There Was A Method To This Director's Madness

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LE Newsletter - October 29, 2009

There Was A Method To This Director's Madness

Excerpt from www.thestar.com - Geoff Pevere

(October 24, 2009) The figure who took the stage at the 1999 Academy Awards, to receive a

lifetime achievement award wasn't about to say he was sorry.

And he never did. When director Elia Kazan died six years ago at age 94, he took with him whatever regrets he might have had about naming names before the House Committee on Un-American activities.

If people wanted to know how he really felt about identifying some of his "fellow travellers" in the American Communist Party, they would have to look elsewhere.

A good start might be his movies – director of On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Face in the Crowd and Splendor in the Grass – one of the most contentious yet formidable bodies of work in American film.

Throughout a career spanning four decades, that boldly straddled theatre and novels as well as cinema and almost single-handedly embedded the acting style commonly called "The Method" as the defining American performance mode, Kazan addressed one subject more than any other: the conflicted soul.

If he could have made a movie about his own paradox, only Kazan might have been able to reconcile the kind of question asked by David Thomson in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: "Is Kazan an original author of films or a great director of actors who manages to disguise conventional material and commonplace attitudes?"

Not that the director would have satisfactorily answered the question. But only he might have found a suitably dramatic form for the struggle.

For the man who saw in the young Marlon Brando sufficient inner turmoil to re-engineer Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire so that it became the vehicle for the actor's volcanic eruptions, the struggle was the drama.

In his notes for the current Cinematheque Ontario retrospective of Kazan's work, critic Kent Jones makes the case that nothing has interfered with the due appreciation of this singular talent than the man himself.

Kazan, who was born in Istanbul and educated at Yale, revolutionized American theatre after co-founding the Brando-launching Actors Studio in the 1940s.

He was a person of such immense personal and professional density that his films always seemed somewhat incidental to what his typically rich and elusive 1988 autobiography simply called, A Life.

"Kazan's enemies have spent years insisting that we make an exception of him," Jones writes, "that we train ourselves to listen past the work for the voice of the whispering scoundrel, attempting to cloak the sin he committed on April 1, 1952, in the finery of artistic splendour. And yet, the exception will not be made, because the work just won't stop speaking for itself."

And what does his body of work say? Among other things, that the past just won't let go. You are what you've done.

Even in his earlier movies, made when the director's reputation as a groundbreaking maverick of the American stage (All My Sons, Death of A Salesman, Streetcar, etc.) had just reached boiling point, Kazan was drawn to characters whose existence always seemed to push at the edge of the screen.

But it wasn't just the boundaries of the frame that the protagonists of Boomerang, Panic in the Streets and Pinky seemed to exist beyond, it was the depths below the surface.

As would eventually become so startlingly clear in the Kazan-directed performances of Brando in Waterfront, James Dean in East of Eden, Montgomery Clift in Wild River and Warren Beatty in Splendor, Kazan had a near-transcendent knack for teasing out performances that percolated with submerged currents. Words and feelings collided and crashed, action and intentions locked in a kind of psychodramatic conflict.

No matter what role it might have played in the director's life, guilt was an issue of pressing dramatic concern in his movies. But so was sexual desire, especially as it rose up and flooded prevailing moral breakwaters of the 1950s: think of Brando lunging after Vivien Leigh in Streetcar, Carroll Baker lolling seductively in Baby Doll's crib, or the combustible passion of Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in Splendor.

Kazan's movies, and the acting style they ushered into the mainstream, cannot be extricated from the general American cultural flow of the period toward inner psychic self-excavation – Arthur Miller and Williams, bebop, Kerouac, Mailer, Brando, Dean, Jackson Pollock, etc. But they also can't be written off to fleeting cultural tempers, either.

What they opened up was the admission of pain as a defining experience, the stuff of the American Dream. The surface of things was only that: the outward form of inner forces, a screen.

Movies, like people, contained unseen depths.

American Outsider: The Films of Elia Kazan runs until Nov. 23. For further info call 416 968-FILM.