Biography for Elia Kazan

Recruited by several studios in 1944, Kazan teamed with producer Darryl F Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, and though he would establish himself as an expert handler of actors and an artist dedicated to addressing contemporary social problems, his early films for Fox are barely recognizable as his, reflecting equal parts Zanuck and Kazan. He made an impressive debut with "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1945), drawing on his immigrant experience to tell the sensitive story of a bright young girl trying to rise above the hardships of tenement life in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, but he chafed at MGM's interference on his next picture the epic "Sea of Grass" (1947), starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Kazan saw it as the very essence of America, the pioneers who blazed the trail ultimately displaced by the farmers, the bourgeois and safe people, but MGM had no interest in a picture about class struggles, preferring instead a depiction of the beauteous American landscape. Footage taken without Kazan's involvement found its way into the film, and the director decried the end result as too sweet and entertainment-oriented.

Kazan was back at Fox for the murder-trial thriller "Boomerang" (1947), his reaction to "Sea of Grass" and the whole Hollywood aesthetic that placed mass appeal above all artistic and political concerns. Foreshadowing the neo-realism of later more interesting works like "Panic in the Streets" (1950), "On the Waterfront" (1954) and "Wild River" (1960), the picture employed non-actors recruited from its Connecticut locale and focused on psychological developments, rather than plot, for suspense. Zanuck's next assignment for him was "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947), which he squeezed in between two heavily lauded Broadway productions (Miller's "All My Sons" and Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire") as a moonlighting gig, leaving the editing and post-production to Zanuck. The Fox chief did more than just piece together the raw footage, promoting the film, one of the first Hollywood pictures to deal directly with anti-Semitism, into a must-see event that would win the Best Picture Oscar and earn Kazan a statuette for directing. Although grateful to be swept along in the Academy Award bonanza, Kazan complained "it looked like an illustration for COSMOPOLITAN" and "doesn't get into the parts of anti-Semitism that persist and hurt . . . it's too damn polite, that picture."

Coming post-Holocaust, "Agreement" was a wimpy movie about WASPs. Six million Jews had perished in the death camps, and Hollywood's ground-breaking approach was to watch Gregory Peck pose as a Jew and get refused admittance to hotels. Even less satisfying for Kazan was "Pinky" (1949), which he called a "total dodge . . . a pastiche," completing it for Fox after John Ford left the project. Purportedly another ground-breaker, this time dealing with race relations, "Pinky" cast a Caucasian actress (Jeanne Crain) as a light-skinned black woman at odds with her family and community because she has chosen to pass for white. If Kazan felt compromised in Hollywood, he was enjoying considerable autonomy on the Broadway stage, where he picked up his second Tony Award for directing Miller's "Death of a Salesman" in 1949, as well as renewing his association with Williams ("Camino Real") the same year. He was developing a stable of Method actors like Marlon Brando, Lee J Cobb and Karl Malden, who would eventually populate the films on which his screen reputation would rest. "Panic in the Streets" marked his passage into a more cinematic phase. Employing many long-shots and a constantly moving camera, as well as adding a wealth of sound effects, he thoroughly exploited his sinister New Orleans locations, bringing a startling noir intensity to back-alley beatings and the pathetic life of small-time crooks.

Kazan won further acclaim as a film director for his memorable adaptation of "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), choosing this time only to helm the film version of one of his Broadway successes. Usually, his immersion in the stage production robbed him of any desire to repeat it, but in the case of "Streetcar", he felt that he'd let Brando's Stanley dominate the Broadway production at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche and sought to correct this in the movie. Vivien Leigh replaced Tandy, and she was equal to the challenge of sharing the screen with Brando. Her personal problems at the time--fragile mental state and rocky marriage to Laurence Olivier--gave Kazan a bottomless reservoir to plumb, and he didn't hesitate to goad her into a remarkable, Academy Award-winning performance. "Viva Zapata!" (1952) teamed him with John Steinbeck as screenwriter, telling the story of the grass-roots Mexican revolutionary in a manner that was acceptable to McCarthy era sensibilities. Despite accommodating a repressive national atmosphere, the pair delivered a vibrant film about the Mexican peasant's rise to power and eventual Presidency, featuring Brando in the title role and an Oscar-winning supporting performance by Anthony Quinn.

