and Alfred Loos, Henry Moore and Allan Bloom. Such citations are related to Dmytryk’s concerns about an over- specialization in current cinema practice whereas filmmaking, he feels, should remain focused on a “continuing study of intellectual disciplines that are in no way related to filmmaking techniques.” In the current scarcity of significant literature on Dmytryk, Cinema: Concept and Practice provides some insight into not only his own general approach to filmmaking but also into an ethics of filmmaking and one that is not solely tied to the content generated by story material. Dmytryk’s progressive, if not leftist, political views (leading to a brief membership in the Communist party in the 1940s that would eventually contribute to his being interrogated by the House Un-American Activ - ities Committee) are sometimes evident in the scenarios to his films, many of those scenarios written by men whose leftist views also came under investigation by HUAC. But such views are not markedly on display in this book, which more immediately concerns itself with practical matters. “A film,” he declares, “more closely resembles a symphony—which also has a director.” This director presides over (but does not single-handedly create) the film. For example, lighting is “the responsibility of the cinematographer, not the director.” It is up to the director merely to “have a concept of the mood he wishes the film to project,” this concept is then communicated to the cinematographer who “creates.” Nevertheless, the director’s sensibility dominates and that sensibility is articulated through a careful attention to various questions of cinematic form, to craftsmanship. However, the films Dmytryk cites

xix xx CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE in this book as exemplary are not simply “well made” but are those in which subject matter of great historical and political consequence is tied to meticulous formal construction: Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), Curtiz’s Casablanca (1943), Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict (1982), and Doctor Zhivago (1965), directed by another one-time film editor, David Lean. Given the occasion of this re-issue, a more pressing question is whether Cinema: Concept and Practice has ongoing value for the ways that we think about the cinema. And is the book of interest to, and useful for, contemporary filmmakers? David Siegel and Scott McGehee have written that Dmytryk’s Mirage (1965) was a film that they “looked to for guidance” in relation to their own Suture (1993). What they saw in Mirage was a hybrid approach to cinematic form, clearly influenced by post-war European art cinema while remaining attached to more traditional Hollywood. The result is a film that is “modernist, empty, formalist, polished, timidly abstract.”3 Such a tension between classical “fullness” and modernist abstraction, operating with a particular clarity in Mirage, is one that also informs much of Dmytryk’s work. Cinema: Concept and Practice offers guidance on making accomplished, com - mercial narrative films even as the ideas sometimes being offered here (especially when seen within the context of Dmytryk’s own body of work) imply broader possibilities. Dmytryk articulates a number of general arguments about what makes a good film good and a bad film bad. Several issues immediately stand out. One is his interest in not simply offering general advice in matters of production but in defining the essential nature of cinema, what it can do as an art form that is unlike other art forms. Here he can be placed in a long line of film theorists and filmmakers, beginning from the earliest days of cinema, who have been concerned with such questions. As in so much film theory, Dmytryk here is concerned not simply with abstract notions of form divorced from their exhibi- tion context but with the thoughts and emotions of spectators that are generated by the film. “Because without the viewer,” he writes, “no film lives—it is merely a long succession of photographs, carrying no meaning or emotion. Its significance can be brought to life only through the empathetic reactions of a viewer’s involvement.” The close-up, such a fundamental discovery of filmmakers during the silent era, is “essential to engage the viewers.” And the close-ups of faces and objects in Murder, My Sweet, Crossfire, or Christ in Concrete/Give Us This INTRODUCTION xxi

