THE DEATH of film and stage director Elia Kazan last Sunday, at the age of 94, drew reverent tributes in Greece and Cyprus but a more ambivalent response in Britain and the US, the country where he lived most of his life.
Neither comes as a surprise. Kazan (born Elia Kazanjoglou in Constantinople) was a great ethnic-Greek film-maker – perhaps the greatest – and never lost touch with his roots. His reputation in America, on the other hand, was permanently tarnished in 1952 when he ‘named names’ to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, i.e. snitched on Communist colleagues during the notorious witch-hunt led by Senator Joe McCarthy.
His career never quite recovered; even in 1999, when he was awarded a Life Achievement Oscar, there was massive controversy, and the cameras showed many of Hollywood’s finest – including Nick Nolte and Ed Harris – refusing to join the traditional standing ovation. Yet Kazan, in his day, was a revolutionary figure: he co-founded the Actors’ Studio, home of the famous ‘Method’ whereby actors tried to be a character instead of just performing; he caused a sensation with the 1947 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, burning with unprecedented physical intensity; he was Oscar-nominated five times and won twice, notably for On the Waterfront (1954), a classic melodrama – and a tale, not coincidentally, of a man who becomes a hero by informing on his friends.
Kazan’s personal charisma was a large part of his legend. “He was edgy, belligerent, seductive, rhapsodic, brutal,” wrote David Thomson in his obituary for The Guardian. “To be with him was to know that, in addition to everything else he had done, he could have been a hypnotic actor or an inspiring political leader”. No one else, it was said, could galvanise actors so intensely. He was fearless, controversial – Streetcar being merely the first of many brushes with the censors – and fiercely unsentimental. He had a natural genius for finding drama: having risen to the top in both film and theatre he later became a noted novelist, and wrote an acclaimed autobiography.
Maybe that’s why he’s never been a darling of film critics: he was Elia Kazan first, and a film-maker second. In truth, his career spanned less than 20 years, from the atypical (but excellent) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) to America, America (1963). In between came such classics as East of Eden (1955), Baby Doll (1956), Splendour in the Grass (1961) and the film version of Streetcar (1951), but the last 40 years of his life were almost completely barren, cinematically speaking. Officially he retired, but he’d also been ostracised by former friends, and was always a prickly kind of person to begin with. Given his prodigious output from the late 40s to the early 60s (15 films in 16 years), you have to wonder: did he jump, or was he pushed?
“My name is Elia Kazan. I am a Greek by blood, a Turk by birth, and an American because my uncle made a journey,” narrates Kazan at the start of America, America, his most personal film. It’s the line of a man forever trying to define himself, and forever feeling out of place. The film is a stirring tale of an immigrant’s journey from Asia Minor to America, the promised land – but that’s not the end of the story. Kazan tried for years (but couldn’t get the finance) for a sequel, Beyond the Blue Aegean, in which the young man of America, America has grown old and corrupt, and ends up returning to his homeland. Not for Elia Kazan the false comfort of a happy ending.
