Kazan, HUAC and Jack

ELIA KAZAN: A BIOGRAPHY By Richard Schickel

Elia Kazan was one of the most important filmmakers of his generation. He directed classics like On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden, and launched Marlon Brando, James Dean and Natalie Wood, among many others, to stardom. Yet he is mostly remembered today not for his cinematic triumphs, but for what biographer Richard Schickel believes should have been a minor blip in his career-naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, which haunted him for the rest of his life, and occasioned major controversy when he was awarded an honorary lifetime-achievement Oscar six years ago.

Time magazine critic Richard Schickel, a personal friend of Kazan's who orchestrated the tribute to the director broadcast during the 1999 Oscars, sets not to right wrongs but to look at the director's life and times as a whole, from his early days in The Group, an off-Broadway acting troupe that would be the embryo of the Actors' Studio, and his early involvement with the American Communist Party (from which he resigned after he came to believe the party was trying to gain control of actors' unions) through his career as a stage and screen actor and his decision to dedicate himself to directing.

Schickel offers a lot of insight into the moviemaking industry and its politics, and also into Kazan's unique style as a director. For instance, during one point while filming East of Eden, he felt that James Dean and Raymond Massey, who played his father in the picture, had a genuine dislike for one another. Instead of trying to patch things up, he decided to work with it. "Do you think I would do anything to stop that antagonism?" Kazan said in an interview. "No, I increased it... You hopefully stimulate them. In that case I didn't have to. It was there."

While making A Face In The Crowd he couldn't get the raw energy he desired from Andy Griffith for the film's final scene, when a desperate, drunken Lonesome Rhodes raves from his New York penthouse after being abandoned by his friends, so "I loaded him up with Jack Daniels whiskey... we call it the 'Jack Daniels technique'... and that did it. He was open to everything."

Schickel dedicates a chapter to the HUAC controversy, detailing the circumstances that led Kazan to finally name names. The director had appeared once, but declined to name Communists. Dissatisfied with his statement, the committee subpoenaed him again, and for weeks he struggled with the idea of naming past associates. After consulting with Arthur Miller, producer Daryl Zanuck and others, he decided he owed no loyalty to a party he hadn't been a member of for almost 20 years.

What he didn't count on was the hatred stemming from his testimony lasting so long. He counted on the American populace's short-term memories, but as history will have it, some things-like this one-remain.

Schickel's biography sheds little light into Kazan as an individual, apart from his brief affairs with starlets like Marilyn Monroe and his three marriages, but instead follows him through his work, all the way to his "merciful" (Schickel's quote) passing in September 2003, when the author was already working on the biography. It reads quite easily, and contains not a single dull moment for those interested in the behind-the-scenes aspects of theater and movies-something rare in this kind of book.