What do we talk about when we talk about Elia Kazan?
We talk about his work. As an actor, director, and writer, Kazan’s groundbreaking contributions to American art and culture span over five decades and continue to permeate our popular consciousness. His participation in the activism of the Group Theatre, promulgation of the Method via the Actors Studio, and acclaimed direction of Broadway milestones such as The Skin of Our Teeth, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof situate him as the most influential director of midcentury American theater. With films such as the adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), and Splendor in the Grass (1961), Kazan made an equally indelible mark on cinema. Between 1948 and 1964 he was nominated for a Best Director Academy Award five times and won twice. His name is repeatedly linked with those of his many collaborators, including the era’s defining writers (Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck, Budd Schulberg) and stars (Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Warren Beatty).
Kazan’s films engage seriously with the social problems and conflicts of their day, but their timeless appeals to feelings of alienation, longing, and rebellion return them to us again and again—so frequently, in fact, that their oft-quoted scenes have become ripe for parody. While my undergraduate students—all born over a decade after Kazan’s last film was made—still root for Dean’s misjudged, mopey Cal in East of Eden, they are also quick to laugh when they catch Peter Boyle and John Belushi trading lines from On the Waterfront as “Dueling Brandos” on an old Saturday Night Live rerun, or when Homer Simpson embodies the boorishness of Stanley Kowalski in the much-loved 1992 The Simpsons episode “A Streetcar Named Marge.” They may never have seen A Streetcar Named Desire, but at the drop of a dime they will all yell “Stellllaaaaaaa!”
We also talk about Kazan’s life—in particular, his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952. Kazan was a member of the Communist Party for about eighteen months in the early 1930s while working with the Group Theatre, but he came to view Communism with suspicion and disgust after the Party began dictating artistic terms to its Group members and subjected him to a show trial. When Kazan was called to testify before HUAC during its investigation into the alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood, he initially balked at providing the names of former associates who were Party members but then changed his mind. Although Kazan remained a committed liberal, his testimony and the subsequent advertisement he published in the New York Times defending his decision to name names marked him as a traitor in the eyes of many on the Left, guilty of complicity and betrayal, careerism and pride.
Decades later, Kazan reflected on his decision to testify in interviews and his startlingly frank 1988 autobiography Elia Kazan: A Life, revealing his evolving and frequently mixed feelings about HUAC. A Life did little to satisfy Kazan’s critics—as evidenced by the controversy surrounding his receipt of an honorary Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1999—while also exposing him to additional charges of disloyalty—of a marital sort this time. From adulterous escapades in alleyways, described pages into the first chapter, through the tale of bedding Marilyn Monroe on the night after she decided to marry Joe DiMaggio, A Life opened all aspects of Kazan’s private life to scrutiny. The man was an obsessive observer, analyzer, and recorder of human behavior—especially his own. Was his autobiography an attempt to honestly and bravely account for his thoughts and actions—however flawed they sometimes were—or to preempt and thus deflect the criticism of others, so as to appear above it all?
All too often, what we talk about when we talk about Kazan comes down simply to the question one film scholar asked me: “Are you for or against?”
We’ve been talking about Kazan for over half a century now. Is there anything left to say?
Plenty.
In the wake of the opening of Kazan’s personal archive to researchers, the centenary of his birth, the accompanying film retrospectives, and recent books, now is the time to revisit Kazan, and in particular his cinematic legacy. The topics of conversation thus far have been meaty, and they deserve to be chewed over: his status as author, collaborator, and artist; his accomplished work with actors; his psychological approach to realism; his interest in social problems and family dynamics; and the stain of HUAC on our national, and in Kazan’s case personal, character. This book engages these subjects in new ways and expands the conversation, providing a survey of what a select group of film critics and scholars—some with prior publications on Kazan, others writing on him for the first time—find significant about his life and movies today. The authors chose their own themes and adopted a range of approaches, examining Kazan’s importance to American cinema from historical, industrial, aesthetic, and social perspectives. Not all of the authors are “for” Kazan—and they don’t always agree.
