Elia Kazan, 1909 - 2003.

"Elia Kazan, the immigrant child of a Greek rug merchant who became one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.... Mr. Kazan also received an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1999. The lifetime achievement award was controversial because in 1952 Mr. Kazan angered many of his friends and colleagues when he acknowledged before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936 and gave the committee the names of eight other party members.... Arthur Schlesinger thundered, 'If the Academy's occasion calls for apologies, let Mr. Kazan's denouncers apologize for the aid and comfort they gave to Stalinism.' Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro extolled him, Mr. De Niro calling him a 'master of a new kind of psychological and behavioral faith in acting.'"

- Mervyn Rothstein, today's New York Times.

"Probably no single individual could have broken the blacklist in April 1952, and yet no person was in a better strategic position to try than Kazan, by virtue of his prestige and economic invulnerability, to mount a symbolic campaign against it, and by this example inspire hundreds of fence sitters to come over to the opposition.... It soon became clear that whatever Kazan's motives, his reputation as the epitome of a betrayer would outlast the Party's ritualistic indignation. When HUAC asked the folksinger Tony Kerber, another Group Theatre alumnus who had been named by Kazan, whether they had known each other in the Party, Kraber responded, 'Is this the Kazan that signed the contract for five hundred thousand dollars the day after he gave names to this Committee?' To the day he died in 1977, Zero Mostel, who made it back to a stardom he had never known before he was blacklisted, referred to Kazan as 'Looselips.' Sidney Zion, the editor of Scanlan's Monthly, a brash magazine that flourished briefly in the 1970s, once ran an article called 'Hello, Informer,' and to accompany it, he republished Kazan's 1952 ad and sent him a check for $150. No matter how unrelated the occasion, few serious interviewers fail to ask Kazan about his informing."

- Victor Navasky, Naming Names, 1980. (Thanks, Ed).

"To be considered an 'actor's director' is a double-edged sword.... A Hawks or a Welles or a Visconti or a Fassbinder is not primarily known as an 'actor's director,' but as a film artist who integrates the work of his actors into a larger and all-sided aesthetic effort. One of their films is instantly recognizable in a fashion that a Kazan film never is.... As for Kazan, somewhere around page 600 in his autobiography he sums things up fairly well: 'For years I declared myself an ardent liberal in politics, made all the popular declarations of faith, but the truth was - and is - that I am, like most of you, a bourgeois. I go along disarming people, but when it gets to a crunch, I am revealed to be a person interested only in what most artists are interested in, himself.' A remarkable comment.... In applauding Kazan the members of the Academy are applauding themselves. What are they saying? 'In similar circumstances, we would behave in precisely the same way.'... As James P. Cannon, a genuine anti-Stalinist, observed two months after Kazan's HUAC testimony, in regard to another specimen of the McCarthy days, Whittaker Chambers: 'American capitalism, turning rotten before it got fully ripe, acclaims the stool pigeons and informers, who squeal and enrich themselves, as the embodiments of the highest good they know. By their heroes ye shall know them.'"

- David Walsh, WSWS, 1999.

Posted by dwhudson at September 29, 2003 12:34 AM