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I am not by any means comparing Kazan's past actions with Riefenstahl's aesthetic enshrining of all things Nazi, but in the eyes of a lot of people his decisions made him just as unforgivable. Kazan's branding act? In 1952, when McCarthy paranoia and career-ending witch hunts were at their most rabid, he denounced his involvement in the Communist Party and gave the names of guilty colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Not that morality has ever played a big role in Hollywood, but the outrage felt by many in the industry over Kazan's snitching was undimmed by the decades that passed. As late as 1999, when the director received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars, there was shouting from protesters outside the auditorium and a good deal of scowling from his peers inside of it. Amid so much hullabaloo, does one dare ask what he was being awarded for? After all, the montage so nervously introduced at the ceremony by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro contained glimpses of Marlon Brando in his sweaty, torn shirt yelling "Stellaaaaaaaaa!" and James Dean suffering voluptuously in stunning CinemaScope. Could anybody responsible for those indelible moments just be boiled down to any one act, no matter how controversial? I doubt anyone can be summarized by one act, and Kazan, born in Constantinople of Greek and Turkish heritage, was far from a simple man. In his vigorous, 800-plus page biography, A Life, he's angry, arrogant, insecure, a prick and a horndog and, at the same time, aware (and not uncritical) of all those things. Most of all, one feels the kind of ardent, personal passion that inevitably drives an artist to work. And passion -- or, more specifically, intensity -- was the recurring motif of Kazan's career, as well as his preferred method. Beginning with his involvement with the Actors Studio during his theatrical days and the development of the so-called Method Acting (or, as Humphrey Bogart once tagged it, "the scratch-your-ass-and-mumble" school of acting), he was obsessed with pumping visceral physicality into scenes. To a firm believer in the dramatic power of two bodies slamming against each other, no argument would be complete without overturned tables and smashed china. Bracketed by the gentility of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945 and The Last Tycoon in 1976 lies a wide variety of rows, collisions and eruptions -- a fortissimo style that, in the words of vintage iconoclast Dwight Macdonald, was "forthright the way a butcher is forthright when he slaps down a steak for a customer's inspection." Meat slab or not, Kazan's handling of material could be maddening. For all the vividness of the details and the rawness of his players, the intensity of his direction was often, in the words of Andrew Sarris, "more excessive than expressive." It's difficult to believe, for instance, that the heightened mannerisms of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) were ever considered the latest word in naturalism, and A Face in the Crowd (1957) is so overloaded with Kazanian sweat and bellowing that it all but shatters the camera lenses. My own path with Kazan's movies has been bumpy. When I first encountered his many award-coddled classics, I thought he was sweating a little too much for effects -- as far as emotional intensity and ballsy idiosyncrasy were concerned, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller were much more to my liking. I like his later, calmer, quieter movies far better: Wild River (1960), Splendor in the Grass (1961) and particularly America, America (1963) are, in one word, overwhelming. In them, one feels Kazan pruning his stylistic hysteria into a direct connection with audiences, achieving what he set out to do from the beginning -- that is, to speak through film in the first person. And that is why, no matter how I may feel about his actions and his intransigence toward them, I respect and admire Elia Kazan. He directed as he lived, full ahead with his guts, and if that made him a pariah to many, well, that wasn't his problem.
Recommended from Kazan's filmography: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Panic in the Streets (1950), Viva
Zapata! (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), Baby Doll (1956), Wild River (1960), Splendor in
the Grass (1961), America, America (1963), The Arrangement (1969), The Visitors (1972).
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