Ctva 310. History of American Cinema: Readings Dr. John Schultheiss Department of Cinema and Television Arts

Past Future

Instincts Principles

Freud Marx

U.S. U.S.S.R.

Female Male

Subculture Establishment

Innocence Experience

Youth Adulthood

Victims Oppressors

Skepticism Idealism

Self-interest Solidarity

Tennessee Williams Arthur Miller

Constantine Stanislavsky John Ford

Psychological drama Epic drama

Cinema Theatre

The image of the family in Kazan's films is at best ambivalent. Beginning the early 1950s, American movie audiences no longer consisted of the monolithic family unit of the prewar era but of smaller, more specialized audiences. By far the largest of these was the so-called youth audience, which responded enthusiastically to films that pleaded the cause of adolescents. Two of Kazan's biggest hits dealt with the problems of young people with their parents: East of Eden and Splendor in the Grass (1961). Tortured relationships within families abound in his works, as Kitses and Estelle Changas have pointed out. Some of these conflicts are between brothers (Zapata, Eden, Waterfront), between generations (Pinky, Eden, Splendor, America, Wild River), and often between sons and fathers or father-figures (Zapata, Waterfront, Eden, Splendor, America, Arrangement, Visitors, and Last Tycoon).

Like his contemporaries, Huston, Wilder, Zinnemann, and Welles, Kazan has a literary sensibility. In interviews he's highly articulate. He has written several popular novels, which served as bases for his movies. The Arrangement was the top bestseller in the United States for thirty-seven weeks. Kazan has collaborated on most of his screenplays and even on some of his stage plays. For example, he helped rewrite two of Williams's plays, Sweet Bird of Youth and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He is close friends with Williams and Arthur Miller, who have both had a strong influence on Kazan's filmmaking. He feels closer to Williams than to any other dramatist. Kazan agreed to film Streetcar at the author's request.

It's the finest of all of Williams's adaptations. Budd Schulberg, the novelist and scenarist who scripted Waterfront and Face in the Crowd, has praised Kazan's rapport with writers and writing: "He's been a pioneer, sometimes I think the only pioneer, in treating screenplays with the same respect that he would give a work written for the stage." Because of his theatre experience, Kazan refused to separate writing from directing. When he first went to Hollywood, he was appalled by the shabby way writers were treated. He has always preferred working with novelists and dramatists rather than professional scenarists. His relationship with his writers is usually close and personal as well as professional. Whenever possible, he prefers them to remain on the set, in case of last-minute adjustments in the script.

Kazan believes that some of his early movies suffered because he was too respectful of scripts. He thinks that a screenplay's worth is measured less by its language than by its architecture and how it shapes and dramatizes the theme. In most cases, a script is not a piece of writing so much as a construction. The director's job is to learn to feel for the skeleton under the skin of words: "I always try to leave the script free enough, open enough so that the human material that's being photographed is not rigidly arranged to the point of choking out surprises, any unexpected possibilities." Kazan derived the idea of a subtext from Stanislavsky:
The film director knows that beneath the surface of his screen play there is a subtext, a calendar of intentions and feelings and inner events. What appears to be happening, he soon learns, is rarely what is happening. The subtext is one of the film director's most valuable tools. It is what he directs. You will rarely see a veteran director holding a script as he works––or even looking at it.
The subtext involves what's beneath the language of the script: not what people say, but what they really want but are afraid to ask. Spoken dialogue is always secondary to Kazan. His concern is with an inner dialogue, and in order to capture this, he sometimes allows his actors to throwaway their lines, to choke on them, or even to mumble. (Throughout the 1950s, Method actors like Brando and Dean were ridiculed by some critics and industry regulars for mumbling their lines.)

Kazan's interest in character is strong. He dislikes conventional leading men and leading lady roles, and he was one of the first postwar filmmakers to reject sexual stereotypes in favor of a more dialectical approach to characterization. His males are generally played by sexually magnetic actors such as Brando, Dean, and Warren Beatty. Yet these obvious studs are allowed many "feminine" characteristics, like tenderness, eroticism, indecisiveness. They cry under intense emotional pressures. (On the other hand, while making Gone with the Wind in the prewar era, Clark Gable refused to play in a scene in which Rhett Butler cries over his child's death. The actor thought it would compromise his masculine image. Under pressure, he finally submitted.) Kazan's female characters are usually strong, articulate, and mature. They often act as moral catalysts, impelling the men they love to face up to their self-deceptions and fears. Rarely are Kazan's females characterized as sex objects––though they can be sexy, girlish, and even maternal. Their strength can be surprising because they are generally played by actresses who are vulnerable and feminine, such as Eva Marie Saint in Waterfront, Julie Harris in Eden, and Lee Remick in Wild River. Kazan believes that women bring out the more sensitive side of his talent, and like Ford, he regards them as a civilizing force. He has always been attracted to honest and direct female characters, and he tends to cast actresses who are not conventionally glamorous to play them. While working on a movie, Kazan keeps a notebook describing all his characters––their essential natures, their self-contradictions, the way they relate to others and to the theme. He believes that people reveal themselves most fully under duress, with their backs against the wall. But he dislikes characters who are too definitive, and he tries to preserve in them an air of mystery, of the unknowable: "I try to be critical but loving, privately uncertain, with my characters."