Day (1949) achieve an iconic intensity through Dmytryk’s attention to the details within the shot. But what sort of spectator is being posited here and what sorts of involvements are being solicited? The ideal spec- tator for Dmytryk is “the person of average education and under- standing.” Such a spectator, when faced with a film that is attempting to dramatize “complex human emotion, condition, or conflict” may find that “words are often too specialized or ambiguous and the rhetoric too literary.” Such an attitude is indicative of Dmytryk’s connection to Hollywood and to making films that appeal to the widest possible viewer. But we may also see in this “average” viewer of Dmytryk’s the site of other potentials. He tells us that “film is not a literary medium” and that “a good director thinks more of images, metaphor, and reaction than he does of words.” This may seem like a surprising statement from a director who spent much of his career doing adaptations of best-selling novels and working with some of Hollywood’s most important screenwriters. For Dmytryk, though, most screenwriters do not understand the basic nature of cinema, and it then becomes a challenge for the director to transform the written text into motion pictures, otherwise the films become “not more than richly illustrated plays.” The paradoxes of finding within literary language analogies to the film image (an issue that greatly concerned Eisenstein) would not appear to interest Dmytryk. And yet he will also acknowledge how, for example, Herman Wouk’s description in his novel The Caine Mutiny of Captain Queeg handling the steel balls while on the witness stand “lends itself to imagery” that he was able to seize upon in making the film version. Even as Dmytryk notes the importance of the facial close-up and the actors’ use of eyes to “reflect fear or express happiness” it is ultimately “only the body” that is able to “shrink back in terror,” or “tremble with delight.” It is a heavily gestural body that we find in Dmytryk. Written or spoken language are no longer inert matter waiting to be transformed by the director but already contain the potential for cinematic images, often embodied through the actor, regardless of the original context and intent of the source. One of the elements of Mirage that fascinates Siegel and McGehee is that, while the film has a “ridiculously thin plot” and an “awkward story,” the film’s “awesome power” resides in its subtexts and metaphors.4 Somewhat echoing Siegel and McGehee, Martin Scorsese has described how Dmytryk’s remarkable serial killer film The Sniper (1952) has a compelling, documentary-like visual “flatness” and “real

xxi xxii CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE sense of place,” co-existing with a screenplay dominated by a rather crude psychological simplicity. The Sniper, to Scorsese, creates a paranoid spectator, the film tapping into collective fears about being “unsafe.”5 Such films as The Sniper and Mirage, for all of the conventions at work in the scenarios, also participate in modernist possibilities of a play with forms, through their often abstract treatment of space, time and light, rather than novelistic density of narrative or characterizations. As with so much of Dmytryk’s cinema, these are films that reflect worlds in a process of change. Such a claim might surprise a director who writes here that “the film must not be pompous, pretentious, pedantic, or overbearing—and it must entertain” or that films made for other filmmakers and film theorists are a “waste of time.” But it should not surprise the critic, theorist or historian of cinema, who is far more accustomed to such apparent contradictions between an artist’s stated intent and the nature of the final result. Taking this relationship between image and word a step further, Dmytryk argues that camera set-ups themselves may become a type of language. They are “often the paragraphs, on rare occasions even the chapters, that make up the body of any and every film,” even if such a “language” must still take its cue from the screenplay at hand. However, he will just as quickly retreat from the implications of this strong argument by writing that the shot is “determined by the substance of the scene” and should not overwhelm what is implied in the writing. “It may be an advantage if the shot is also beautiful,” he declares, “but more often than not beauty befogs the essence of reality.” He objects, for example, to Elia Kazan’s framing ideas for the dinner table confrontation between father and son in East of Eden (1955) as “an artful experiment gone wrong,” the canted angles “arbitrary and apparently unmotivated.” One might respond to this objection that the framing in East of Eden, far from being unmotivated, is tied to two closely linked ideas: conveying a shared, tense subjectivity between father and son at this precise moment, while also serving as a rhetorical device on Kazan’s part. Such objections are indications of Dmytryk as a conscientious Hollywood craftsman in which “the mark of a true artist, whether tailor, architect, or filmmaker, is that ‘the seams don’t show.’” On the other hand, he will argue that the limitation of such directors as Frank Capra, George Stevens, or Wyler was their limited interest in the camera’s “versatility.” It was not until the arrival of Orson Welles, for Dmytryk, that the style of the film director began to strongly assert itself. However questionable this might be as historical poetics it is indicative INTRODUCTION xxiii of Dmytryk’s classical/modernist push-and-pull throughout both Cinema: Concept and Practice and throughout his own body of work.6 In the case of the latter, the “seams” often do show and this, as much as their adherence to certain prevailing norms of filmic construc- tion, provides much of their great interest. For example, he will write of film noir lighting (so central to the visual power of Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire) that “one of its greatest advantages is its liberation from any obligation to a realistic on-screen light source, an obligation that can severely limit creative lighting.” The opening sequence of Mirage, set in a Manhattan office skyscraper in which the power has suddenly been shut off, is arguably the most striking (and certainly most extreme) use of this kind of low-key lighting. Described by Siegel and McGehee as “one of the most inspired film openings any of us can remember,” the lighting here is plausibly located in relation to the story situation but, in its expressivity, also exceeds this. It sets the film up for becom- ing a “Freudian landscape within which the drama will unfold, and turns the city itself into a kind of oversized model of pathological psychology.”7 If the camera set-up (and its attendant effects in lighting and use of the actor) is one fundamental way in which a film “speaks” to the viewer it is the succession of these shots—the editing of them—that completes the journey for this director who began as an editor. The manipulation of time through editing determines much of Dmytryk’s thinking. He is largely opposed to the sequence shot (long take scenes) because it restricts the “freedom to manipulate space and time.” Concerns with “temporal realism” found in the sequence shot constitute a “reactionary point of view,” particularly since they also involve a “spatial realism.” Alfred Hitchcock’s experiments with the long take in Rope (1948), for example, or Welles’s opening crane shot for Touch of Evil (1958), the latter “showing off the director’s conceptual skill,” hold little interest for Dmytryk. Even as one might counter these arguments of Dmytryk’s by noting that, far from being reactionary, the long take has historic- ally been tied to modernist concerns with duration, these arguments do point the way towards other possibilities for shaping temporality and movement. Instead of the sequence shot, or the conventional, static master shot (“useful for scenes which are completely dominated by dialogue and in which reactions are relatively unimportant”) Dmytryk proposes the “moving master shot.” Such a shot (Crossfire contains a number of these) “achieves movement of the mind through movement of ideas, movement of the film’s characters, and the movement of the

