Elia Kazan is a fascinating twentieth-century American. An immigrant, he was brought to America when he was only four. While he has never lost his Greek-Turkish roots-as witness 'America America -few native directors made films that so persistently dealt with American problems and subjects, ot that were so absorbed in the American regard for sincere intensity of performance.
He is a superficial radical. From 1934-36 , amid the Group Theater, Kazan was a member of the Communist party, and yet, in 1952, he reversed an earlier stand and declared the names of fellow Communists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Some may have consented to that admission, but others felt betrayed and note that shortly after the hearing Kazan signed a contract (at a reduced salary) in Hollywood. From this, the question arises: how committed are his films? Is he an exponent of tadical concern, or just a master of naturalistic melodrama? Is Kazan an original author of films or a great director of actors who manages to disguise conventional material and commonplace attitudes?
He joined the Group Theater in 1932, originally as as actor: he appeared in 'Waiting for Lefty' and 'Golden Boy' by Clifford Odets and later acted in two films directed by Anatole Litvak-'City for Conquest' in 1940 and 'Blues in the Night in 1941'. But direction ws his real aim and by the mid-1940's he ws the leading director of new plays n Broadway. This side to his work continued throughout most of his career: 'Truckline Cafe' in 1946, 'All My Sons' and 'A Streetcar Named Desire' in 1947, 'Death of a Salesman' in 1949, 'Camino Real' and 'Tea and Sympathy' in 1953, 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' in 1955, ' The Dark at the Top of the Stairs' in 1957, J M in 1958, 'Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959 and 'After the Fall' in 1963.
Kazan's first six films-allbut one made for Fox are barely recognizable as his. Their realism is in the muted postwar fashion, they are muffled by players like Dorothy McGure, Gregory Peck and Jeanne Crain, they take on controversial issues in a literal or discreet manner and they seem to reflect the chadracter of Darryl F Zanuck as much as Kazan himself. 'Boomerang and Panic in the Streets profit from being thrillers, enhanced by unfamiliar loctions and making their social points indirectly. 'Panic', especially, has some effective deep-focus photography of New Orleans by Joe MacDonald that dramatizes the contrived sense of community. But the crusading pictures-'Gentlemn's Agreement' and 'Pinky'-are naive and clumsy, showing very little awareness of the medium, and smothering their issues with sentimentality.
Kazan's personal impact began only with 'Wtreercar', a film taken from the stage, employing a method nurtured at the Actors Studio, founded by Kazan and Bobby Lewis in 1948. It was the new actor-originally Brando-that best expressd Kazan, although in this instance he was burdened by a traditionally florid actress, Vivien Leigh. Thus the film is more a conflict of acting styles than the poetic struggle Tennessee Williams described.
Of course, Kazan had directed 'Streetcar' on Broadway. In that process, through the casting of Marlon Brando and the very physical promotion of Brando's Staney Kowalski, Kazan actually countered some of the playwright's intentions. Kazan was not a homosexual. He invariably needed some kind of sexual investment in a show-imaginative and actual. So he made the Stanley-Stella bond more central and arousing than Williams had intended. He also shifted Blanche, from heroine to natural victim. And so the play worked in part, in 1947, because its poetry had been converted into a raw need Kazan could feel. That incident is a clue to his appetite for acting and actors. For Kazan backed the psychological thrust of Method acting most when he could himself identify with a character. In a real sense, he made the theatre as sexy as movies.
The next films are deeper explorations into emotional naturalism in action: Brando as Zapata; Brando, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, and Lee J Cobb in 'On the Waterfront; James Dean, Raymond Massey, and Julie Harris in 'East of Eden'; Carroll Baker, Eli Walach and Malden in 'Baby Doll'. Zapata still looks an original movie, but 'On the Waterfront' is glossy with skill and has less to do with the New York docks than with the mixture of grand guignol and neo-realism. It is certainly emotional, but the feelings are all planned in advance, and the possible comparison between the Brando who informs on the mob and Kazan's own readiness to talk is embarrassing.
'East of Eden' is Kazan's best film: partly because of Dean's prickly hesitation; partly because the absorbing clash of acting styles (Sean and Raymond Massey) suited Steinbeck's high-class weepie novel; and also because CinemaScope seemed to stimulate Kazan into treating his camera with some of the emphatic care he lavished on actors. 'Baby Doll' while always a minor chamber play, is atmospheric and catches the tender humor of Williams. 'A Face In the Crowd' was the conscience-stricken radical, crudely manhandling the media and unable to deal with an intransigent chief actor. 'Wild River' is the concerned American thinking and feeling in unison, a more speculative film than Kazan usually allowed himself, subtle in its situation, its coloring, and its acting. 'Splendor in the Grass', however, is intense to the point of hysteria, the most extreme instance of Kazan's emotional involvement with his characters, the source of all that is vital and most alarming in his work. As a result, it is a violent film, lurching between great beauty (especially in Natalie Wood's performance) and excess.
At this stage, Kazan grew reflective on his own life. 'America America' was based on his novel, as was 'The Arrangement’, a very obvious commentary on materialism in America. Sadly, the defects of that film seem to Kazan its greatest virtues. The novels he wrote in the sixties and seventies were solidly second-rate, overwritten, and underthought. They showed how banal the energy of a director could seem on the page. But in the woeful 'Last Tycoon', Kazan had lost his essential energy.
After 1980, he had appeared occasionally in documentaries about Greece or the Actors Studio. But his largest venture was the writing of his lengthy biography, 'A Life'. The autobiography is far and away his best book, destructively candid and boastful about his treatment of women, but a lasting work, to be put beside his best films and his enormous glamorization of the American actor. For good and ill, this is one of the great lives in American theatre arts. But when the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar, in 1999, all the old enmities sprang up-and Kazan refused the chance of apologizing. He didn't feel it, AND THAT'S HOW HE DIRECTED PERFORMANCES.
His career was blemished by his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he identified eight entertainment figures as communists, all of whom were later blacklisted, and who later had a successful career as a best-selling novelist, died 2003 in New York City, aged 94.
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