buying a house
by Douglas Messerli
Ben Barzman (adaptation and
screenplay from a novel by Pietro Di Donato), Edward Dmytryk (director) Christ in Concrete (aka Give Us Our Daily Bread) / 1949
Rod E. Geiger’s British production
of Give Us Our Daily Bread (USA Christ in Concrete) must have appeared
in 1948 to the four Americans blacklisted by the Committee for House
Un-American Activities—director Edward Dmytryk, actor Sam Wanamaker, screenplay
writer Ben Barzman, and composer Benjamin Frankel—a project impossible to pass
up. None of these
Despite the rather melodramatic elements of the original novel, written
as Christ in Concrete by
Italian-American writer Pietro Di Donato (published in 1939), who based it on
his father’s death in 1923, the team clearly perceived in it the theatrical and
social elements which they had often sought out in their own art.
In the remarkable first scene of the film—in which a nearly
indecipherable figure stumbles across a black urban landscape before ducking
into a tenement building, and drunkenly lurching forward, floor by floor, in
what seems like an interminable struggle to reach his own apartment—reveals,
once more, just how influential German Expressionist film was in the creation
of the American film noir tradition.
And even the opening credits, closing in on a scene of the same tenement
buildings from its backyard, suggest the director’s ties to Italian neo-realism
in this film.
Once that obviously drunken, clearly desperate man reaches his domicile,
breaking down the door to enter, we realize that we are witnessing the near-end
of a tragic set of circumstances—the failure of a marriage, a family, and an
American dream—that the rest of the movie, in a slow spiral back to beginning
of events, will reveal to us over the course of the film’s nearly two hours.
In many respects, as The New
York Times critics Bosley Crowther correctly summarized in his original
review, the makers of this film have made an “earnest attempt to capture the
hard yet wistful quality of Mr. Di Donato’s tale.”
They have set the
poignant story of the bricklayer's struggle to
acquire a home for
his wife and family in surroundings
which have the
cluttered look of the lower East Side of
Manhattan—the sleazy
tenements, the Mulberry Street
cafes and the union
halls and constructions at which bricklayers
spend a lot of time.
But, in the end, I have to agree with Crowther’s conclusions that these set pieces can’t keep us from the realization that the delusions, human failures, and simple inabilities of the one family upon which Christ in Concrete focuses do not total up to the tragedy its creators claim for it.
By 1949, however, when this film appeared,
so many Americans were suddenly realizing that dream that in a few years whole
suburban communities would sprout up to utterly change the American landscape,
bringing some of the same squalor of city living to previously polished
downtown edifices. Whole areas of once vibrant immigrant neighborhoods were
being abandoned for the look-alike wooden boxes on cement-lined avenues on the
outskirts of dying towns.
Today, after decades of returning
refugees from these truly sub-urban territories to those previously forbidding
brick and mortar edifices, Annuzaluta’s dream of a Brooklyn home seems oddly as
bourgeois as the regentrification of that same New York borough today.
Yet Dmytryk and his story, in its
straight-laced focus, demands that we single out Geremio as a kind of “Christ,”
a man who suffers nearly everything for his and his family’s salvation.
Presented more as a Job than a Christ, Geremio is also palpably human in his
temporary abandonment of his wife for his former love, Kathleen (Kathleen
Ryan)—a relationship doomed, at least from the audience’s point of view, from
the beginning, given Annuzaluta’s saintly face and demeanor. Worse yet, we are
asked to forgive Geremio for undertaking a new job as foreman for a dishonest
architect friend and involving his old acquaintances in the dangerous situation
of constructing a building without proper worker protections—all for the sake
of fulfilling Annuzaluta’s dream.
That Geremio ultimately breaks with
Kathleen and seeks out the forgiveness of his worker friends and aspires for
acquittal through his macho acts of standing before every wall that might come
tumbling down, still does not elevate him, I am afraid, to sainthood. Nor does
his shocking, but perhaps inevitable death, as he is buried alive in a sea of
cement, encapsulate him in forgiveness. Unlike Christ, when faced with
temptation, he has quite regularly given in. And Dmytryk’s attempt to cloak
Geremio’s horrific death in a loud confessional plea transforms what might have
been emotionally shattering into a melodramatic, almost laughable mea culpa.
Similarly, Annuzaluta’s monologue against
the idea of the men attempting to attach a monetary sum to the life of a man,
may have seemed to the film’s makers a kind of dirge to capitalist greed, but
it quick sputters into a hymn of her vulgar aspirations: finally Geremio is
able to buy her and her children a house!
Given all of his many brilliant cinematic
techniques, one wants to love and admire Dmytryk’s film, and to assert its
value to a society that so utterly rejected it when it was first shown;
certainly it deserved better than its one week appearance in US theaters,
spurned, in part, because of the unconscionable labeling and dismissal of the
political views of its makers. Yet, this film’s process of shifting through the
dough of a singular being results in a creatively flat product that we perceive
cannot even be served up as a Eucharist loaf, let alone a staple of one’s daily
diet.
Los Angeles, August 13, 2014
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2014).
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