If one is searching for some term to describe the insistent yet curiously inchoate body of work produced by Elia Kazan in the 1940s (primarily under the aegis of Darryl Zanuck and Twentieth Century-Fox), “realist” is as good a tag as any. Undertaking his first five efforts as a film director during the last phase of true studio filmmaking, Kazan referred often to his desire in this period to go beyond the back lot. In his book-length interview with Michel Ciment, Kazan complains of the soundstage airlessness of his acclaimed debut A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)—“the rooms were too clean, too nice, too much the work of the property man”—which became a “catastrophe” on his sophomore effort at MGM, the stock-footage epic The Sea of Grass (1947) with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. “I could still make that story,” said Kazan to Ciment, “but to do it right I would have to do it like Flaherty, to go out and spend a year with unknown actors [whose] faces are like leather, whereas Tracy’s face by that time in his life looked like the inside of a melon.”1
In these discussions, “reality” becomes an assumed, presumably self-explanatory virtue for both Ciment and Kazan. From his “first contact with reality on the screen”2 in the location-shot semidocumentary procedural Boomerang! (1947) to his “personality really appear[ing] for the first time”3 in the flavorful, New Orleans-set thriller Panic in the Streets (1950)—after the intervening retreat to the studio for the anti-Semitism exposé/Zanuck show-pony Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and its anti-racist companion piece Pinky (1949)—“reality” functions as shorthand for, and a gauge of, Kazan’s auteurist development. Indeed, Panic in the Streets, with its memorably atmospheric evocation of tenements and docklands, has been duly singled out as the obvious precursor to On the Waterfront (1954), as per Thomas Pauly: “Kazan was left with the lingering impression that [Panic in the Streets] comprehended material from which another even better movie might be made . . . a more violent, more emotionally complex struggle could be created from conditions on the waterfront, the brutality of its way of life, the fearful, suspicious reserve of its residents.”4
In all these readings the familiar auteurist teleology gets full play, a hindsight-derived narrative of a coherent, unique artistic personality emerging from previously impersonal or compromised material, and further, a transference of “reality” from the objective to the subjective. The story of Kazan’s emergence as an artist has always been bound up with his increasingly intense expression—most prominently via Brando—of the psychic and emotional depth of the individual. “Direction finally consists of turning Psychology into Behavior,” he had first written in his notebook for the stage production of The Rose Tattoo in 1947,5 and this focus on interior realism, a turning away from the “objective” demands of the semidocumentary form, has consistently been associated with Kazan’s cinematic maturation. As Brian Neve recounts, “Kazan felt that the cycle of Fox semidocumentary films, including his own Boomerang!, had become a ‘formula,’ of ‘cold action against brick backgrounds.’ Instead he wanted to dig deeper into reality and to handle the people with a ‘WARMER FEELING’ ”—setting out once again the conflation of reality/emotionality/artistry that characterizes readings of Kazan’s career, and thus the continued classification of Boomerang! and Panic in the Streets as formative preludes to the emerging auteur.6
It would of course be disingenuous to claim that Kazan’s filmmaking skill does not develop considerably by the time of Panic in the Streets, or that his increasing freedom (both artistic and financial) after the success of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) did not allow him to choose and develop projects in which he was particularly interested. Yet evolution aside, what is less remarked on is how much Kazan retained from this earlier period, both ideologically and stylistically. If Boomerang! and Panic in the Streets, as per the received narrative, did indeed offer openings onto reality within which Kazan’s personality as an artist could express itself, those openings were part of a larger generic, stylistic, and ideological context. In the brief period lasting roughly from 1945 to 1948, the semidocumentary format became a prominent point of reference not only for a modular change in studio filmmaking, but for progressive hopes about the new, civic-educational role that Hollywood films could perform in postwar American society. Kazan, who by this time had migrated to the left-liberal center of the political spectrum and away from the collective ideals that had helped fuel his artistic and political formation with the Group Theatre, fit snugly into this model of institutional instruction.