xxiii xxiv CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE camera.” This is a “powerfully sensory movement which borders on the physical” but which nevertheless allows for options in terms of editing, in particular “when the characters are quite motionless.” Time and again, Dmytryk will insist upon mobility as being central to the very nature of cinema, in contrast to much of what he sees in film criticism and scholarship that draw upon other non-mobile art forms for their theories. In Dmytryk, the cut is often determined by movement within the moving master shot or the cut on movement within otherwise static frames. “In short,” he writes, “cutting demands are imposed by the story, the attendant situation, the complexity of the particular sequence, the characters, the mood, and the pace, not by some esoteric theory.” Cinema: Concept and Practice, then, is the product of Dmytryk’s own paradoxical relationship to, on the one hand, commercial film production and, on the other, more recent exposure to theories about the cinema that were produced under radically different circumstances from those that gave birth to his own films. In many ways, though, Dmytryk’s films have been foreshadowing this moment all along, in which a dialogue between the practical and the philosophical are often literally enacted and held in a tense relationship with one another. We may see this with a particular clarity in his underrated Civil War epic Raintree County (1957) with its sharply defined struggles between the world of the intellect and the world of lived, physical experience. The ethical issues at stake in Dmytryk’s cinema are often tied to getting the job done efficiently, even if, as in The Caine Mutiny, such a devotion becomes a paranoid obsession. In Cinema: Concept and Practice, Dmytryk displays his theoretical erudition even as he periodically reminds us that, like Captain Finlay (Robert Young) in Crossfire, he must keep his sights on more practical matters. “I’m not interested in philosophy,” Finlay states. “I’m trying to solve a murder.”

Joe McElhaney Dept. of Film & Media Studies Hunter College of the City University of New York INTRODUCTION xxv

Notes 1 See, for example, Richard Koszarski, ed., Hollywood Directors, 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Koszarski assembles a variety of articles written by various directors of the period that address the nature of their craft. 2 Robert Parrish, “University of Southern California Film School, Hollywood 1926–50,” Projections 4 1/2, John Boorman and Walter Donohue, eds., (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 143. 3 David Siegel and Scott McGehee, “Mirage,” Boorman and Donohue, p. 272. 4 Siegel and McGehee, p. 273. 5 “Martin Scorsese on The Sniper,” Columbia Pictures Classics I: The Big Heat/5 Against the House/The Lineup/Murder by Contract/The Sniper, DVD, (Sony Pictures, 2009). 6 Bill Nichols writes: “In many of his films Dmytryk displays much the same sensibility informing the work of Frank Capra: a belief in the virtues of working together, a deep reverence for traditional American ideals and heroes, and a strongly utopian bent that tends to see evil as a localized aberration capable of correction {.} Dmytryk directs with an essentially serious tone that minimizes comedy and seldom romanticizes the agrarian or non-urban ethos so dear to Capra. He also tends to work with more interiorized states of personal feeling that run counter to Capra’s tendency to play conflicts out in public among a diverse, somewhat stereotyped range of characters. But, like Capra, Dmytryk dwells upon the issue of faith—the need for it and the tests it is subjected to.” Bill Nichols, “Edward Dmytryk,” The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume II, Christopher Lyon, ed. (New York: Perigee Books. 1984), p. 143. 7 Siegel, and McGehee, p. 274.

