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DAVID KALAT/ALL DAY ENTERTAINMENT - Page 1
 
 
 

With the release of Christ In Concrete, independent label All Day Entertainment has put together one of the company's best DVD packages.

Releasing 'movies that fell through the cracks' is the company's tagline and mandate, which translates as unearthing rare film treasures that may have remained forgotten and ignored, including B-movies by cult director Edgar G. Ulmer, and classics by such legendary filmmakers as Fritz Lang, and Luis Bunuel.

As you'll discover from our interview with astute owner/producer/film historian and writer David Kalat, conducted in the fall of 2003, producing a DVD with Special Features content isn't an easy chore, and can sometimes equal the work involved in securing and transferring the main feature elements for a DVD release.

Mark R. Hasan: How did Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete and some of the unique extras come to your attention?

David Kalat: This was an interesting situation where I was unfamiliar with the film, as I think most people were, because it received virtually no distribution in the United States. Books about films and articles about movies and all the resources that one reads to learn about film history tend to be written by people abut the things that they've seen - it makes obvious sense - so movies that aren't widely available or in circulation don't get written about; and then people don't know that they exist.

Like most people I had no idea that this film had ever been made, and then the family of Pietro di Donato… who own the rights to the film contacted me, and said that they thought this was something appropriate for my DVD company, and I agreed with them instantly. Legend had been that the film didn't really exist in any usable form - it had been shown theatrically a handful of times in the last twenty years, using a very poor-quality print. There are some school that have been teaching the film, and they were using that really awful looking print; so if you didn't bother to look you'd think that was the only thing available. But it had been preserved by the British Film Institute, and they had in fact original nitrate elements dating back to the film's original distribution, and those were the things that we used for the DVD.

MRH: Edward Dmytryk remains a fascinating and, I'm sure, still a controversial figure because of his connection with the House of Un-American Activities [HUAC], but his early films are classics; even his later work reveals solid craftsmanship.

DK: They had a retrospective of his stuff on Turner Classic Movies the other day, [and showed] a bunch of his films.

MH: He was very prolific. For someone who started off in the late Thirties/early Forties, he did manage to work all the way through to the Seventies.

DK: And that is part of the complication of his relationship to HUAC and the Blacklist era. It's one thing for me, as someone who obviously did not live through that era and has no personal grudge to bear, to be able to look with a more reasoned eye on what happened. Norma Barzman isn't the screenwriter of record of Christ in Concrete (1949) but in many ways she was as valuable a creative force behind the scenes as her husband, Ben Barzman, who's the screenwriter credited with the film. [Both] were afraid of being subpoenaed by HUAC and had left the United States in order to escape, and emigrated to England.

Eventually [they] settled in France, and Christ in Concrete was the vehicle by which they were able to make that transition. But they had not expected to be exiled for so long, because when Dmytryk ultimately testified, he named them - his old friends. But Dmytryk had nothing else to rely upon. Screenwriters were able to keep working in reduced circumstances during the Blacklist era by using pseudonyms or in other ways concealing their contributions to films, but directors couldn't; so if you couldn't be hired openly, you basically couldn't be hired.

He was no longer a member of the Communist party, and really didn't think that it was worthwhile for him to be in jail and having his martyrdom being used as a cause celebre by the Soviets. Because he did not want that, and felt that he had bills to pay and had to get back to work, the only way he was going to be able to work was to reach an accommodation with Congress, so testifying was really the only way that he could ever have a career again… He did build himself back up again, and keep working for many decades thereafter.

MH: I recently finished reading David Caute's biography on Joseph Losey, and there's a significant chapter devoted to his efforts to establish or maintain a career in Europe during the Blacklist, and the lunacy involved in the credit swapping that went on, where for a while they were allowing his name to appear on films, and then other times they weren't allowing it and substitute another name -

DK: Well that's part of why Christ in Concrete vanished. There was this kind of naïve attitude that they could use the film to break the Blacklist by not hiding behind pseudonyms, and by being very ostentatious; Edward Dmytryk gets above-the-title credit - this was 'Edward Dmytryk's film- and they were really being very open about it.

This had been a best-selling book in the United States just ten years previously. The film itself had been a very handsomely mounted production - it had won all these awards in Europe - and they honestly thought that when it came to the United States that it would be warmly received, that it would be a successful and critically acclaimed film, and that it would prove that audiences were not objecting to seeing movies made by people in this politically hellish situation.

Of course the exact opposite happened: there were protests. The film was withdrawn precisely for the very reasons the Blacklist had been created, which was fear of audience reaction, so it got orphaned. But it's funny when you look at some of the changes they were making precisely to accommodate the American censors. Why do that if you weren't expecting the film to be distributed in the U.S.?

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