As much as any self-directed evolution, the emergence of Kazan as auteur was facilitated by the disintegration of this earlier project and the progressive hopes invested in it, along with the rapid fragmentation of the intrinsically unstable semidocumentary format. However, that format’s inclination toward instruction, and the concomitant belief that the ever more “fearful” and “suspicious” residents of postwar America required that instruction, did not entirely disappear, and Kazan’s work of the early fifties—particularly Viva Zapata! (1952) and On the Waterfront—continues to bear its traces. Kazan’s stylistic and artistic evolution comprised as well a strategic transformation of the instructional imperatives that had been integral to his cinematic apprenticeship, articulated now not in the declamatory fashion of the 1940s but absorbed more invisibly into the films’ dramatic structure and their aura of heightened realism. The first stirrings of this transformation are evident in the passage from Boomerang! to Panic in the Streets, and an examination of these two earlier works may give evidence of those values that Kazan, well into his true heyday in the 1950s, continued to take for granted.
Though there were certainly precursors to the postwar semidocumentary cycle in such eve-of-war items as Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), the format proper was inaugurated by the surprise success of Henry Hathaway’s The House on 92nd Street (1945), detailing the (supposedly) true-life account of the FBI’S infiltration and destruction of a Nazi spy ring attempting to smuggle atomic secrets out of the United States. As laid down by The March of Time newsreel producer Louis de Rochemont and an initially hesitant Darryl Zanuck, who “was clearly concerned that this innovatory form of film might place factual accuracy above drama,”7 the emergent format would be characterized by the use of real-life stories (often drawn, as narration would remind the viewer, “from the files of government agencies”), typically framed as investigative narratives; location shooting, often with the employment of local people as extras or in small parts; a flat, reportorial style of narration and presentation that emphasized the drama of procedure rather than more flamboyant varieties of suspense; and a subordination of the individual particularities of protagonists to their institutional functions—often helped via the casting of dutiful journeymen such as Lloyd Nolan in The House on 92nd Street, though such stars as James Cagney and Jimmy Stewart, in Hathaway’s semidocumentary follow-ups 13 Rue Madeleine (1947) and Call Northside 777 (1948), respectively, would also occasionally be recruited.
Elia Kazan and cinematographer Joe MacDonald shooting on location in a petite New Orleans bar for Panic in the Streets. Kazan employed actual locations and local people to provide the film with a gritty, real-world atmosphere. Photo courtesy of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives.
The enthusiastic public response to certain of these semidocumentary thrillers was matched by far grander hopes from a more rarefied audience. As Will Straw asserts in his excellent essay “Documentary Realism and the Postwar Left,” “It was an article of faith among progressive postwar thinkers that the wartime collaboration between Hollywood and the institutions of wartime public education had produced a model of civic-minded filmmaking appropriate to postwar life.”8 The initially warm reception of the semidocumentary indicates the persistent hold the doctrine of realism had over the Left, the broad spectrum of progressive opinion the format satisfied, and the range of antecedents and projects to which it could be attached. For the Communist or fellow-traveling Left, the semidocumentary’s provenance could be traced back to the Popular Front-era example of Pare Lorentz and Frontier Films (on whose 1937 documentary The People of the Cumberland Kazan had acted as assistant director). For liberal progressive writers and filmmakers, the format’s deglamorized protagonists represented a healthy continuation of the collective heroes of the wartime combat films; and although Straw notes that “The emotionally flat heroes or male couples of institutional procedurals [are] weak inheritors of the battle film’s dryly determined collectives,” they still give evidence of “the mid-1940s suspicion of sentimental individualism.”9
At the most ambitious end of the progressive spectrum, audience fascination with the meticulous, process-oriented narratives of the semidocumentaries, coupled with the format’s institutional basis, singled it out as a potentially valuable vehicle of civic instruction: “A rationalist project for postwar cinema imagined fiction films engaged in an ongoing transfer of knowledge between the most innovative of midcentury intellectual disciplines (like psychiatry or sociology) and the moviegoing public.”10 Whatever form such hopes took, in this period the new strain of documentary realism became strongly linked to progressive, democratic values. As opposed to the “emotionalism” and sensation of thrillers such as The Big Sleep (1946),11 the semidocumentary’s mode of rational, institutionally sanctioned procedural investigation read as a veritable demonstration—to cite Kazan’s thematic epigram for Panic in the Streets in his production notes—of “Democracy at Work”12—“democracy” in this formulation traveling under the guise of enlightened paternalism.