xxv The author and his crew on location for Alvarez Kelly. A successful film is a collaborative effort; sharing the load makes the difficult times easier. Photograph courtesy of Columbia Pictures. 1 The CollectiveCollective NounNoun

The more I see ofof thethe performingperforming artsarts thethe moremore firmlyfirmly II amam convincedconvinced that aa preciseprecise definitiondefinition of ofthethe idealideal "Film""Film" wouldwould differentiatedifferentiate it fromit anyfrom ofany its cousins.of its cousins. With theWith sole exceptionthe sole exceptionof film, theof per­formingfilm, the per-arts formingare appropriatelyarts are appropriately named; in all named; instancesin theall instances visible artiststhe visible in this branchartists in ofthis the branch arts areof the performers.arts are performers. Whether theyWhether stand they beforestand an audiencebefore an oraudience a televisionor a television camera tocamera deliverto deliver one-liners,one-liners, "read" "read" a fine author'sa fine author's golden goldenwords, dancewords, adance noted achoreographer'snoted choreographer's pas de deux,pas deor singdeux, anor operaticsing an operatic aria or onearia ofor tin-panone of alley'stin-pan cleveralley's ditties,clever theyditties, are performingthey are performing.. And in these And areasin these a fineareas performancea fine performance can be a gratifyingcan be experience.a gratifying experience. The viewer The watches,viewer andwatches, listens, and and listens, usuallyand appreciatesusually theappreciates performerthe moreperformer wholeheartedlymore wholeheartedly than he does thosethan whohe doescreatedthose the materialwho created performed.the material performed. But inin filmsfilms aa "performance,""performance," so recognized,recognized, ringsrings falsely.*falsely/ AsAs we have already seen,seen, mostmost definitionsdefinitions ofof filmfilm includeinclude thethe wordswords "life""life" or "reality."or "reality." RegardlessRegardless of of whetherwhether thethe filmicfilmic technique stems from from Eisenstein oror GodardGodard oror Hollywood,Hollywood, thethe actorsactors on theon thescreenscreen mustmust "be" the"be" humanthe human beings thebeings viewersthe viewerswatch, humanwatch, beingshuman who,beings if thewho, film isif skillfullythe film is made,skillfully soonmade, becomesoon familiars,become andfamiliars, the viewers'and the emotionalviewers' responseemotional shouldresponse increaseshould alongincrease with theiralong involvementwith their involvement

*It*It is unfortunate thatthat film'sfilm's foundingfounding fathersfathers littlelittle realizedrealized theirtheir plaything'splaything's potential, andand borrowedborrowed theirtheir descriptivedescriptive vocabularyvocabulary fromfrom itsits antecedents.antecedents. BecauseBecause of thisof this we wehavehave no adequateno adequate wordword for "being"for "being" on theon screen,the screen, and theand wordthe "perfor­mance"word "perfor- mustmance" of necessitymust of necessity be used inbe anyused discussionin any discussion of the screenof the actor'sscreen art.actor's Reluc­tantly,art. Reluc- it willtantly, be soit willusedbe in sothisused book.in this book.

