Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Holllywood Ten
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.20 (860 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0809319985 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-12-02 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Dmytryk's effort to fight his way out of blacklisting and back to active participation in the world of film-making is dramatically but appropriately presented."--Michael Bliss, author of "What Goes Around Comes Around: The Films of Jonathan Demme "and "Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah" . "This is a book written from the inside of a political hurricane made up of compromises and deceit in which the author, despite his idealistic impulses, managed to find himself
His reactions to other members of the Hollywood Ten and his recollection of conversations with them lend his book an immediacy that is not only informative but also absorbing. He goes on to provide a fair assessment of what then happened to him and the effect it had on the rest of his life.Dmytryk describes the activities, prejudices, and personal behaviors of all the parties enmeshed in the congressional hearings on communism in Hollywood. As a result, Dmytryk was fired by RKO and spent three years in England before returning to the United States to serve a six-month jail sentence and undergo a second round of hearings, during which he recanted and provided evidence against several of his former colleagues.In this personal and perceptive book, Dmytryk sharply chronicles the history of a particularly turbulent era in American political life while examining his own life before and after the events universally called the witch hunts. He details his brief membership in the Communist Party of America, explaining his initial commitment to what he perceived as communist ideals of civil liberties, economic justice, and antifacism, followed by his eventual disillusionment with the party as itbetrayed those ideals. Dmytryk's account is characterized by an openness born of a mature awareness of personal trial as history.. Most im
Russ Burgos said Spotlights HUAC's Absurdity. It's hard to evaluate whether or not Dmytryk has written an "honest" memoir of his experiences during the Red Scare, because very few memoirists put pen to paper in order to show the world how bad they were. Nevertheless, Odd Man Out is a useful corrective to the conventional narratives about the Hollywood Ten, from the Left and the Right. The Hollywood Ten were not, strictly speaking, purely innocent; many, like Dmytryk, had in fact been members of the Communist Party -- though many, like Dmytryk, for quite short periods of time. Now . The Only Honest Memoir You'll Ever Find About The Ten This book is a much needed contribution to the historical record, to undo all the mindless junk that's been said for years about what the Hollywood Ten was all about. Dmytryk's memoir is candid, honest and gets to what the heart of the matter was all about. And because he was the only one of the Ten who recognized that, he is treated now as a pariah by those who seem to think that fealty to the American Communist Party is more noble than "naming names", even when in Dmytryk's case it forced him into prison in the name of beliefs he no . Odd Man Out Steven Hellerstedt In 1947 Edward Dmytryk, a rising young director of such films as "Murder, My Sweet" and "Crossfire," along with 11 other Hollywood writers and executives, was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, known to history as HUAC. HUAC's stated purpose for calling these 12 men was to expose the corrupting presence of communists in the entertainment industry and, it hoped, bar them from further employment in Hollywood. Ten, the famous Hollywood Ten, did indeed testify, were found in contempt of congress for their