Along with The House on 92nd Street, Call Northside 777, and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), Kazan’s Boomerang! was one of the most celebrated and widely discussed specimens of the semidocumentary. Adapted by Richard Murphy from “The Perfect Case,” a Reader’s Digest story by Fulton Oursler, Boomerang! offers a pseudonymous account of how Homer Cummings—designated Henry Harvey in the film, and essayed by a dependably stolid Dana Andrews—a former Connecticut state’s attorney and later attorney general under FDR, unraveled the seemingly watertight murder charge against a wrongly accused suspect in the inexplicable slaying of a beloved local clergyman. Opening with the murder and flashing back to establish the slain pastor’s saintly credentials, the film tracks the increasingly frustrating manhunt for the killer, whose only identifying traits are that he wore a dark coat and light hat on the night of the murder. As political pressure mounts—courtesy of members of the city’s precarious reform government and their electoral rival, a reptilian local newspaper editor—and public paranoia and indignation (fanned by the editor’s yellow journalistic tactics) builds to a fever pitch, the police expand their net to bring in anybody even faintly resembling their vague description. This seems to hit pay dirt when the police finally pull in one John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy), an embittered, unemployed veteran with a dark coat, a light hat, and a .32 revolver that forensic tests establish as the murder weapon.
When he has been coerced into confession after forty-eight sleepless hours and positively identified by all eyewitnesses as the murderer, Waldron’s fate appears sealed until his duly appointed prosecutor, Harvey, troubled by as yet undisclosed discrepancies in the case, announces that he intends to prove Waldron’s innocence. Defying his political allies—including a threat of blackmail from one, the crooked real estate speculator Paul Harris (Ed Begley)—as well as outraged public opinion (which at one point manifests itself as a would-be lynch mob), Harvey systematically dismantles the police interrogation report, eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence to win Waldron’s freedom. And while this triumphal narrative of justice vindicated cannot, following its real-world model, conclude with the apprehension of the real killer, a noticeably sweaty fellow in the courtroom audience—previously seen in flashback confessing some unspecified, and apparently unmentionable, compulsion to the pastor—turns up dead in a car wreck shortly afterward. (Democracy, like other intangibles, apparently works in mysterious ways.)
What self-consciously elevates Boomerang! above the status of rote thriller or courtroom drama and into a treatise on democracy-at-work is its proudly proclaimed grounding in reality. Shot in Stamford, Connecticut, purportedly on many of the locations where the actual case transpired—a disingenuous claim, as the incident actually occurred in Bridgeport, which denied permission to shoot in its streets13—and featuring residents as extras and select nonprofessionals (including a local policeman and Kazan’s uncle Joe Kazan) in small roles, Boomerang! plainly aims to capture more of its surroundings than the closed-off world of a “pure” procedural like The House on 92nd Street. As Straw notes, the enthusiasm for the film evinced by such commentators as Siegfried Kracauer and Parker Tyler turned on its movement beyond the somewhat sterile parameters of the semidocumentary’s institutional starting point and out into the “social textures” (in Kracauer’s wording) from which the story emerges. “As narratives got under way and characters followed their investigative paths into Kracauer’s ‘social textures,’ the richness and diversity of those textures were always at odds with the solemn flatness of the institutional point of departure,” writes Straw.14
Indeed, not only is Boomerang! “perhaps the least institutionally centered of films within the semidocumentary cycle,”15 but it even appears to make something of an attack on some of the very institutions the format had been designed to celebrate. While the corruption of the city’s reform government is localized in the person of Harris, the rank opportunism of the other city council members is not scanted by Kazan, particularly in a scene where Harris and the mayor loom over the skeptical Harvey at his desk, delightedly leering over the open-and-shut case against Waldron and the political dividends it will pay, and promising Harvey the state governorship if he successfully prosecutes the case. Though Lee J. Cobb’s harried police chief is rendered sympathetically, the increasingly arbitrary exercise of police power in the hunt for the killer is certainly not looked on favorably—not least because, as against the rationalist exercise of professional prowess evinced by the institutional actors in other semidocumentaries, this investigation is hysterical, desperate, and thus profoundly irrational. Most interestingly, the film’s embodiment of that specialized knowledge that certain sectors of progressive opinion hoped to impart to the public—a state-appointed psychiatrist (Dudley Sadler) working with the police—is depicted as a somewhat clueless accessory to the railroading of Waldron during his interrogation, and is later dressed down on the stand by Harvey.