1 2 CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE with those who live on the screen, whose joys and sorrows they feel as their own, whose existence they pity or envy or dream of sharing. Only after the vicarious experience of being part of such lives begins to dissolve into reality will analysis and appreciation of the film's separate elements, including the art of the actors and the skills of the technicians who made the film, begin to encroach upon the viewers' attention. At least, that's how it should be. Alas, how often are things the way they ought to be? Ninety-five percent of all film made does not even come close to meeting the standards of an ideal motion picture. But to avoid any possible mis­ understanding, let us first exclude all filmmaking which lies outside the scope of this discussion. There are a number of fields that lend themselves to filming; a rather extensive one covers industrial sub­ jects and techniques in their different phases, from explication of manufacturing processes to the selling of the products to agents and dealers. For the consumers of those products and nearly everything else, there are the ubiquitous commercials, without which neither our economy nor our society could now survive. Rock video, de­ signed to sell or display "pop" music, and styled to interest and excite the youthful fans, is a fast-growing newcomer in the television and home VCR fields. There are the documentaries, which inform the viewer on the states and activities of society and the environment, and docudra- mas, which do the same thing with less fact and more fiction, and sometimes do it better. There are children's cartoons, full length narrative cartoons, puppet films, educational films, "art" or exper­ imental films which range through all the genres known to painting, and a few others, such as film vérité, which the more static media cannot accommodate. Then there is the self-defining "narrative" film, a genre which has sired a large family of overlapping subgenres, but which I will separate roughly and arbitrarily into "theatrical" and "cinematic" films. Of all the foregoing classifications, excluding only commercials, the public is acquainted primarily with the documentary and the narrative film. Today, the documentary belongs exclusively to tele­ vision. Although documentarians like Flaherty, Schoedsack, Lorenz, and others have been acknowledged as superior artists whose work attracted sizable audiences, the narrative film unquestionably over­ shadows documentaries and all the other classifications by a very THE COLLECTIVE NOUN 3 wide margin. It is primarily this "Film," whether shot on film, tape, or a combination of both, and shown on a television set or on a theater screen, which will be discussed in the following pages. Sixty-five years ago, Jacques Feyder, a French film director, wrote, "Everything can be transferred to the screen, everything expressed through the image. It is possible to adapt an engaging and humane film from the tenth chapter of Montesquieu's UEspiit des Lois, as well as Nietzsche's Zoroaster." This somewhat optimistic analysis was written in the days of the "silents," but now that the screen speaks it is both much easier and much more difficult to realize Feyder's dream. It is easier because the marriage of sound and image makes it possible to achieve a certain depth of meaning even when dealing with a difficult concept. When dramatizing a complex human emo­ tion, condition, or conflict, words are often too specialized or am­ biguous and the rhetoric too literary for the person of average education and understanding.* And isn't it this person we should be most concerned to reach? The versatility of film permits the use of a relatively straightfor­ ward verbal language while the accompanying images serve (broadly speaking) to "diagram" the scene's intellectual or dramatic richness, and to eliminate sources of ambivalence, thus making it accessible to nearly all levels of understanding. This aspect of film was brought home to me quite dramatically a few years ago at the California Institute of Technology. Following an annual custom, on Alumni Day a number of scientific lectures were presented on campus, all with the aid of specially made films. The combination of nontechnical language and filmed demonstra­ tions clarified some very abstract scientific concepts and activities for audiences that contained many persons with no scientific back­ ground whatever. Not exactly new, but a great advance over the magic-lantem slide show. Closer to home, a number of successful narrative films support this point of view. The film Amadeus, beyond its excellent dram­ atization of character and situation, beyond its presentation of eigh­ teenth century customs, costumes, and behavior, brought the beauty of Mozart's music and more than a glimpse of some of the technical

*See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). 4 CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE aspects of his art to millions of viewers, most of them with little knowledge of, or previous interest in, music at this level. The film even impressed a respectable number of those who consider anything beyond punk rock a total waste of time. The truth is that this happy combination of words, images, and sounds in the interest of deeper content is not often realized, but that is due to the scanty supply of talented filmmakers rather than to the medium's inability to deliver. As has frequently been pointed out in the world of computers, theorists excepted, a viewer gets no more out of a medium than that medium's manipulator puts into it. However, Feyder's dream has also become more difficult of re­ alization because words have once more largely taken the place of effective imagery. Narrative film has been engaged in a tug-of-war with the theater that the theater, through an almost "Chinese" process of absorption, seems to be winning. Although purists con­ tinue to maintain that the cinema should be only a medium for images, most of today's films are no more than richly illustrated plays. Any argument on this point has been made moot by the reality. And though I will try to make a case for the modified cin­ ematic film as the truest and best art of the screen, only the tunnel- minded will rule out any narrative form which adapts itself to film and succeeds in interesting and entertaining the viewer. At this point there must be an unambiguous understanding of the word entertainment. The expression is equivocal, but in theatrical terms most people think of it as "something which amuses." I will always use it in the following senses of the word.

1. Entertainment: That which affords interest and amusement. 2. To entertain: To engage, keep occupied the attention, thoughts, or time of a person.*

In other words, entertainment is not only Beverly Hills Cop or Star Wars, it is also Amadeus, Ghandi, Missing, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A film may amuse, inform, explain, analyze, or deliver a message; as long as it holds the viewer's attention, it is entertaining. Why all the emphasis on entertainment, or interesting the viewer?