Throughout the 1950s Kazan was said to have "invented" the Method, which he repeatedly pointed out was not new and was not his. It was an off-shoot of Stanislavsky's system of training actors and rehearsing, which he had developed at the Moscow Art Theatre. His ideas were adopted by Strasberg and Clurman at the Group Theatre, which folded in 1941. In 1947 Kazan and his associates Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis founded the Actors' Studio, which received much publicity during the 1950s because it had developed such well-known graduates as Brando, Dean, Julie Harris, Karl Malden, and Rod Steiger. "The Actors' Studio was my artistic home," Kazan has said. He continued there as a teacher until 1954, when he asked his old mentor, Strasberg, to take over the organization. Within a short period, Strasberg became the most celebrated acting teacher in the country, and his former students were––and still are––among the most famous performers in the world.

The central credo of Stanislavsky's system was "You must live the part every moment you are playing it." He rejected the tradition of acting that emphasized externals––declamatory vocal techniques, stylizations, "correct" body positions, and so on. He believed that truth in acting can only be achieved by exploring a character's inner spirit, which must be fused with the actor's own emotions. One of the most important techniques he developed is emotional recall, in which an actor delves into his or her own past to discover feelings which are analogous to those of the character. "In every part you do," Julie Harris explained, "there is some connection you can make with your own background or with some feeling you've had at one time or another." Stanislavsky's techniques were strongly psychoanalytical: By exploring their own subconscious, actors are able to trigger real emotions, which are recalled in every performance and transferred to the characters they are playing. He also devised techniques for helping actors to focus their concentration on the "world" of the play––its concrete details and textures. In some form or another, these techniques are probably as old as the acting profession itself, but Stanislavsky was the first to systemize them with exercises and methods of analysis; hence the terms the System and the Method. Nor did he claim that inner truth and emotional sincerity are sufficient unto themselves. He insisted that actors must master all the externals as well, particularly for classic plays, which require a somewhat stylized manner of speaking, moving, and wearing costumes. He was famous for his lengthy rehearsals, in which performers were encouraged to improvise with their roles in order to discover the resonances of the text––the subtext, which is analogous to Freud's concept of the subconscious. Stanislavsky condemned individual virtuosity and the star system. He insisted upon ensemble playing, with genuine interactions among the actor-characters. Players are encouraged to analyze all the specifics of a scene: What does the character really want? What has happened before the immediate moment? What time of day is it? And so on. When presented with a role utterly foreign to their experience, actors were urged to research the part so that it would be understood in their guts as well as their minds. For example, in order to play a prison inmate, an actor might actually ask to spend some time in a prison cell, studying its smells, sounds, and textures.

Kazan is famous for bringing out the emotional intensity of his players. His working-class protagonists especially have "the frenzied smell of crotch and armpit about them," to use Charles Silver's memorable phrase. The violent outbursts of passion in such movies as Waterfront and Eden were unprecedented in the American cinema. Even in ostensibly quiet scenes, Kazan is able to achieve an underlying sense of tension and repressed anger. His eight years' experience as an actor has made him especially sensitive to actors' needs and insecurities. He believes that a person must have a character's experience within him, and he goes to considerable lengths to learn about the personal lives of his players in order to use such details for characterization. He cast the unknown James Dean in Eden on sheer instinct: "I thought he was an extreme grotesque of a boy, a twisted boy. As I got to know his father, as I got to know about his family, I learned that he had been, in fact, twisted by the denial of love." He considers Brando as close to a genius as he has ever encountered among actors––a view that's widely shared by others, especially other actors, to whom Brando is an idol. Kazan usually has a close rapport with his actors. With Brando and Montgomery Clift, the relationship was loving and paternal. Kazan tries to build up an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect on the set and often socializes with his players in their off-hours. Sometimes he casts nonprofessionals, especially in minor roles, to enhance a sense of authenticity: "There's something about almost all actors that is well-fed looking. If you have a scene of either a working-class person or a person deprived by life or a person who is hard up, it's much better sometimes to get a face."

