Elia Kazan

The Cinema of an American Outsider

Brian Neve

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780755696543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In 1999, Elia Kazan (1909-2003) received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement; it was a controversial award, for in 1952 he had given testimony to the HUAC Committee, for which he was ostracized by many. That Oscar also acknowledged Kazan's remarkable contribution to American and world cinema, making such films as "On the Waterfront" and "A Streetcar Named Desire". Kazan's life in the cinema is due a reassessment, one that is presented expertly and gracefully by Brian Neve in this book, drawing on previously neglected and some hitherto untapped sources. Focussing in particular on the producer-director's post-"On the Waterfront", New York based independent work, and on his key artistic collaborations, including those with Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck and Budd Schulberg, Neve gives a fascinating reassessment of Kazan's famed technique with such actors as Marlon Brando and James Dean, and his lifetime concern to provoke and photograph 'authentic' behaviour. He reveals a pattern, through the films, of personally resonant themes, relating for example to ethnicity and the American immigrant myth.
He reviews Kazan's style, from the colour and wide screen of "East of Eden" to the creative use of location in his Amercian South films, including "Baby Doll". He debates the reception of Kazan's work and the controversy - which dogged his career - of his 1952 Congressional testimony. These elements and more make this a very readable and memorable, fresh portrayal of the film career of this ever fascinating director.

1

Kazan at Twentieth Century-Fox

It was early in 1944 that Elia Kazan, after having considered other studio offers, signed a non-exclusive, seven picture directing contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, a studio that had enjoyed spectacular profits during the war years, but which with other studios faced a number of problems in the immediate post-war period, not least because of the long-term decline in attendances and studio profits that set in early in 1947. The head of production at Fox was Darryl F. Zanuck, a writer turned executive who at Warner Bros. in the late twenties and early thirties had overseen the first sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927), and the early gangster cycle, including Little Caesar (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931). Overlooked for promotion, Zanuck had resigned from Warners and founded a new production company, Twentieth Century Films. When Twentieth Century-Fox was formed in 1935 from the merger of Fox Films and Twentieth Century Films, the 33-year-old Zanuck ran the studio, favouring nostalgic Americana in the thirties, producing The Grapes of Wrath in 1940, and calling in the war years for Hollywood to adapt its new found social responsibility to the post-war era. A registered Republican and the most significant non-Jewish studio head, Zanuck’s social concerns were also reflected in his personal involvement in Wilson (1944), an idealistic and expensive recreation of President Woodrow Wilson’s struggle for the League of Nations after the First World War, and in his ultimately unsuccessful effort at the end of the war to mount a production, ‘One World’, based on the ideas of 1944 Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie (at one point Zanuck had approached Kazan to direct the latter project).¹ Fox writer Philip Dunne later noted the studio was ‘no place for an Auteur’, given Zanuck’s intense involvement with all stages of the production process, from script conferences to casting and editing.² John Ford was perhaps the exception to the rule, generally ignoring Zanuck’s urgings that he quicken the pace of his films, although the studio head made significant changes to Ford’s cut of My Darling Clementine (1946), Ford’s last film under his studio contract. Kazan’s work at Fox provided him with a film apprenticeship while he remained based for much of the period in New York, where he worked with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams on groundbreaking Broadway plays. During the time that he lived in Los Angeles, while working on Gentleman’s Agreement, Kazan enjoyed working with Zanuck, but saw himself as something of an ‘exile’ in Hollywood.³

With no film experience except for his collaborative work in the mid-thirties with the Theatre of Action Film Unit, a brief spell as assistant to Lewis Milestone in 1937, and his work with Frontier Films, Kazan faced a steep learning curve as he directed the Fox adaptation of Betty Smith’s semi-autobiographical and best-selling first novel of 1943, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). He was, as he later said, ‘thrown into directing right from the New York stage’.⁴ Kazan began work after the script was completed and the film was shot entirely on the Twentieth Century-Fox lot. He was aided by the film’s producer, Louis D. Lighton, with whom he worked on the casting, and by cameraman Leon Shamroy, who advised on angles and close-ups. The completed film was well received by audiences and critics; it was one of the top moneymaking films of 1944–5 and also made the National Board of Review’s ten-best films list for the year. To Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, discussing the shift from novel to film, ‘the main and essential story of a little girl’s painful, hopeful growth in a tenement home full of fancies and patient, wretched toil has been kept’. Manny Farber was more critical, appreciating the truth in the earlier part of the story, but finding the photography to be destructive, blanketing ‘the poverty in lovely shadows and pearly sentimentality’. James Agee disliked the deadness of the sets and the too neatly ‘tagged’ characters, but felt nonetheless that the film represented, after the stereotypes of the war years, ‘the respectable beginning of at least a return toward trying to represent human existence’.⁵

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a historical saga of family survival amid the poverty of a Brooklyn tenement of the early 1900s. Kazan found in Peggy Ann Gardner, as Francie, the young girl, and James Dunn, as her father, feelings and vulnerabilities that chimed with those of their characters. Singing waiter Johnny Nolan (Dunn) is full of charm, but his drinking and pipe dreams of success divert the family responsibilities on to his hard-working but emotionally rigid wife, Katie (Dorothy McGuire). She is well aware of her husband’s vices but blind to his virtues, as well as to those of her cheerful and flirtatious sister Sissy (Joan Blondell). The sister’s extra-marital relationships had concerned the Breen office, necessitating some script changes. When Katie insists that Francie leave school so that her younger brother Neeley can continue his education (a decision that makes a lasting impression on Francie), Johnny is upset and leaves home, and within a week he is found dead of alcoholism and pneumonia. In effect he has sacrificed himself so that his daughter can continue her education. Katie eventually sees her own shortcomings, in particular after Francie nurses her during the difficult birth of a third child, and the bond between mother and daughter is repaired. Francie returns to school and the film ends on a conventionally optimistic note, with Katie accepting a proposal of marriage from reliable and respectful local policeman McShane (Lloyd Nolan).

Kazan was a new cog in a disciplined, well-oiled studio machine that released 27 films in 1945. His work with Dunn and Garner was particularly recognised. Dunn gained an Academy Award as best supporting actor the next year, while Peggy Ann Garner was named the most promising newcomer. This work is particularly evident when Katie is painfully in labour and uncharacteristically vulnerable and fearful, in need for the first time of her daughter’s love and nursing. The whole scene takes place during a downpour that has an aural and visual association with the mother’s trauma and emotional release. The rain on the windows is reflected in a pattern of light on Katie’s face as she lies back on her pillow. Afraid of death – a glimpse of the real fears that accompanied the lives of poor women in childbirth at the time of the story – Katie finds a new emotional register. As she lies in her bed in front of Francie, viewed as if through a veil of tears, the image suggests a sentimental variation on the iconic Dorothea Lange photograph, from 1936, of the ‘Migrant Mother’.

On set, Kazan penned some ‘personal notes of a rank beginner’, edited by Kazan’s sometime assistant on the film Nicholas Ray, and sent them to his wife and professional confidant Molly Day Thacher in New York. Ray, an old friend from the Theatre of Action days in New York, came west with Kazan, and made his own first film, They Live By Night, belatedly released by RKO in 1948. The notes construct an opposition between cinema and reality, on the one hand, and the ‘illusion and unreality’ of the stage, on the other. Kazan cites approvingly the notion of the Russian theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold that dialogue was ‘the decoration of action’, but he also wanted to go further in film in discovering ‘what’s going on in the hearts and feelings of the characters’. He expressed a desire to provoke and photograph authentic behaviour from his actors, so that the dialogue becomes secondary to looks and behaviour that become ‘pieces of real experience’.⁶

Despite being aware of the need to learn about the new medium, Kazan also analysed key characters and relationships in terms of the theatrical notion of a three act structure. In the first act Johnny and Katie are unaware that they have fallen out of love, in the second the couple realise that their relationship is dead, and finally Johnny turns to Francie, and Katie and Francie are reconciled. In terms of themes Kazan was interested both in immigration – the drama is set around the time when his own immigrant family established itself in New York – and also in the young girl’s emotional need for her father, an element that the director related to his own separation from his children in New York. It was at this time that Kazan also first referred to the work of other directors and notably to John Ford’s ability to create depth within the film frame. During his forties sojourn at Twentieth Century-Fox, Kazan would run several of Ford’s films, including Young Mr Lincoln (1939), and talk to the veteran director, in particular about his use of locations. In his notes on his first film, Kazan mentions various borrowings in terms of technique but also admits that Ford’s work transcended technique: to Kazan ‘the truth is FORD is a poet. His frames sing with feeling.’⁷

Perhaps this early feeling for Ford was a factor in Kazan’s unlikely involvement with MGM’s production of The Sea of Grass (1947), in 1946, although he did later recall thinking that he had ‘made it’ when he took the Super Chief out to Hollywood to work at this most renowned of studios. At MGM Kazan had no role in the casting and never met the screenwriters, Marguerite Roberts and Vincent Lawrence, who had adapted the 1937 Conrad Richter novel of – in the words of the Motion Picture Digest – ‘infidelity and bastardy’. There are certainly political and environmental undertones in the epic conflict, set in the 1880s, between wealthy cattle baron Jim Brewton (Spencer Tracy), who affects a mystical commitment to the unfenced grasslands of the South West, and the homesteaders who want to settle on the land. Brice Chamberlain (Mervyn Douglas) represents these farmers and also has a relationship with Jim Brewton’s wife, the Eastern socialite Lutie Cameron (Katherine Hepburn). Unsympathetic to her husband’s attitudes towards the ‘nesters’, Cameron spends long periods away from her husband’s ranch and has an illegitimate son with Chamberlain. The couple are separated for 20 years and during this time the son, Brock (Robert Walker), grows into a disturbed young man; it is only when he dies (shot when he escapes justice after killing a man during a card game) that Cameron returns west for the funeral and is improbably reconciled with her husband.

