Bunuel1976 Review of Give Us This Day

Give Us This Day (1949)

GIVE US THIS DAY (Edward Dmytryk, 1949) ***1/2

[8/10 · 17 April 2009]

It took me a long while to purchase this one (by which time, most of the output by DVD-producing company All Day Entertainment – with whose president, film historian David Kalat, I had the pleasure of corresponding on a number of occasions – had gone out-of-print) and some more before I actually sat down to check it out. Having finally watched this, I must say that the mainly gushing reviews which I had read on the Internet upon the DVD's first appearance – citing the film as a neglected masterwork (though not quite director Dmytryk's best, in my opinion) were very much accurate; incidentally, the main feature bears the official title given above rather than that attached to the DVD i.e. Christ IN CONCRETE, actually the name of Pietro Di Donato's original source novel. Knowing of its pedigree – Dmytryk having famously been one of The Hollywood Ten, jailed for refusing to appear before HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) in view of his alleged past Communist leanings – and its theme – the domestic and professional troubles of struggling Italian immigrants in the construction business with a 1920s New York setting – I had expected to be somewhat unenthused by it, but the reverse proved to be the case, thanks largely to Dmytryk's unerring eye for detail and a handful of naturalistic performances (an achievement which seems all the more remarkable when considering that it was entirely filmed in England with a mostly British cast!). That said, one of the two leads was a genuine Italian – Lea Padovani – and the other an American, fellow victim of the blacklist Sam Wanamaker: both of them are terrific playing husband and wife, though he remains attached to friendly Kathleen Ryan, and their consistently precarious economic situation (exacerbated by the Wall Street crash of 1929) shatters the wife's dream of owning her own home. Also appearing in the film are Charles Goldner (the old man who actually got the couple together), Bonar Colleano, William Sylvester and George Pastell as Wanamaker's team-mates at work, Sidney James(!) as another construction operative who harbors ambitions to start his own company and wants the hero to get in on the business with him, and Karel Stepanek as the elderly landlord of the protagonists' house. In view of its inherent grittiness, unusual compositions (employed during melodramatic passages) and doomed hero, the film has been rightfully likened to the then-prevalent noir style – in which, as it happens, Dmytryk had already proved himself several times while still employable on his home turf. Despite its generous length (115 minutes) and the occasional Marxist viewpoint (it is clearly stressed that Wanamaker's downfall transpires because he dared to stand out from the crowd, even if all he wanted was to improve his family's conditions), the proceedings compel attention all the way through – culminating in the unforgettably harrowing sequence of the hero's death, engulfed in cement after the weak structure he had been supervising gives out. Regrettably, I did not have time to look into the numerous extras featured on the double-sided "Special Edition" DVD – I had actually made a resolution in this regard at the beginning of the year, but which I am now finding myself increasingly unable to accommodate! In closing, I cannot fail to mention Benjamin Frankel's superb music score – no wonder that one is even given the option to listen to it in isolation on the All Day disc.