Posted on 09/30/2003 2:37:42 AM PDT by weegee
When Elia Kazan was presented a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999, he closed his speech - and the door to his confounding life - with the words "I think I can just slip away."
And now he has. Kazan died Sunday in his Manhattan home at the age of 94.
Besides his indelible work as a theater director, Kazan leaves behind conflicting legacies as one of postwar Hollywood's most important filmmakers and one of its biggest finks.
A former member of the Communist Party USA, Kazan wilted before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and named names.
Afterward, he signed a new studio contract while some of his ratted-out colleagues were placed on the infamous Hollywood blacklist.
Unrepentant to the end, Kazan was not forgiven in his lifetime and won't be in repose.
Neither will his accomplishments be forgotten or diminished.
As angry and bitter as his legion of enemies were, none would deny his genius for finding and inspiring naturalism in his actors, or his influence on the next generation of directors.
A co-founder in 1948 of the Actors Studio, Kazan discovered Marlon Brando and put him in three movies - "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), "Viva Zapata!" (1952) and "On the Waterfront" (1954) - that permanently redirected the spark in Hollywood drama from story to performance.
The year after "Waterfront," Kazan turned another internal-combustion actor loose in "East of Eden," and we can only imagine how much more he might have gotten from James Dean had the star not died at age 24.
Kazan, in effect, discovered himself about the same time he found Brando, and we'll never know which had more influence on the other.
The two first collaborated on the 1947 Broadway production of "Streetcar," in which Brando gave a performance still regarded by many as the most powerful in modern theater.
Certainly, Kazan's films changed with Brando. He made important, socially edgy movies before, taking on alcoholism in the 1945 "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," American anti-Semitism in 1947's "Gentleman's Agreement" (for which he won the first of his two best-director Oscars) and racism in 1949's "Pinky."
But it was his work with actors in the decade 1951-1961, beginning with "Streetcar" and ending with the Warren Beatty/Natalie Wood melodrama "Splendor in the Grass," that earned Kazan a place among Hollywood masters.
Others in the pantheon may sit on their hands when he arrives, as did many in the audience for his 1999 Oscar speech, but they can't say he doesn't belong.
Originally published on September 30, 2003
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Jack Mathews has been a critic, reporter, columnist and movie editor for 25 years and for many of the largest circulation newspapers in the country. Before joining the Daily News in 1999, Mathews was senior film critic at Newsday, movie editor and columnist at the Los Angeles Times, senior film critic at USA Today, and senior film critic, columnist, and West Coast bureau chief for the Detroit Free Press. He's the author of "The Battle of Brazil," a book chronicling the behind-the-scenes fight between film director Terry Gilliam and Universal Pictures over the final cut of the now-classic movie "Brazil." In the late 1990s, he co-hosted "Cinema," a PBS-aired weekly television program.
Has anyone ever seen a copy of that "blacklist?"
It should be published with the federal directive ordering the public to stop buying Dixie Chicks stuff.
Ratted-out, wilted are words used by this employee of the newspaper. In the days of multiple newspapers in each city of any size we had a free press. The American public knew of the contempt that some had for our representatives in Congress and for our Republic.
We would not pay to see movies made by traitors -- unlike today. Hollywood knew that. What we did not know was that many of the traitors continued working under different names. The rest went to other countries away from the country they hated. There they continued working.
Mr. Kazan's name is at the top of Hollywood's only blacklist.
If somebody had outed a Klan plot to infiltrate Hollywood, would these people still call him a fink?
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