Elia Kazan -- Final End

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1], 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 13:15:14 09/29/03 Mon
Author: Drummond
Subject: Elia Kazan

You know, I love his movies, even though I think he took up the On the Waterfront job in a pathetic attempt to justify his snitching on behalf of Joseph McCarthy. He justifies giving the names of 8 former friends and ruining their careers on his hate of Stalin. But not all of them had been communists, and none of them identified themselves as such by the 1950s. They suffered in their careers because they refused to snitch like he did.
And his career blossomed after that. Go figure.

The article I linked mentions briefly a conversation with Arthur Miller, a lifelong leftist and writer of The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, etc. What the article doesn't mention is that they didn't speak for years after Miller sent Kazan a copy of his then recently finished play "View from the Bridge" in order to tell Kazan what he thought of snitches. The play is about a man who is in love with a woman interested in another man who happens to be an illegal immigrant. The man snitches the other off to the authorities in order to remove the competition.

Not only did the careers suffer during HUAC's rampage, but art in the US in general suffered, with great films receiving no nominations or recognition while the winners of the academy awards at the time can't even be found in Blockbuster. For instance, in 1954, Singin in the Rain received no nominations because Gene Kelly, a liberal, not a communist by any stretch of the imagination, refused to give names. The winner that year was some movie about a circus.

After McCarthy was defeated by alchohol and a pack of pols too cowardly to take him on at his height of power, the back of the blacklists was broken by Spartacus, in which the producers went out of their way to hire blacklisted talent sans the false names in open defiance. Of course it became a blockbuster, successful enough so that there have been scores of cheap imitations since (Anton and Cleopatra, Braveheart, Gladiator, etc.).

If Kazan and some of the others had shown a little lest self-interest and a little more principle, we might not have the "decade of dark ages" (the words of Bertoldt Brecht who used his intelligence and got the Hell out of Dodge and moved to Europe before he could be accosted) in our country's legacy.

That being said, Kazan brought the theater to the big screen, and deserves recognition for that. It's a shame that his career is tarnished by a moment of weakness.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3148538.stm

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]