* Oxford English Dictionary. THE COLLECTIVE NOUN 5

Tom Hulce as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Amadeus. The actor's performance is obviously a crucial part of a film, but for the film to be successful, the other parts, including the sound and narrative imagery, must also be excellent Photograph courtesy of Orion Pictures. 6 CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE

Why not, like some purists, consider only the artistic excellence of the film and the skill of the filmmaker? Because without the viewer no film lives—it is merely a long succession of photographs, carrying no meaning and no emotion. Its significance can be brought to life only through the empathetic reactions of a viewer's involvement. And even the diehard purist must admit that film is a business as well as an art. Building a motion picture requires the services of a large, highly-paid professional crew, the contributions of an exorbitantly-priced group of "artists," the utilization of tons of ex­ pensive equipment, and time. "Highly-paid," "exorbitantly-priced," and "expensive" equals money—a great deal of money. Today, the cost of a very modest film would keep an American family in comfort for a lifetime. The financiers who supply such money, whether through the studios or though individual producers, would like to retrieve their investment along with as much profit as their money would earn while sitting in a bank. The dream, of course, is for a great deal more. The source of the recouped investment is the viewer. If he does not find the film to his liking there is little recoupment and no profit at all. Such is the fate of many films—in fact, of most films—but for the producing studio, disaster is extremely rare. Ancillary rev­ enues from sources such as video, television, toys, and music al­ bums, all fatten the kitty, and unless it goes as far over the edge as United Artists' Heaven's Gate, a studio can "average out." One hit will make up for a dozen flops, and the losers will at worst furnish a useful tax loss for the parent conglomerate. On the other hand, the independent who gambles it all on one film is challenging one of the world's highest risk businesses. His chance for making a killing is small indeed. But, fortunately for the good filmmaker, there is never a shortage of gamblers, and the independents, as well as the studios, manage to struggle along, their hopes kept new-penny bright by the few who succeed. Profit may be the main goal of the producing entity, but most filmmakers dream of creative freedom, and the quickest, perhaps the only way to get it is to make films which attract large audiences. With so much money riding on each production, the director with a record of box-office success is obviously in demand. The greater the success the greater the demand, and the greater the demand the greater the amount of freedom requested, and received, by the film- THE COLLECTIVE NOUN 7

A successful motion picture always benefits from a well-known cast. For Broken Lance, this investment paid off—the film won an award for the best Western of 1954. On this lunch break near Nogales, Arizona, the author is surrounded (on his right) by Spencer Tracy and (on his left) by and Earl Holliman. Across the table are Jean Peters, Richard Widmark, and, with his back to the camera, Hugh O'Brien. 8 CINEMA: CONCEPT AND PRACTICE maker. It follows that the filmmaker with a poor success rating soon loses the opportunity to make demands—or films. Such are the film facts of life. These simple and quite logical parameters pose a number of problems and offer a few opportunities. Many of the films which rack up huge grosses are, to put it politely, tripe. But if the tripe sells, those who produce it get greater freedom to turn out more tripe. The bright side of the picture is that each year a few films, made by thoughtful and talented filmmakers, also manage to attract large film audiences, audiences composed of adults who rarely visit movie houses, and the more responsive members of the youthful community. Together, these two groups can make up an impressive profit-turning array of spectators. It must be obvious that the filmmaker who can produce a quality film of substance which can also attract and hold the attention of a mass audience must possess abilities far transcending the ordinary. His or her message must be delivered in a manner that is under­ standable to the average person, yet deep enough to please those who demand nourishment in their entertainment diet; the film must not be pompous, pretentious, pedantic, or overbearing—and it must entertain. It can be as raucous as a Marx Brothers comedy, which the discriminating will easily recognize as a sharp satire of our social and political structures; as brilliant as Doctor Zhivago, which deals with some of the greatest upheavals of revolutionary Russia while holding the viewer's complete attention with a superior love story; or as stark and stomach-turning as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which lays bare the tragedy and the cruelty of a mental in­ stitution while supplying more laughs than most Chevy Chase com­ edies. Each of these furnishes amusing or emotional entertainment to its viewers while providing substance for those thirsty enough to require it and intelligent enough to demand it. And they all bring our attention back to the filmmaker—which is really a collective noun.