The Breen Office had been concerned at the woman’s out-of-wedlock relationship and had repeatedly urged the studio to ensure that she was properly punished.⁸ This punishment seems to take the form of Lutie Cameron admitting that her husband had been right about everything, including the unsuitability of the land for anything but grazing. In effect the conclusion shows an independent woman returning to domesticity, a theme with some relevance to immediate post-war American experience. Writer Marguerite Roberts was a leftist who was later blacklisted, while Tracy, Hepburn and Douglas were all prominent Hollywood liberals. To Roberts, a Western specialist, Kazan, despite his liberal politics, was a ‘chauvinist’, and favoured the Tracy character, although it is doubtful if the director had much opportunity to change a perspective that, under pressure from the Breen Office, was central to the script.⁹ More fundamental to Kazan’s evident frustration with the project was the studio’s unwillingness to film on location, so that the vast grasslands, the ‘sea of grass’ of the title, appear only in the form of back projected footage, shot a year earlier in Nebraska.

Seeking to provide ‘spines’ for the main characters, Kazan saw Katie Cameron as an ‘adventurer’ and Col. Brewton as a ‘fanatic’; yet these identities, and the pain of separation implied in the story, impinge little on the star performances of the two principals. Tracy was ill at ease with horses and makes an unlikely man of the West, while the Hepburn character is pegged as an MGM star by her succession of opulent costumes. A scene in which Brewton strolls into a room on his ranch, ostensibly after an arduous ride through a snow storm, seems particularly ludicrous in terms of Kazan’s concern with capturing ‘pieces of real experience’. The story does make references to the experience of the Depression, and Kazan noted that ‘the nesters’ should not be 1935 Dust-Bowlers but ‘should have something hungry-eyed and desperate about them’. Purely in terms of the story there are echoes of The Plow that Broke the Plains, the Resettlement Administration sponsored documentary, directed by Pare Lorentz, of 1936. Yet in the film (described as a ‘Woman’s Drama’ by the Hollywood Reporter), it is the Tracy figure and not the Government who conserves the land, although the film is also sympathetic to Chamberlain, who provides for the interests of the settlers.¹⁰ To the extent that Lutie Cameron returns unconditionally to her husband the sexual politics of the film, together with the politics of the land, are ultimately resolved in his favour.

After this unhappy spell at MGM Kazan was happy to return to Fox, and the four additional films that he made there in the late forties were equally divided between two forms, the location shot ‘semi-documentary’, and the high budget, high prestige social problem film personally supervised by Zanuck. Boomerang! (1947) was made on location in Stamford, Connecticut in the autumn of 1946 and was produced by the former March of Time producer Louis de Rochemont, who had joined the studio in 1943, and was responsible for two successful films dealing with wartime espionage, The House on 92nd Street (1945) and 13 Rue Madeleine (1947). Zanuck, who was always suspicious of documentary elements that were insufficiently enlivened by strong acting and dramatic values, felt that he had invented the ‘semi-documentary’ form in tough negotiations with de Rochemont, who favoured stories dealing with FBI and police technique and procedure. At the time the Hollywood Reporter saw Kazan’s film as ‘something of a novelty, in as much as not a foot of the feature was filmed in Hollywood, or in any studio, but all of it on location’.¹¹ With the squeeze on profits at the studio from 1947, the shortage of and increasing cost of studio space was to contribute to the wider attractiveness of location shooting. Products of this trend included Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), described at the time as risky and experimental by producer Mark Hellinger, and Robert Rossen’s production of All the King’s Men (1949) at Columbia Pictures. In terms of the origins of Boomerang!, de Rochemont had referred Kazan to a 1945 Readers Digest article, ‘The Perfect Case’, based on a 1924 incident in which an accused man was arrested but eventually acquitted through the efforts of prosecuting attorney Homer L. Cummings. Yet the producer’s main contribution seems to have been related to the most conservative element of the film, the heavy-handed voice-over narration at the beginning and again at the end.

Location work crucially allowed inexperienced directors such as Kazan to work with a new freedom from studio think...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Kazan at Twentieth Century-Fox
• 2: New Directions: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Viva Zapata! (1952)
• 3: Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities
• 4: Filming On the Waterfront (1954)
• 5: Producer–Director: East of Eden (1955) and Baby Doll (1956)
• 6: Journeys in the American South
• 7: Splendour in the Grass (1961) and America America (1963)
• 8: Into Myself: The Arrangement (1969) and After
• 9: The Last Tycoon (1976): A Coda
• References
• Filmography
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright