Reading #8 MASTERS OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA

––Elia Kazan

When he attended Williams College in the late 1920s, Kazan felt more isolated than ever. He viewed Williams as a bastion of WASP exclusiveness, and he resented his classmates' air of superiority. The crash of 1929 wiped out his family's modest holdings, and he had to wash dishes and wait on tables in order to stay in school. Throughout this period, he smoldered in anger, but his sense of alienation made him tough and tenacious. Since childhood he had been attracted to the arts, an interest his cultivated mother had encouraged as much as his father had ridiculed. Upon graduating from college in 1930, young Kazan decided to attend Yale University's School of Drama. The training he received there was comprehensive, and he felt less disaffected, for his classmates were mostly bohemian types who judged him on the basis of his talent rather than his pedigree. They too washed dishes and waited on tables.

''I'm a child of the thirties," Kazan has stated. During the Great Depression he converted his anger into an intense political activism. Karl Marx was his god. Kazan was also influenced by the ideas of Freud and by the revolutionary movies of such Soviet artists as Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. Kazan's feelings for his adopted country also began to change. He identified strongly with the American working class and adopted the rough clothing of laborers as a symbolic repudiation of bourgeois values. In his travels across the country, he was intoxicated by its color, romance, and excitement. What he still lacked, however, was an artistic outlet for these enthusiasms. He was not long in waiting. "All of these trends came together in the Group Theatre," Kazan has recalled, "the political Left, the introduction to Freud and Marx, the absolute, idealistic dedication and determination towards a new world."

The Group Theatre was founded by Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, who wanted a theatre of social relevance. It was only one of many leftist theatre organizations in the 1930s. The Group Theatre was even a collective for a brief period: Its members cooked, lived, and worked together. Kazan joined in 1932 as an actor, and eventually he became a writer and director as well. Even by depression standards, his $18 a week salary was low. Like most of his comrades, Kazan also joined the American Communist party, and he made many political speeches on street corners. He wrote several agit-prop (agitation propaganda) plays to awaken blue-collar workers to their collective power. He idealized the U.S.S.R. and such Soviet theatre artists as Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Stanislavsky.

The Group Theatre's ideal was to discover the poetry in the common things of life. It was influenced by the psychological theory of acting promulgated by the Soviet stage director, Constantine Stanislavsky. "Stanislavsky was also peculiarly suited to us because he emphasized not the heroic man but the hero in every man," Kazan recalled. "That Russian idea of the profound soul of the inconspicuous person also fits the American temperament." He adhered religiously to the strict regimen of exercises of Stanislavsky's method, or the Method, as it was commonly called in America. As an actor, Kazan was fiery and intense (one reviewer called him "the proletarian thunderbolt"), but his range was narrow.

His disillusionment with communism took place in 1935. He and other Communist party members of the Group Theatre were instructed to go on strike and wrest control of the organization from Strasberg and Clurman, who were not Communists. Kazan refused to take part in this treachery. He was tried for failing to follow orders and expelled from the party. Bitter as he was, he still had faith in the U.S.S.R. "We believed the lies they told," he recalled in later years. When he heard rumors of the mass killings of Stalin's purges, Kazan's faith waivered, and with the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, he gave up entirely on the U.S.S.R. Although still a leftist, he was passionately opposed to the totalitarian and repressive form of communism which came to be known as Stalinism.

The New Deal ushered in an era of hope. Like many leftists, Kazan originally feared that Roosevelt's relief program was merely a Band-Aid remedy for the serious economic ills of that era. Eventually, he came to believe that FDR's selective use of Marxist principles to bolster the capitalistic system was what most Americans really wanted. Roosevelt remained his political idol. Furthermore, Kazan believes that social equality is likely to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary: "I believe that socialism will win in the world––maybe not fast enough in every way, but it is going that way." During this same period, Kazan began to develop doubts about the political efficacy of the Group Theatre, whose patrons, like himself, were mostly left-wing intellectuals aspiring to be proletarian. Working-class audiences were going to the movies. More and more, he was drawn to film as the best medium for communicating his views.