In exemplifying the semidocumentary format, Boomerang! could thus simultaneously be seen as turning some of its fundamental premises on their heads, and carrying documentary realism into that sphere of social criticism that the Left continued to view as its highest calling. Yet while certain reflexes of Kazan’s leftist past might be read into such elements, there is no sustained systemic critique of the forces that allow Waldron to be convicted, which is the crucial endpoint of the leftist documentary ideal. Apart from the familiar target of the venal editor (who plots strategy at his country club), the institutions that have colluded in this miscarriage of justice are eventually let off the hook. The police force and city government (Begley’s desperate swindler aside) are finally shown, sympathetically, as being misled rather than ill-intentioned, and properly repentant: after Waldron is cleared, the same mayor whose fortunes were riding on Waldron’s conviction stands supportively alongside Harvey, the very man who has cost him his crucial political victory.
If these institutional representatives are eventually returned to the side of the angels, tellingly, Harvey’s greatest condescension during his courtroom performance is directed toward the eyewitnesses to the murder, each of whom is crucially mistaken in some detail of his or her original testimony. While these successive revelations could have been portrayed as the chilling ease with which fleeting impressions can be built into damning accusations, the authoritative air with which Harvey quashes each witness’s statements cannot help but carry an overtone that these factual errors are personal failings on the part of these ordinary citizens—most obviously in the case of Waldron’s vengeful ex-girlfriend, whose insistence that she saw Waldron just before the murder quite clearly tips the scale between mistaken impression and active malice.
In demonstrating the various follies of the eyewitnesses’ testimony, Harvey is playing not only a legal but also a moral-educational role. Not only correcting error, Harvey gives a lesson in civic virtue via the rationalist pursuit of verifiable truth, as he minutely explains how he and his dedicated (and previously unseen) functionaries conducted a series of “experiments” (Harvey uses the word himself) to demonstrate how the various facets of eyewitness testimony could not possibly have been fully accurate.
Truth/reality and moral instruction are thus made coterminous—and in doing so, they reassert the inherently institutional basis of this “least institutionally centered” of semidocumentaries. The opening narration’s purposeful omission of the name of the city in which these events took place, and its lyrical evocation of it as a veritable Anytown, USA, serves two purposes: to make the film’s social texture familiar and comforting to the audience, the better to emphasize the drama of the radically unsettling events that beset it; and further, to make Harvey’s ultimate victory, implicitly, the victory of the system and nation he represents. (After all, as the closing narration reminds us, the real-life Harvey did not receive the tainted reward of the governorship but was appointed attorney general of the United States, the highest recognition of the institutionalized democratic values he stands for.)
