A Conflict of Loyalties: Elia Kazan, American (1909-2003)

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ^ | October 6, 2003 | Editorial

[quidnunc]

You’ve heard of the Hollywood blacklist. It’s become the stuff of cultural history, which means it’s also the stuff of propaganda and myth. The story line will be familiar to any faithful listener of NPR: how innocent Americans were labeled Communists and driven out of work, punished merely for their views and associations. A mention of McCarthyism is mandatory at this point.

Well, Elia Kazan, the most talented director of his time and maybe his century, was blacklisted in his own way — not because he’d once been part of a Communist cell in Hollywood, but because he’d told the truth about it.

After agonizing over whether to name names, the director testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and never looked back. But the fashionably leftish never forgot. Elia Kazan was Name No. 1 on their enemies ’ list.

It took decades, after several lifetimes of achievement, before he was given an Oscar for lifetime achievement. Even then there was a smattering of protest from the true believers. If there’s anything Hollywood’s cultural vanguard can’t understand, it’s a real nonconformist.

To some, Elia Kazan was a mystifying figure — "brilliant, passionate, generous, restless, discontented, angry, vengeful and a fount of creativity, resentment and controversy," to quote one description.

But what’s so hard to understand about Elia Kazan? He’s as clear as his uncompromising films — from America, America to On the Waterfront. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the parallels between Marlon Brando’s character in On the Waterfront, a dockworker who defies a corrupt union run by mobsters, and Elia Kazan’s decision to defy the Party. The hero of On the Waterfront was also called an informer, a stool pigeon, a bum. And took his lumps.

The director always sounded tongue-tied when he tried to explain his decision to inform on others. Considerations of career, patriotism, friendship, duty … they were all mixed up in his head. Elia Kazan was an artist, not an intellectual. He wasn’t used to laying out his ideas clearly; his politics were more a form of method acting — just an extension of his personal feelings. In the end, he just said what he had to say to the committee and went on with his life. It was an eminently sane decision, but not a satisfying one to those of us obsessed with analyzing motives.

It took an intellectual like Whittaker Chambers to explain why a man would sacrifice his friends to save his country. He, too, hesitated before telling the truth. For a time he even lied to shield his old friend Alger Hiss. But the dam burst when a young congressman named Richard Nixon, in the course of those fateful hearings that transfixed a nation, asked him:

"Mr. Chambers, can you search your memory now to see what motive you can have for accusing Mr. Hiss of being a Communist … I mean, do you — is there any grudge that you have against Mr. Hiss over anything that he has done to you?"

Till then, Whittaker Chambers had been testifying only about the facts, limiting himself to cool, exact recollection. But that one question released all his pent-up, clarifying emotion, as if he were acting under a kind of compulsion — a compulsion that, for want of a better word, could be called a sense of history.

"The story has spread," he replied, "that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him in remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise."

The committee room fell silent. For perhaps the first time, the American people understood what all the hubbub was about. Whittaker Chambers didn’t bear witness because he wanted to; he bore witness because he had to.

Elia Kazan, too, would have to confront his history. He’d left the Party back in 1936, when he’d had enough of being told what to say and do, how to act and think, what movies to make and what line to take. Two decades later, subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in January of 1952, he had refused to name names, just as Whittaker Chambers had — at first.

But a few months and a world of agonizing later, Elia Kazan appeared before the committee at his own invitation. He had decided he must speak out, and he would never be forgiven for it. Worse, he took out a full-page advertisement the next day in the New York Times explaining his decision. In that broadside, he spoke of Communism as a dangerous and alien conspiracy — talk about intellectual heresy! — and urged others to join him in fighting it.

Elia Kazan had committed the unpardonable ideological sin. His critics and rivals would hate him for it, not least because his movies, unlike theirs, would endure.

Hollywood’s boycott would end only in 1999, when Elia Kazan was finally given an Oscar. Only two years before, the American Film Institute had refused to grant him similar recognition. Even the night the Oscar was presented, as Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro were praising his work, some at the ceremony booed, or sat on their hands. Others said the Academy should apologize for honoring an informer.

To which Arthur Schlesinger Jr., American liberalism’s court historian, replied: "If the … occasion calls for apologies, let Mr. Kazan’s denouncers apologize for the aid and comfort they gave to Stalinism." It was Professor Schlesinger’s finest hour.

How to explain the long trail of decisions that led Elia Kazan from what was still Constantinople in 1909, where he was born a son of the Greek diaspora, to his death this week in Manhattan, rich in family and honor and enemies after a lifetime of passion? Is there some single word or image that would, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane, serve as a key to the rich legacy he leaves on film for generations to come?

Of all his works, the one that might best explain his 94-year journey is one of his earliest — America, America. There is one line in it that has stayed with us. The hero has left behind home and family and mother tongue; he has killed and lied and cheated his way across an ocean to a new land, and on the way played every base role from thief to gigolo. And with the Promised Land in sight, he is asked by the very voice of the Old World — the cynical, brutish, cuckolded husband — just what he expects will happen to him in this wonderful New World of his. Doesn’t he know it will turn out to be as corrupt as the old? And our young hero answers without thinking: "I will be washed clean."

There you have Elia Kazan’s motive. And Whittaker Chambers’. And what America, America has meant, and still means, to all those coming after them: a new start, a new hope, not just for themselves but for man. Thank you for reminding us of all that, Mr. Kazan. Thank you for being so thankful for so long. See you at the pictures.

[Tacis]

I never have understood why these folks got praise for not identifying who was also attending meetings; for not "naming names." This might be praiseworthy ONLY if they still viewed themselves as bound by their communist, anti-American oaths. But, then, ONLY to the other traitors they were protecting.

This and the invention of the word "McCartyism" was, without question, the greatest victory ever for the ultra-left wing media conspiracy.

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[Elisha]

Great Post. Thanks.

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