In the late 1930s, Kazan finally got a chance to work in film. A number of leftist artists, including the photographers Leo Hurwitz, Paul Strand, and Ralph Steiner, had established their own company, Frontier Films, in order to make documentaries with a strong emphasis on social reform. Kazan's People of the Cumberland (1937) was a twenty-minute film about coal miners, shot entirely on location, with nonprofessionals in the cast. "That experience showed me that before and beyond a script there was life itself to photograph," Kazan said, an attitude that was to exert an influence on his fiction filmmaking as well.

He came into his own in the decade of the 1940s. His first big break came when he directed the premiere stage production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). From then onward, he was one of Broadway's busiest directors, with four productions playing simultaneously for a brief period. On the basis of his success as a stage director, he received several offers to go to Hollywood, primarily from Warner Brothers and 20th Century-Fox. Both studios had made many movies revolving around contemporary social problems. In 1944 he finally signed with Fox. His contract called for one picture per year for five years, with no final-cut privileges. It wasn't a great contract compared to the one RKO had given Orson Welles, but at least Kazan was free to direct other movies and plays provided he fulfilled his obligations to Fox. Kazan was not to abandon the New York theatre for another twenty years, and throughout much of this period, he was the most eminent stage director in the United States as well as a filmmaker. His productions included such classics of the American theatre as Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1947), Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), Williams's Camino Real (1953) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), Archibald McLeish's JB. (1958), Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Miller's After the Fall (1964).]

The cocky and diminutive Darryl F. Zanuck headed 20th Century-Fox. Most of the moguls were politically conservative, and some, like MGM's Louis B. Mayer, were outright reactionaries. Zanuck was perhaps the most liberal––in theory, if not always in practice. Though the studio's pictures were diversified, he tended to favor topical and controversial subjects, with an emphasis on story values rather than stars. Energetic, strutting, and competitive, he liked to put his personal stamp on his pictures, but as Kazan was to discover, the mogul's contributions were by no means contemptible. When World War II broke out, Zanuck––who was intensely patriotic––enlisted in the Army and became a producer of documentaries. In the postwar era he was one of the first to sense that American audiences had changed as a result of the war. Fox became the leading producer of films of social commentary, and it also was the first to abandon the soft, romantic style of photography which had typified the prewar era. The movies at Fox were usually shot in razor-sharp focus. Kazan respected Zanuck and thought him a decent, honest man, though perhaps too eager to curry favor at the box office at the expense of truth. Kazan also thought the mogul was tuned in to American society: "Zanuck was always a man of the people. If something was being felt, he felt it."

The industry was paralyzed with fear, for the Hearst press and others had been calling for stringent federal censorship of films. To show their good faith, the studios produced a spate of blatantly anti-Communist movies, most of which failed at the box office. Such industry liberals as Wyler, Huston, Bogart, and Lauren Bacall helped form the Committee for the First Amendment, which publicized the Constitutional violations of HUAC and McCarthy. The Writers Guild strongly opposed the blacklist, which was condemned by a vote of four hundred to eight. Eventually even industry conservatives, like John Ford, spoke out against the witch-hunts. In 1954, the televised Army-McCarthy hearings revealed the senator for what he was, and public sentiment veered sharply against him. Later he was censured by the Senate. The hysteria began to subside––very slowly. A number of blacklisted writers were still working, at vastly reduced wages, during this period, but they were forced to use pseudonyms. By the end of the decade, such producer-directors as Otto Preminger and Stanley Kramer were the first to defy this practice, and blacklisted writers were finally allowed public credit for their work.