“Social texture” is thus ultimately contained within the universalizing impulses of institutional prerogative. While the location shooting constitutes a vital part of the film’s contract with its viewers—the promise of bringing them closer to reality—the locations are fundamentally neutral until activated by the orchestrated spectacle of procedure that occurs within them. Rather than burrowing deeper inside those textures, the film’s investigation only allows them to be catalogued. When a montage sequence shows dozens of men being rounded up and paraded through lineups, the film’s tone fluctuates ambiguously between a certain reserved indignation at the harassment of the innocent and a detached curiosity at these societal specimens that have been assembled under the institutional gaze. (“Angry men, indignant men, beaten men, and dazed men; men with long criminal records, and simple men snatched from peaceful pursuits, all to be shoved into the glare of the line-up platform,” intones the narrator over this sequence, helpfully breaking down and classifying the human material before the audience.) Institutional process is the necessary completion of Boomerang!’s realist project, not only making reality legible to the viewer but becoming commensurate with it.
Police chief Robinson (Lee J. Cobb, front right) and state’s attorney Henry Harvey (Dana Andrews, rear right) present a lineup of possible murder suspects in a publicity still for Boomerang! Witnesses will falsely accuse John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy, suspect number 5). Photo courtesy of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives.
Just as this ability of the semidocumentary to harness realism to an institutionalized discourse—or rather a discourse of institutions—contributed to its vogue among progressive opinion in the early postwar period, that same ability soon caused it to fall from left-wing grace. Social-problem doyen Zanuck’s application of the semidocumentary mode to William Wellman’s The Iron Curtain (1948), a staunchly anticommunist account of the recent defection of Igor Gouzenko (played by Boomerang!’s Dana Andrews, no less), caused an uproar from many of the same voices that had formerly sung the format’s praises. Yet while the susceptibility of the semidocumentary to use as a propagandistic affirmation of the Cold War state apparatus—thus betraying the paternalistic progressive faith in the format as a vehicle of enlightened civic instruction—seems a logical result of its institutional basis, the format was by no means monolithic enough to make this evolution inevitable.
Indeed, the semidocumentary mode had begun to fragment almost as soon as it had become established, disassembling itself into an assortment of appropriable, mutable techniques applicable to any number of ends—not only ideological, as in the rather isolated case of The Iron Curtain, but chiefly stylistic. “In many films in the late forties and early fifties,” notes Foster Hirsch, citing Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947), Dassin’s The Naked City, Anthony Mann’s Side Street (1950) and Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, among others, “expressionist motifs invaded location shooting, transforming the real city into moody echoes of the claustrophobic studio-created urban landscapes.”16 Moreover, this transference or adaptation of studio effects to real locations was complemented by an increasing infusion of that “emotionalism” that the semidocumentary’s studied dryness had previously guarded against. Whereas a film like Boomerang! had sought to contain hysteria and abnormality (such as the closet pervert “real” killer) within its stance of levelheaded rational inquiry, the sensational and the grotesque quickly staked their place within the format, whether through performance—as in Richard Widmark’s immortal, giggling psycho turn as Kiss of Death’s Tommy Udo—or such memorable sequences, courtesy of Mann and cinematographer John Alton, as the steam-room murder in T-Men (1947) or the gruesome death-by-harvester in Border Incident (1949).
From being an end in itself, documentary realism was being steadily subverted into a vehicle for more expressive or ostentatious stylistic endeavors, a development not lost on an ambitious director like Kazan. Panic in the Streets, Kazan’s second collaboration with Boomerang! scribe Murphy, not only offers a far less overtly didactic representation of reality than its predecessor, but supplants the earlier film’s voice-of-God, you-are-there assurances with an evocatively seedy, lived-in rendering of the New Orleans underbelly. Tracing the race-against-time quest of public health official Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) as he and his initially unwilling police counterpart Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) attempt to track down three killers who have been unknowingly infected with bubonic plague by their victim, the film evinces both a surprisingly brisk narrative drive and a remarkably fluid camera sense—as Kazan stated to Ciment, Panic in the Streets taught him for the first time that “the environment was not just something you played against, it was something you played inside of.”17 Kazan’s atmospheric use of shadowy train yards, the crisscrossing diagonals of tenement fire escapes, and the memorable, multileveled final pursuit through a coffee warehouse and underneath the docks may be his most obvious achievements, but he also brings a naturalness and flow to domestic scenes between Reed and his affectionately tart-tongued wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) and an expressionistic grotesquerie to the villainous side of the cast, getting much useful mileage out of a sweaty, hysterical Zero Mostel and the hulking yet strangely feline menace of Jack Palance.
Furthermore, this loosening of the strict semidocumentary mode allows for a far greater exploration of the setting’s uniquely rich “social textures.” Lacking Boomerang!’s omnipresent voice-over narration, which aligned itself with the surveilling, classifying, and controlling gaze of the film’s institutional actors, Panic in the Streets places those actors in far greater proximity to, and interaction with, a wide array of social groups, each with their own distinctive habits and habitus: a seaman’s hiring hall where the tight-lipped sailors inform Reed (who offers a cash reward for information about the dead man) that none of them is likely to talk to any authority figure out in the open; the captain of the ship that smuggled the dead man into the United States, who resents the intrusion of government representatives on his sovereign vessel; a Greek restaurant owner and his unknowingly infected wife whose decision to keep mum reflects the tendency of members of ethnic communities to stay “out of trouble”—that is, out of any kind of contact with the hegemonic mainstream of American society.
However, while Panic in the Streets thus offers a far richer social portrait than Boomerang! its dramatic engine is similarly predicated on the assorted fallacies of its societal specimens and the need for professionalized expertise to set them aright. Reed’s search is complicated not only by the difficulty inherent in locating the associates of an undocumented, recently arrived immigrant in a teeming city, but in the obstinacy and obstreperousness of all those he encounters. As Pauly notes, “Dr. Reed’s quest [becomes] an unnerving lesson in the public’s opposition to what it does not want to hear and its ingrained suspicion of governmental agents. . . . Widmark’s effectiveness derives largely from the circumstances of these scenes and their vivid illustration of a lonely individual battling an immovable community that refuses to act on its own behalf.”18 While Pauly correctly identifies the drama’s chief source of conflict, what his reading crucially omits is that the community has precious little opportunity to act on its own behalf. Reed, fearing that a general alert about the plague threat will spark a mass exodus from the city and an exponential spread of the virus, insists on keeping the reason for the citywide manhunt from the public—which later leads the now-compliant Warren to incarcerate a snooping reporter who upbraids Reed for this enforced secrecy and loudly proclaims the public’s right to know.
In a publicity still for Panic in the Streets, public health official Dr. Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) questions New Orleans longshoremen about suspicious passengers disembarking in the city. Kazan surrounded Widmark with real dockworkers and shot in the local union hall. Photo courtesy of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives.
Reed’s frustration in the face of this “immovable community” is thus at least partially a result of his own actions, springing from his distrust of ordinary citizens and a disbelief in their ability to act for their own welfare. That this does not scan as more ideologically damning during the course of the film is due to Kazan’s adeptness at weaving it into character and situation. Reed and Warren’s characterizations, in Kazan’s words, as “ordinary guys in ordinary spots, coping with outside threats,”19 may make them akin to the purely functional protagonists of the semidocumentary, but they are far more prickly and individuated than the institutional standard-bearers who preceded them. Not simply the face of professionalized, paternalistic expertise, Reed’s self-righteousness is linked to his own bruised self-esteem as an overworked, underpaid government functionary, unable to give his wife and son the life he wants for them and, most woundingly, unable to afford the second child he yearns for. Furthermore, the fact that Reed is proven emphatically right in keeping the plague a secret also robs him of public recognition and acclaim for his ultimate victory, such as that accorded Harvey at the conclusion of Boomerang! Unlike the object lesson in democracy afforded by Boomerang!’s courtroom setting, “democracy” in Panic in the Streets is something anonymous, ingrained, and those who exemplify it are ignorant of their own virtue. As Kazan quoted his friend and first producer at Fox, Bud Lighton, in notes he took during the shooting of A Tree Grows in Brooklyni”At the end [of a film], a person should say to the hero: ‘Gee! You did a great job’ and the hero shouldn’t know what the hell the other man is talking about.”20
If Lighton’s views were considerably shaped by his profoundly anticommunist, antiliberal “frontiersman” ethos—against which, as Kazan recounts tellingly in his autobiography, “my left-wing positions seemed provincial, my convictions shallow”21—his maxim applies with equal aptness to the functionalist cogs of the semidocumentary. While Widmark’s harried doctor can be read as creating a bridge between the objective, rationalist world of the semidocumentary’s institutionally sanctioned professionals and the subjective, emotional worlds Kazan would be drawn to in his fifties work, that quality of unawareness would become the key transformational agent in the ideological dimension of Kazan’s future work. While Panic in the Streets, despite its more vivid characterizations and infusion of that much-sought-after “warmer feeling,” still belongs to the declarative world of the semidocumentary and its insistent demonstration of how its principles are put into practice—at one point having Reed angrily enunciate the film’s one-world thesis when defying the city councilors’ claim to represent the best interests of the community (“we’re all in a community, the same one!”)—Kazan’s two overtly political collaborations with Brando in the 1950s, Viva Zapata! and On the Waterfront, do not represent an abandonment of this didactic, instructional imperative, but a reversal in its mode of address.
Whereas Boomerang! and Panic in the Streets convey their messages via protagonists who speak with the voice of instructional authority, lecturing the ordinary citizens who linger on the edges of the frame (and thus by extension the film audience), Brando’s Emiliano Zapata and Terry Malloy conversely assume the position of students in this tutelary dynamic, occupying the center of the films rather than being relegated to the wings. Zapata’s and Terry’s emotional awakenings are innately tied to their gradual ideological education—Zapata in the corruption of power and the amorality of Bolshevik-style professional revolution, Terry in the moral imperative of informing—educations now received from Kazan’s limning of the characters’ geographical and dramatic environments rather than from the semi-documentary’s podium lectures, and confirmed by their grim fates—fates that are duly dictated by the films’ emphatic tone of social and political realism. Reality itself, that sense of reality that Kazan so studiedly and skillfully cultivated, here supplants the personified mouthpieces of the earlier films, a disembodied, enveloping, and hence even more persuasive pedagogue.
Kazan’s artistic maturation in the 1950s can thus be read not simply as a progressive escape from the formulaic material he shouldered during his formative cinematic years but as a gradually changing emphasis in the stylistic and ideological reflexes bequeathed to him by the increasingly fissiparous semidocumentary format. Just as the semidocumentary promised audiences a greater contact with reality on film, so the acting revolution Brando and Kazan helped usher into Hollywood cinema from the theatrical stage was founded on the imperative of a deeper penetration into the reality of the human personality. What allowed Kazan to assume the purpled auteurist mantle was his skillful combination of these two realist projects, as well as the lingering, and increasingly vague, aura of political import invested in the earlier of the two. Not simply a movement toward a greater degree of truth, Kazan’s increasing contact with reality bore with it the residual codes and associations invested in the realist project during the years of his cinematic apprenticeship. How this affected Kazan’s apprehension of realism’s accompanying hypothetical—democracy—must for (thankful) reasons of space be left to others to gauge.
With thanks to Bart Testa
1. Michel Ciment, Kazan on Kazan (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 50–53.
2. Ibid., 55.
3. Ibid., 62.
4. Thomas H. Pauly, An American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 129.
5. Brian Neve, Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 34.
6. Ibid., 28.
7. Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1992), 105.
8. Will Straw, “Documentary Realism and the Postwar Left,” in “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, ed. Frank Krutnik et al. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 138.
9. Ibid., 139–40.
10. Ibid., 139.
11. Ibid.
12. Neve, Kazan, 28.
13. Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 142.
14. Straw, “Documentary Realism,” 141.
15. Ibid., 141.
16. Foster Hirsch, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), 67.
17. Ciment, Kazan on Kazan, 64–65.
18. Pauly, American Odyssey, 129.
19. Ciment, Kazan on Kazan, 64.
20. Ibid., 50.
21. Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), 251.