It was at this point in time that Kazan made the Faustian bargain that saved his career short-term but has effectively black-listed his accomplishments into present day. Renouncing his early involvement with the Communist Party as youthful folly, he "sang" to the House Un-American Activities Committee (reversing his initial resistance to HUAC), naming eight former colleagues (including Odets and actress Paula Strasberg) as dangerous Communist infiltrators. Criticized by many for caving in to the witch hunt, Kazan answered the snubs with "On the Waterfront" (1954), in which dock worker Terry Malloy (Brando) takes the unpopular action of testifying against corrupt labor leaders. Kazan later wrote: "When Brando, at the end, yells . . . 'I'm glad what I done--you hear me?--glad what I done!' that was me saying with identical heat, that I was glad I'd testified as I had." Kazan's detractors saw it as a maddeningly self-serving allegory of recent history, but moviegoers, unconcerned with the ideological debate, responded enthusiastically to an exciting picture of moral awakening, photographed in the gritty, unfamiliar milieu of the Brooklyn and Hoboken docks (complete with real dockworkers). Featuring a superb performance by Brando, supported magnificently by Eva Marie Saint, Lee J Cobb, Rod Steiger and Karl Malden, the film broke box-office records and won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.

Kazan's remarkable Broadway run continued throughout the 50s with Anderson's "Tea and Symphony" (1953), Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955), Inge's "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (1957), Archibald MacLeish's "J.B." (1958) and Williams' "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1959), but his Hollywood reputation had finally caught up (or surpassed) that of his stage work. He had discovered Brando's potential, and he introduced James Dean to a wide audience as the tortured son of Raymond Massey in "East of Eden" (1955), adapted by Paul Osborn from the Steinbeck novel. Recognizing that Dean's Method mumblings (a la Brando) drove Massey to distraction, Kazan stoked the pair's antagonism, capturing their hatred for each other on film. He tapped another Method newcomer (Carroll Baker) for "Baby Doll" (1956), and the same people (namely the Catholic Legion of Decency) who had objected to his suggestive low-angle photographing of Kim Hunter (Stella in "Streetcar") railed against his provocative presentation of Baker. He also drew impressive performances out of neophytes like Andy Griffith ("A Face in the Crowd" 1957) and Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty ("Splendor in the Grass" 1961). In all, Kazan directed 21 Oscar-nominated performances and nine winners.

With the exception of Lincoln Center's inaugural season, Kazan completely abandoned his theater work in the 60s, took up fiction writing and focused his film career on much more personal, independently produced projects. "America, America" (1963) was a critically acclaimed adaptation of his own novel about his family's emigration to the USA. His subsequent efforts, "The Arrangement" (1969, again from his own novel) and "The Visitors" (1972, shot at his home in 16mm), were resounding failures. Kazan made an unexpected return to mainstream filmmaking with Harold Pinter's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" (1976), taking over the project abandoned by Mike Nichols. Focusing on the novel's love affair and glamorous settings, he delivered arguably the best feature presentation of Fitzgerald's work, the film benefiting greatly from an outstanding performance by Robert De Niro as the movie producer (based on Irving Thalberg) who is slowly working himself to death. The picture, unfortunately, did no business, and Kazan may have summed it up best: "Harold is a master of understatement, but I think he understated too much in this case."

Kazan the immigrant began his life as an outsider and even when successful remained an outsider. His best work examined the plight of the outsider, and he explained his affinity for Williams, for whom he directed six stage and movie productions over two decades: "What the gay world--then still largely closeted--was to him, my foreignness was to me. We were both outsiders in the straight (or native) society we lived in." It is ironic that many of his most vocal present day detractors were not even born when he testified before HUAC because, despite the hostility Hollywood may have had for him at the height of the McCarthy era, some of its staunchest liberals (Brando, Warren Beatty, Kirk Douglas, Haskell Wexler) willingly worked with the pariah afterwards. Even Arthur Miller reached out to him to direct "After the Fall" in 1964, coming to the conclusion that " . . . If I still felt a certain distaste for Kazan's renouncing his past under duress, I was not at all sure that he should be excluded from a position for which he was superbly qualified by his talent." Kazan's way of prodding actors to dig deep, his channeling of the Method into the cinema stands as his lasting legacy. Long denied lifetime achievement recognition for the sins of his past, he finally received a 1998 Honorary Oscar--not, albeit, without protest--and with it the tacit forgiveness of an industry which had decided to embrace the unrepentant outsider to its breast before he died.