Customer Reviews

Christ in Concrete

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Although I thought the movie was less controversial in content than what the title and the description suggest, I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The subject matter, which explores one man's downfall during the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, has already been discussed in American films and novels, such as Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. What is very different about this film, however, is the dark and un-Hollywood way in which the protaganist meets his destiny. There's no Disney ending here. For a film that has been virtually destroyed and banned in the U.S., Christ in Concrete is palatable for a wide audience, and I would recommend it as a required viewing in a high school history class.

Hollywood has never shown much dedication to social realism, and when it has it's usually set it within the context of crime and criminality. If it takes place in an urban setting the movie is about gangsters, in non-urban settings it cowboys gathering around a lynching. John Ford's 1940 `The Grapes of Wrath' is an exception that proves the rule. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that Edward Dmytryk's powerful CHRIST IN CONCRETE (1949) was filmed in England, during a period in his career when Dmytryk was blacklisted by Hollywood.

Adapted from Pietro di Donato's novel, CHRIST IN CONCRETE is the story of Geremio (Sam Wanamaker), a bricklayer in New York City. The story takes place during the decade preceding the Great Depression. One day Geremio sees a photograph of an Italian family and declares, pointing at one of the young women in the photograph, "I want to marry her!" Soon Annuziata (Lea Padovani) is debarking in New York and the marriage indeed takes place. Annuziata's dream is to own a home, her great dream, and she came to America with the understanding that Geremio was a homeowner. Not quite. Geremio is saving money for a home, but work is spotty in these relative boon times. A bricklayer works maybe one week out of three. They will save, of course, but it will be a very long time before they have the $500 dollars needed to make the down payment on their dream home. Tragically, beyond their knowledge, their dream of a home is in a deadly race with a stock market that is on the verge of crashing and plunging the country into the Great Depression.

Such is the set-up for this unique film. There's a gritty, deep shadowed, urban realist look to CHRIST IN CONCRETE that's a bit at odds with the sometimes stilted dialogue and melodramatic treatment given to the material. Wanamaker is good as the man slowly being beaten down by the world. Padovani is transcendent as the oft-disappointed wife. In his biography Dmytryk says he'd never had the freedom as a director he enjoyed on CHRIST IN CONCRETE. If that's the case he should have been given a free rein more often. This is an impressive, deeply felt movie.

Also included on the dvd is a 30-minute `monodrama,' an orchestral piece writer by composer Harold Seletsky. A monodrama, the on-screen text tells us, is a `complex union of words and music.' Anyway, Eli Wallach narrates an adaptation of the piece, very dramatically, to a closely interwoven musical score. `Memories in Concrete' is a 30-minute dialogue between son Peter di Donato and film scholar Bill Wasserzieher which tells us the history of the play, book, and movie. `Home Movies' is a 26-minute compilation of videotapes and home movie films of Pietro di Donato presented as a montage. There's a circa 1990 videotape of di Donato at the Cooper Union, kibbitzing for 90-seconds with then New York City mayor Mario Cuomo in 1992, etc. I didn't find either the dialogue of the home movies all that illuminating. The Stills section contains a number of stills from the movie.

This film was on Hollywood's blacklist & had been totally lost until recently. Based on Pietro Di Donato's novel it is the story of Southern Italians who came to America to secure jobs, family, and home.....the American dream.

Set in the 1920's this black and white DVD is the story of the young men who were the bricklayers for the buildings in New York. It takes place over several years, and begins with a traditional Italian wedding. The struggles these Italians endured in the 1920's and during the Depression show the hardships these men & women endured and the love, determination, and sacrifices they had to make.

This movie was quite controversial. It does not show the good side of the employers or even those in power to help when there is so obvious a problem. You get the sense of the discrimination the immigrants experienced. However, the movie only covers a portion of the excellent book. One that will haunt you even more.

In 1983 at a film conference in Catania, Sicily, Prof.Peter Bondanella and I presented papers on "Christ in Concrete." These were later published, in English, in the Italian journal "Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani" (1983), and I believe they were the first extended commentaries on "Christ in Concrete."
The paper by Prof. Bondanella, author of what has become the standard history of post-World War II Italian cinema, was titled "Edward Dmytryk's 'Christ in Concrete' and Italian Neorealism." My paper was titled "'Christ in Concrete': Fiction into Film."
Bondanella's paper includes the following observation: "It is time that a little-remembered but interesting film CHRIST IN CONCRETE (1949) be reevaluated, not only for its intrinsic merits as a work of art (which are considerable) but also because it stands as one of the very first and perhaps the best example of a film produced by the Hollywood system which owes a substantial debt to the seminal cinematic movement of Italian film history, neorealism."
My paper, based partly on lengthy conversations I had with Edward Dmytryk and partly on close comparisons of Donato's short story and novel with the film's screenplay and the film itself, contains the following: "Geremio [in the movie] is destroyed because he allows his life to have no meaning beyond sacrifice to another's obsession. His affirmation that man does not/should not signify that man should live only for others....Some critics have associated Geremio's name with Jeremiah, the biblical prophet of dirges and lamentations. One could also associate it with the term 'jerry-building' -- Geremio is a collapsing man with a collapsing life who is wiped out by the collapsing building that he erects."

I am a big fan of Edward Dymtryk and expected to see in this film a hard hitting film noir combined with class conscious, social realism (as the DVD copy advertises). Something like Dymtryk 's Crossfire, if not a variation on Last Exit to Brooklyn. But this is plotwise a maudlin melodrama focusing on a failed marriage between a bricklayer and an Ialian immigrant he efectively tricks into marrying him by lying to her that he owns a house (her one condtion for marriage to him). She is a classic petit-bourgeois type. Forced to live in Manhattan instead of Brooklyn, she tries to adjust but resents her husband over time, and he eventually cheas on her (we larn this at the beginning of the film, which is mostly told to the mistress in flashback). To buy her the house he goes into management (inexplicably, he just wants to lay bricks!).

The pace is slow and the story gets quite boring quite quickly. The acting is often exaggerated and, well, melodramatic. (Melodrama can be great, of course, but this film is not Now, Voyager or Stella Dallas). The musical score is unimpressive, and visually, there is nothing happening here. There is one early Expressionistic shot of skyscrapers from below taken at an angle. Otherwise, this is a completely formulaic Hollywood product. I became so bored I stopped watching the film. Hard to believe it was blacklisted.

This terrible film is called "Give Us This Day" NOT "Christ in Concrete" and there's a reason for that. It is NOT the film version of Pietro di Donato's classic novel, Christ in Concrete, but a film version of the novel's backstory (a sort of prequel). Unfortunately, Christ in Concrete has NEVER been made into a film.