Junto Boys

SO LONG ELIA KAZAN

Elia Kazan (1909-2003) was a great director of film and theatre, but he could never escape his involvement in the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The people who liked the HUAC said that Communism was a real threat to our country and needed to be exposed. Those who opposed HUAC said that people had the right to be communists and Russia had no influence on Hollywood or American politics.

Kazan told the HUAC that he was once a communist and then named some other people he knew to be communists. Many people during that era who had associations with Communists that didn’t come clean were blacklisted. Some in the entertainment business have never forgiven him. He was continually passed over for the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The Institute saw fit to honor young Tom Hanks and Schlock movie director Roger Corman instead. He did receive the honorary Oscar in 1999, but it wasn’t without incident. While Meryl Streep and Warren Beatty applauded, Ed Harris and Nick Nolte sat on their hands.

The conventional wisdom has been that HUAC overreacted, and that Joe McCarthy was a demagogue, and that the communist influence was never a threat. McCarthy was certainly self-serving, but KGB documents have since shown that Russia had made real in-roads inside Hollywood and was influencing the content of writers and movies. But instead of blaming McCarthy for his personal indiscretions alone, Hollywood has totally ignored the evidence that shows there was real danger. They blame people like Kazan now for being right.

Regardless of the politics, Kazan was a great director. When he was directing the original Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” Kazan debated Williams over the script. Williams went back wrote the entire third act of his play when Kazan told him that Big Daddy was too big of a character to not appear in the finale. The idea presented by Kazan changed the entire conclusion of the play and it’s the one we’ve seen in every production since.

As a movie director his films were heavy on message, but they were still entertaining and he got tremendous performances out of his actors. Movies like “Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the Waterfront,” and “East of Eden” are acknowledged classics, but he made a number of great lessor-known films.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1946) – When I saw this film I was surprised at how real and honest it was. It’s only peer in the female (Peggy Ann Garner) coming of age department is To Kill a Mockingbird.

Boomerang (1947) - This is based on a true story and has a definite documentary feel, although it’s a total dramatization. Dana Andrews plays a prosecutor who realizes the man on trial is innocent and proves him so.

Panic in the Streets (1950) – Great thriller with Richard Widmark trying to catch a gang of thugs that are also carrying the deadly bubonic plague. A bunch of great character actors, Zero Mostel and Jack Palance play the thugs, and Paul Douglas plays a police captain.

A Face in the Crowd (1957) – His two long stints on network TV would make you think that Andy Griffith was merely a wink and nod actor, but his performance in this film should have won him the Oscar. A country boy drifter who is made famous by television, Griffith plays jovial, enthusiastic, earnest, duplicitous, treacherous, destitute and remorseful all with directness and believability.

Splendor in the Grass (1961) – Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood struggle to please their parents in the 1920s. Teenage hormones had never been given this much weight in a Hollywood film. Though treated seriously here, it was certainly a precursor to comedies like Porky’s and American Pie.” It doesn’t hurt that Beatty’s character is named “Stamper.”