He uses many techniques derived from Freud in the analysis of a character, and he encourages his actors to do the same. He has undergone psychoanalysis twice and believes that it made him more self-perceptive and responsible. He also thinks that it made him more articulate and helped him as an artist. He believes in confronting the unthinkable, the embarrassing, the shameful in oneself, however fearful or chastening. Usually he gives his players the basic objectives of a scene, then leaves them enough room to explore the character within these parameters. He prefers actors who are creatively independent, who discover surprises and nuances that even he hadn't seen.

Critics have generally lumped Kazan with such postwar realists as Fred Zinnemann, but Kazan's realism is generally less austere and matter of fact. There is a pronounced lyric and epie quality in his style, especially in his long shots, which he derived from that old fox at Fox, John Ford. Like most classicists, Kazan has no single visual signature but adjusts his form of expression to fit the nature of the materials. The visuals in Zapata, for example, were based on actual photographs of the Mexican Revolution. (The musical score by Alex North was likewise based on tunes popularized by peasant brass bands of the revolutionary era.) The sun-bleached exteriors of the New Orleans setting in Panic in the Streets (1950) recall the movies of the Italian neo-realists. Streetcar on the other hand is almost Sternbergian in its diaphanous lighting effects. Kazan rarely moves his camera, and he avoids virtuoso editing. His concern is always with the human material. His mise-en-scène rarely suggests an overt manipulation of visual forms. He considers the long shot one of the richest forms of expression, however, and in lyrical scenes he uses such shots with considerable power.

Kazan's main fault as a director is his tendency to overheat his materials, to hype up the action with explosive effects. "My problem is that I can always make things forceful," he has admitted. "I used to make every scene GO GO GO! mounting to a climax, and if I had sixty minutes in a picture there were sixty climaxes." In his later works he learned to relax more, to allow the emotional moments in the action to assert themselves without overstatement. Estelle Changas has also pointed out that Kazan has difficulty offering endings that are dramatically satisfying. For example, she finds the hopeful ending of Waterfront unconvincing and contrived, as do a number of other critics.

––Fred Zinnemann

He moved to Berlin, where prospects seemed more promising. For a time he was an assistant to the cinematographer Eugene Schufftan. In 1929 they photographed the popular Menschen Am Sonntag (People on Sunday), which was produced and co-directed (with Robert Siodmak) by Edgar G. Ulmer and was written by Billy Wilder. Eventually all of these young men went to America, where they found greater fame and fortune. Though working only in a minor capacity on this movie, Zinnemann learned much about the problems of blending the techniques of the documentary with those of fiction, for the film was shot on location, using mostly nonprofessional performers. But nothing came of the movie for him, and since the political landscape in Germany was darkening, he decided to leave.

In 1930 Zinnemann resolved to try his luck in America. For several years he worked in a variety of jobs in Hollywood, but only when he met Robert Flaherty did his career take another step forward. "Robert Flaherty is probably the greatest single influence on my work as a film maker," Zinnemann has said, "particularly because he was always his own man." The creator of the celebrated documentary, Nanook of the North (1922), was a maverick whose brief flirtation with the Hollywood studio system ended in disaster on both sides. Charismatic, gregarious, and conspicuously brilliant, Flaherty attracted many of the intellectually ambitious young artists of Hollywood. Much taken with Zinnemann, he offered the young man a job as an assistant on a documentary that Flaherty had been asked to make in the Soviet Union. They met in Berlin with some Soviet officials, but almost immediately Flaherty ran into difficulties. His sponsors expected a propaganda film dealing with the great technological strides since the 1917 revolution. Flaherty, the arch romantic and conservative, wanted to make a movie dealing with the glories of a lost culture. Although the film––like so many of Flaherty's projects––was never made, Zinnemann was profoundly influenced by the old individualist.

By his example, Flaherty taught him two crucial lessons. The first, and ultimately the more important, is the need for the movie artist to be as independent as possible from the people who control the financing of a film. There's not much point in undertaking a project if the director merely executes the ideas of others. Paradoxically, the other lesson Flaherty taught him––albeit unwittingly––is to know how to accommodate the contributions of others without allowing them to corrupt one's artistic integrity. In later years Zinnemann was to fight many stormy battles with the front office, but he also came to recognize that flexibility is an essential survival skill in a collaborative art/business/entertainment like movies. "Carte blanche frightens me," he once remarked, and throughout his career, he has been more than generous in his praise of his collaborators––including producers, whom almost nobody praises.

In 1933 Zinnemann was asked by the still photographer, Paul Strand, to direct a movie he had been commissioned to make by the Mexican government on their revolution. The crew was mostly Mexican, and Zinnemann, Strand, and four other Americans lived for nearly a year in a remote jungle section of the state of Vera Cruz. Redes (The Wave, 1934) was the result, a sixty-minute semi-documentary dealing with the lives of some impoverished fishermen. Acted by native nonprofessionals, the movie deals with the economic exploitation of the members of a small village. The protagonist is killed after he attempts to organize his fellow fishermen to combat their common oppressor. In directing the movie, Zinnemann was able to put into practice many of the lessons he had learned from Flaherty.