Kazan was a friendly witness. And he named names––twelve of them. He had strong misgivings about his collaboration with HUAC, for though he hated Stalin (whom he considered as evil as Hitler), Kazan also hated McCarthy and other elements of the extreme right. Nor did he lie to the committee: He made it plain that he favored a strong non-Communist left in the United States. During this same period, of course, he continued making movies that were critical of America's social hypocrisies. The studios exploited Kazan's vulnerability by cutting his salary in half after he testified: He was now damaged goods. He was harshly criticized by the liberal press for cooperating with HUAC. Filmmaker Abraham Polonsky, who was blacklisted for many years, claimed that Kazan's subsequent work was "marked by bad conscience." Others have interpreted such movies as Viva Zapata! (1952), Man on a Tightrope (1953), and On the Waterfront (1954) as rationalizations for informing.

Kazan doesn't deny the autobiographical element in his work. Indeed, he insists upon it: "Every film is autobiographical," he claims. "A thing in my life is expressed by the essence of the film. I've got to feel that it's in some way about me, some way about my struggles, some way about my pain, my hopes." He identified strongly with Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in Waterfront. The dupe of a paternalistic labor racketeer, Malloy decides, after agonizing with his conscience, to cooperate with a government investigating committee and is subsequently spurned by the fellow longshoremen he wanted to help. Similarly, East of Eden (1955) involves a clash of moral values between a rebellious son James Dean and his strong-willed and righteous father (Raymond Massey). "It's really the story of my father and me," Kazan has observed of the film, "and I didn't realize it for a long time."

Except for his early Zanuck pictures, Kazan has been able to work with few compromises to his artistic integrity. After the enormous success of Waterfront in 1954, he produced most of his own movies. His company, Newtown Productions, is New York based, for he has always disliked the cultural and political atmosphere of the Los Angeles area. A number of other filmmakers followed suit by using New York as their base of operations: Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Brian De Palma, and Woody Allen, among others. Kazan has always been confident of his artistic powers and has been willing to fight for his ideas. Not that he wants to be surrounded by zombies. He finds disagreements stimulating, and he believes that the chief enemy of art is indifference. He has even praised some of his producers. For example, he regards Sam Spiegel, who produced Waterfront and The Last Tycoon (1976), as one of the most creative people he has worked with. Although he is a harsh self-critic, Kazan's critiques of his work usually involve errors in execution. He has never disavowed a film for its ideas or values.

"I think a work of art is good when it has trailing roots that go into society," Kazan has stated, "and through it, you get a clearer view of the society. That's what I've always tried to do in films." A number of critics have pointed out that his movies might be viewed as spiritual barometers of the national psyche. He has always believed that it was his responsibility as a citizen-artist to speak out against injustice and to exert pressure on public policy as strongly as possible. "I was born in another country, and I have been in many countries and therefore, more than most American men I know, I appreciate and value what we have here, while at the same time not closing my eyes to our faults and differences," he's observed. Throughout most of his career, he believed that American society was basically healthy and that justice ·would eventually prevail. However, like John Ford, who influenced him more than any other American filmmaker, Kazan grew more pessimistic with age. During the Vietnam era especially, his faith in American institutions wavered. The Arrangement (1969) and The Visitors (1971) reflect this darker vision. Nonetheless, he saw great moral strength in the protest movement of this same era, and he was heartened by the revival of interest in Marxism. He considered the New Left less dogmatic and authoritarian than the old left of the 1930s.

"Kazan's career can be seen as a set of variations on the basic theme of the individual as victim of social pressures that demand a caricature of the self and betrayal of the past," Jim Kitses has pointed out in his perceptive analysis of Kazan's work. Most of his movies deal with a conflict of loyalties, in which the protagonist struggles inarticulately to find his essential nature. His struggle is usually dialectical, cutting across cultural boundaries, impelling him to adapt to an alien world, whose values are both alluring and repugnant. In order to fit in, he initially believes that he must repudiate his family, his past, and his cultural origins. He becomes, in effect, a spiritual exile, devoured by guilt and feelings of ambivalence. Only those characters who are able to synthesize the best of both worlds survive with their souls intact. The dialectical tensions between the values of the individual and those of society in Kazan’s work might be schematized by the following sets of polarities: