Many people, hearing this name, think he is one of those German directors like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang escaped in the United States during World War II, but he isn't. Edward was born in Canada in 1908, in Grand Forks in the British Columbia from two Ukrainian parents, Micheal Dmytryk and Frances Berezowski. His father, who has a severe temper and was addicted to discipline, did various jobs, from trucker to engine expert. His family first moved to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles where his mother died. His father remarried and the young Edward adapted himself to the messenger job for $6 a week for what would become the Paramount Pictures (Famous Players-Lasky Corporation at the time). Then he made a career and became first a projectionist, then a cinema editor and finally a director, becoming a naturalized American. He debuted in 1935 with The Hawk and shot his first film known under the noir gender, Murder, My Sweet (1944) with Dick Powell, based on a Raymond Chandler’s novel. Then he directed Till the End of Time (1946) with Robert Mitchum and the legendary Crossfire (1947) with Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, which was Oscar-nominated for Best Director. He ended up in jail because of McCarthyism, for which those who had collaborated, even in superficial ways, with the Communist Party were persecuted by the authorities. He returned to cinema in 1952 with Stanley Kramer, and two years later he shot Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart and Van Johnson. He worked with Bogart even the following year with The Left Hand of God, then he directed Montgomery Clift in Raintree Country (1957) and The Young Lions (1958) and ended the Fifties with a big film starring Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, Warlock. But the same year, 1959, he signed a mediocre remake of the masterpiece with Marlene Dietrich The Blue Angel, this time starring Curd Jurgens and May Britt. We find his best tracks in the sixties in Walk on the Wild Side, The Carpetbaggers with George Peppard and Alan Ladd, Mirage and Alvarez Kelly, with William Holden and Richard Widmark. Then he made two blunders with Shalako, with the strange and unconvincing couple Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot, and the partial failure Bluebeard with Richard Burton. He ended his career with the sufficient The "Human" Factor with George Kennedy in 1975. After directing he taught in various universities and died at the age of 90 for a heart attack in 1999 in Encino, California.