On the strength of the critical admiration inspired by The Wave, Zinnemann was offered a contract by Jack Chertok, who headed the short subjects department at MGM, the most powerful and successful studio in Hollywood. During this period, promising young talents usually worked their way up the studio ladder by beginning in B films, which were commonly exhibited on the second half of double bills. MGM was unique in that it also used its short subjects department for this purpose. Between the years 1937 and 1939, Zinnemann directed a total of eighteen documentaries at MGM, most of them one- and two-reelers. A medical film, That Mothers Might Live, garnered an Academy Award as best documentary of 1938. Speed, efficiency, and economy were the watchwords at the MGM unit, though the studio prided itself on the "quality" look of its products. The production values of many of these shorts (especially the Crime Does Not Pay series) were sometimes more impressive than the A features of other studios.

Since Zinnemann was restricted to three shooting days per reel, a good deal of painstaking and meticulous preparation was required before the camera began to roll. Virtually every detail had to be pre-visualized and pieced together like a mosaic. But he had already learned the lesson of exhaustive research from Flaherty, and the rigorous discipline required in these shorts Zinnemann considered an artistic challenge. Perhaps the most valuable lesson he learned was the need to tell a story as economically as possible. Time and footage were limited, so he learned to cut away all superfluities, to intensify the dramatic thrust of a story, and to make the images as densely saturated as possible––techniques he carried over to his later fiction movies as well. In this respect, Zinnemann is somewhat untypical of most realists, who tend to manipulate their narratives less overtly. In most of his movies, the story line is not allowed to slacken. His films are rich in authentic textural details, but generally these are embedded within the mise-en-scène itself, rarely offered separately for !heir own sake. In such movies as The Search (1947), The Men (1950), and Teresa (1951), he was sometimes at odds with his writers to tighten up the narrative thrust.

In the early 1940s, Zinnemann entered what he calls his "donkey work" period, directing B movies for MGM. There followed a series of well-crafted but conventional genre films, most of which were successful at the box office and praised by B film aficionados. In 1943 he was given an opportunity to make an A feature, The Seventh Cross, with Spencer Tracy, one of MGM's most prestigious stars. Despite its success, Zinnemann was sent back to directing routine cheapies. Finally he got disgusted and refused several mediocre scripts in a row, an act of rebellion which gave him the rather impressive distinction of being the first director ever suspended by MGM. Of course like most Hollywood directors during the studio period, Zinnemann was required to pay his dues by directing assembly-line projects. But he viewed his low-budget B-film assignments as necessary stepping-stones for a crack at more important work. Once he got his opportunity to work on more personal projects, the civilized, soft-spoken Zinnemann exhibited a surprising tenacity and combativeness. "I don't like to dictate and I'll be damned if I'll have somebody dictate to me," he once said of meddling producers. He even stood up to the notorious bully, Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, when he tried to force his ideas on Zinnemann during the production of From Here to Eternity (1953). Those who stood up to Harry Cohn were in a very exclusive minority.

Shortly after World War II, a Swiss company invited Zinnemann to come to Europe to direct The Search. MGM eagerly agreed to send their resident "difficult" director, and even put up some of the financing. A story dealing with displaced children in Europe after the war, The Search is Zinnemann's first aesthetically mature example of documentary fiction. Employing the Flaherty method he was to use as a standard preparation for his subsequent movies, he and his staff researched the materials in great detail before writing the script:
We felt that the main thing was to get as much of the elements of the story as possible from first-hand observation: from seeing and studying the locale and talking to a maximum number of people who had been directly involved in the period of history we wanted to portray.
The movie was filmed in the actual ruins of Berlin and the refugee camps of Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfort. The script was a collaboration, inspired in large part by the horrifying tales of the children who had only recently come out of Nazi concentration camps. Zinnemann also used many of these youngsters as actors: "They alone could understand and project the feeling of animal terror. Normal children could not have comprehended what it was all about." The Search was a critical and commercial success, and with it Zinnemann's apprenticeship came to an end.

When his contract with MGM expired in 1949, he signed a three-picture agreement with Stanley Kramer, an independent producer with innovative ideas. He not only shared Zinnemann's liberal values, he also agreed that movies could deal with serious social themes and stories revolving around contemporary problems without a sacrifice in drama, suspense, or excitement. In fact, Kramer was a major contributor to the revival of social realism in the American cinema of the postwar era. Eventually he became a director himself, though most critics and historians believe his main importance was as a producer. Three of his finest properties were directed by Zinnemann: The Men, High Noon (1952), and The Member of the Wedding.