Upcoming at the Seoul Cinematheque  from April 6th-18th is a retrospective of the Hollywood director Elia Kazan. The films included are: GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENT (1947), PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950), A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951), ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), EAST OF EDEN (1955), WILD RIVER (1960), and SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961). The schedule is available here. There are few directors in American cinema history as controversial as Kazan, partially for his films but even more because of his naming of names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Because Kazan participated in the anti-Communist witch hunt and betrayed many of his former friends and colleagues, he has never been fully accepted by Hollywood. Even in 1999, when he was finally given an Academy Award for his body of work, there were many in attendance who did not stand or applaud. The blacklisted writer-director Abraham Polonsky even went so far as to say someone should use the occasion to shoot him. And as much as critics and even audiences like to separate art and politics, it has been a difficult divide to maintain in evaluating Kazan’s career.

Of course, many have tried, most notably the film critic Richard Schickel, who is also Kazan’s biographer. In fact, Schickel even goes so far as to defend Kazan’s actions as legitimate, that the Communists who he named deserved their fate. This is in keeping with the hard-line of Kazan himself, which is the one of the main reasons there remains so much vitriol against him. Unlike many others who named names and later regretted their actions, Kazan insisted that he cooperated not to save his career but because he believed in the anti-Communist cause. However, he also rather contradicts himself by also stating that the names he gave the committee were already known to be communists. This defense comes up often, and is completely invalid. The whole point of the blacklist era was to create an atmosphere of fear. The naming of names was not about rooting out communists and protecting national security. Rather, as Victor Navsky shows in his study NAMING NAMES, the whole process was a “degradation ritual” that worked as ideological warfare against the Left (people make the same mistake today when discussing torture, which is not, contrary to popular belief, about getting information, but rather about terrorizing a population). Kazan is correct in one detail, which is that he did not need to inform in order to save his career. He could have gone back to New York and the theatre, given how successful he was in that medium. And this makes his betrayal even worse. Unlike many others, Kazan sold out not to feed his family, but to maintain his Hollywood lifestyle. Kazan had the power and position to fight for a principle, and didn’t. For this, many have never forgiven him.

All of this complicates how one is to view Kazan and his oeuvre today. Certainly, Kazan is a legendary “actor’s director”, and his direction of Marlon Brando and others helped change American screen acting, for better or worse (not everyone supported the revolution; Howard Hawks claimed that A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE reintroduced every bad acting habit he had tried to eliminate throughout his career). How much credit goes to Brando and the other actors in arguable, but few would deny Kazan’s talent with performers. His best film in this regard is probably ON THE WATERFRONT; unfortunately, this is also his most politically problematic. It is a movie that I once loved very deeply. I first saw it in my first year of university, when I was just getting seriously interested in cinema, and I watched it repeatedly over the next few years, blissfully ignorant of the political subtext. Essentially, Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg made the picture as a justification for their cooperation with HUAC, stressing the nobility of the lead character who testifies against the mob and waterfront corruption. The film is much harder to take after you have that information in the background, and it now lacks the same resonance it once had for me. This is a shame because the acting and the depiction of the waterfront are both ahead of their time and remain effective.

But it is not only Kazan’s cooperation with blacklisting that has led to the downfall of his critical reputation. Film critic and historian Andrew Sarris, in his auteurist study THE AMERICAN CINEMA (1968), went against the grain of the time (in the 1950s Kazan was considered a giant in the industry) and viewed Kazan as overrated and not a true auteur. Ironically, Sarris’s problem with Kazan is the sociological nature of his films, often from a Leftist perspective. Kazan himself has claimed that although he named names before HUAC, he never stopped making socially relevant films and that he remained critical of American society. In what is probably his best film, A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957) (unfortunately not part of the retrospective), this is somewhat accurate. Thus Kazan has been dismissed by politically oriented critics by his HUAC connection and also neglected by auteurists because he seemed to lack a distinctive visual style, remaining overly theatrical. There is some justification to this: GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENT is a very lackluster film, notable only for its early (and very timid) tackling of anti-Semitism.  STREETCAR is a great acting showcase that also pushed censorship boundaries, but few would claim it as great cinema. However, EAST OF EDEN showed a real visual flair in working with the then new CinemaScope wide-screen frame as well as having Kazan’s typical strength with actors, in this case James Dean. And while the hysterical, melodramatic excess of SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS is not for everyone, I don’t think you can excuse Kazan of playing it safe.

All the films of the retrospective are screening in 35 mm prints, and all have at least some interest. To begin to grasp and understand post-war America and its movies, the work of Kazan is, if nothing else, a very useful lesson in social and cinematic history.

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