The book groups the essays together into a series of conversations about a shared topic or film and proceeds roughly chronologically through Kazan’s career. Some films are noticeably absent—nobody wants to spend time on The Sea of Grass (1947), it seems, and there appears to be a consensus that enough has been said about On the Waterfront. Other films emerge as worthy of expanded critical consideration, in particular Panic in the Streets (1950), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Wild River (1960), and America America (1963). Authors draw attention to Kazan’s visual style with unprecedented depth, emphasizing his use of staging and the environment to shape mood and express character psychology. And the relationship between Kazan’s life, politics, and art is plumbed in new ways, revealing fresh viewpoints on his approach to character, story, and aesthetics.
The initial essays provide an overview of Kazan and his films, raising key issues and questions that will be explored throughout. Jeanine Basinger, the curator of Kazan’s papers at the Wesleyan Cinema Archives, offers a personal reflection on his character, interests, and working methods. She discusses the life experiences that defined Kazan’s identity and shaped his worldview, including what drove a man in his sixties to archive a dance card from high school. Kent Jones initiates a discussion of Kazan’s aesthetics, highlighting the “luminous pockets of serenity” that alternate with the director’s more frequently noted scenes of impassioned fervor. Comparing and contrasting Kazan’s strategies for harnessing the specificity of time and place with those of Joseph Mankiewicz, Douglas Sirk, William Wyler, and Nicholas Ray, Jones argues for renewed attention to how Kazan articulates the relationship between character and environment through staging and mise-en-scène. Jonathan Rosenbaum reconsiders a survey of Kazan’s career that he wrote in 1973, when he found the director’s films “uneven, varied, and unsystematic.” While Rosenbaum champions Kazan’s work with actors and location, he finds his approach to storytelling frequently overwrought. Jones and Rosenbaum come closest to agreeing on Wild River, which both embrace for its quiet visual power and depth of feeling. Leo Braudy concludes the section with a focused consideration of Kazan as auteur and collaborator, using Viva Zapata! (1952) as a window into the director’s conflicted views on authority and power.
Braudy’s exploration of the relationship between Kazan’s politics and his aesthetics leads into the next set of essays—about Kazan’s decision to testify before HUAC and how it shaped his subsequent work. Victor Navasky reviews the controversy surrounding Kazan’s cooperation with HUAC in the context of recent revelations regarding the depth of Soviet spy infiltration in the United States during the Cold War. Navasky considers whether Kazan’s negative reputation as an informer should be reassessed—or, if he was guilty of betrayal, exactly what or who did he betray? Brenda Murphy continues the thread in her analysis of the first film Kazan made following his testimony, Man on a Tightrope (1953), about a Czechoslovakian circus troupe that escapes across the Iron Curtain. Murphy situates the film in relation to Boomerang! (1947), Panic in the Streets, Viva Zapata!, and On the Waterfront as a paean to the “man of individual conscience” battling authority, foregrounding its concern with threats to the artist’s right to self-definition and creative freedom. As such, she links the film to Kazan’s defense of his HUAC testimony and considers it a marker of his liberal anticommunism.
The critical and commercial success of On the Waterfront enabled Kazan to begin to break away from Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio where he had been under long-term contract, and venture into independent filmmaking with Newtown Productions. His two initial independent entries, Baby Doll (1956) and A Face in the Crowd, are the subject of the next essays. Brian Neve reveals the impetus of Kazan’s desire to produce and makes a case for Baby Doll as the harbinger of a new direction in his filmmaking. With its location shooting, extended takes, tonal shifts, adult-oriented themes, moral ambivalence, and lack of a clear resolution, Baby Doll finds Kazan experimenting with art cinema techniques rooted in an objective form of realism. Sam Wasson also considers the Newtown films, but argues that the partisan nature of Kazan’s approach to character undermines his humanist impulse. In his search for humor and humanism in Kazan’s films, Wasson champions the satirical A Face in the Crowd as the director’s most effective union of argument, complex character psychology, and comedy.
Mark Harris and Savannah Lee discuss several of the iconic characters and performances in Kazan’s films, digging below the surface to reveal hidden meanings. Harris explores the (homo)eroticization of the male movie star in Kazan’s films and the formal means that allow gay male moviegoers to construct parallel narratives of identification and desire in A Streetcar Named Desire, Splendor in the Grass, East of Eden, and Wild River. Harris considers the films’ “generosity of spirit and complicated empathy” in relation to Kazan’s own attitudes toward sex and gender, an approach also adopted by Lee in her exploration of the director’s presentation of female pain. Seeking to balance previous accounts of Kazan’s work that privilege his male protagonists, Lee tackles his interest in the inner lives of women, highlighting the stories of female suffering and strength found in Pinky (1949), A Streetcar Named Desire, and Splendor in the Grass. Together Harris and Lee find Kazan’s depiction of sexual desire and gender roles in his middle-period melodramas to be unusually sensitive, modern, and rare for the era.
Three essays return to the topic of location and staging initially considered by Jones, combating the lack of sustained attention historically granted to Kazan’s visual style. Andrew Tracy and Patrick Keating explore Boomerang! and Panic in the Streets as examples of the semidocumentary production cycle that swept Hollywood in the late 1940s. Tracy considers the two films in the context of the progressive goals that underlay the adoption of documentary realism in midcentury American film and Kazan’s own didactic inclinations. He suggests that Kazan’s semidocs are transitional works in the director’s formulation of a hybrid approach to realism that emphasizes both the physical world and inner subjectivity. Keating’s detailed analysis of Boomerang! and Panic in the Streets illustrates how they challenged genre conventions and visually suggested the unpredictability of contemporary urban space. Through the use of long takes and deep, multiplanar staging, Kazan locates narrative information throughout the frame and highlights random connections, anonymous meetings, and surprise appearances in a complex and pioneering way. My own essay continues in this vein by addressing Kazan’s employment of depth staging in East of Eden and Wild River. I argue that the arrangement and movement of characters within a defined environment is an aesthetic tool that is just as important to Kazan’s films as his actors’ performances. The staging strategies he adopts for his two CinemaScope movies situate him in the company of visual storytellers ranging from D. W. Griffith to Hou Hsiao-hsien and widescreen innovators such as Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger.
The final contributions to the book focus on Kazan’s late works, including Wild River and America America, two of his personal favorites. Richard Schickel examines the inspiration for Wild River and its production history, highlighting in particular Kazan’s changing conception of the film’s central protagonist, played by Montgomery Clift, during script development and shooting. Schickel finds a central theme of the film to be “the hidden price we pay for our choices,” a theme that Hayden Guest picks up on in his examination of the narrative and stylistic threads that interweave the director’s last four films, America America, The Arrangement (1969), The Visitors (1972), and The Last Tycoon (1976). All four films concern male protagonists who are “unmoored and unstable,” struggling with personal and professional decisions that frequently reflect Kazan’s own. While Guest finds the themes and structures of the final films in keeping with Kazan’s recurring narrative interests, he considers how their stylistic experimentation sharply foreground the ambiguity previously entwined with classical conventions in his earlier work.
Taken as a group, these essays reveal Kazan to be a flawed man and an uneven artist, but one who nevertheless created transformative films that shaped the terrain of postwar American cinema. His close attention to human behavior—including strengths and weaknesses—drove him to represent truth both didactic and ambiguous in all its ambiguity and to craft new strategies for communicating physical and psychological realism. His work continues to speak to us, and the discussions and disagreements contained in this book are but a fraction of what we might say in response. Hopefully they’ll expand our conversation about Kazan.