Sunday, March 14, 2021

Elia Kazan the Great

Frederick R Smith has moved to Frederick R. Smith Speaks (substack.com)

Elia Kazan (1909 – 2003) was born in Constantinople (now Istanbul). In 1913, Kazan along with his Greek parents came to the United States and they settled in New York City. Kazan’s father, George Kazanjoglous, worked as a rug merchant and expected his son to follow him. However, Kazan’s mother, Athena, encouraged her son to make his own decisions.

Kazan attended public schools in the New York City area and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts. Thereafter, he studied drama at Yale. In the 1930s, Kazan took part in New York’s Group Theater and it was during this acting stint that he worked with well-known actor Lee Strasberg. In 1935, he directed his first stage production and by the 1940s he was known to be one of the great Broadway actor/producers. He also was one of the founders of the “Actor’s Studio” in 1947. The more notable achievements were his direction of the plays “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947) by Tennessee Williams and “Death of a Salesman” (1948) by Arthur Miller. After Streetcar Named Desire, Kazan also took part in the development of William’s scripts. In 1955, William’s felt that Kazan had taken over his authority as the writer of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

Kazan also started to work on films during this period and his first feature film was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945). In 1947, he won the Academy Award for the film “Gentleman’s Agreement” in which Gregory Peck portrayed a reporter investigating Anti-Semitism. Kazan worked with Marlon Brando during the Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and in 1951 it was made into a screenplay. The movie adaptation starred Kim Hunter and Karl Malden. Brando said that “Kazan is the best actor’s director you could ever want… because he was an actor himself, but a special kind of actor. He understands things that other directors do not. He also inspired you. Most actors are expected to come with their parts in their pockets and their emotions spring-loaded, when the director says, ‘Okay, hit it,’ they go into a time-slip. But Kazan brought a lot of things to the actor and he invited you to argue with him. He is one of the few directors creative and understanding enough to know where the actor's trying to go. He’d let you play a scene almost any way you’d want.” [1]

Brando’s key role in “VIVA ZAPATA!” (1952) and “On the Waterfront” (1954) won him eight Oscars. Budd Schulberg's account of corruption in NYC harbor unions was the basis of “On the Waterfront.” Schulberg knew his subject as he testified as a friendly witness before a Congressional committee looking into the corruption of longshoreman. In this film, there were depictions of conflicting loyalties that paralleled Kazan’s own life. 

On April 10, 1952, Kazan testified at the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) hearings and admitted past membership in the Communist party. It was there that he committed the secular sin that certain people from the debased left have never forgotten — he named others in his former secret Communist group. Kazan not only admitted that he had been a Communist member for 18 months (1934-36), but he named eight people who had been in the party with him. He did not denounce them, as some newspapers erroneously reported. The unreported truth: Kazan felt that they joined for the same reasons he did, anger against Hitler and sympathy for the poor. Just two days after his appearance, Kazan placed an ad in the New York Times urging others who knew about this “dangerous and alien conspiracy” to inform the public or “the appropriate government agency.” Many with a debased leftist worldview were ballistic, as they could not stand such “betrayal” from one of their own.

Other former party members had appeared before the HCUA and spoke of ex-comrades. However, the debased lamestream media vilified Elia to the hilt because he was the most well-known former Communist from the entertainment industry to have cooperated with the HCUA. As an insult to the lamestream, even more, Kazan had become an anti-Communist. While he was initially reluctant, he thought that cooperating with HCUA was a justifiable position because of the menace that Communism posed to world stability. Kazan also supplied information on how key Communist leaders would show his Red Cell how to assist the party’s front organizations and how to make Group Theatre a Communist organ. Other debased leftist publications, including The Nation (still an open Commie rag) and the New York Post (then a far-left newspaper), went after Kazan. Playwright Arthur Miller (his longtime friend and collaborator) and Stalinist/writer Lillian Hellman joined in the assault. Even today, the lamestream will portray the “Kazan affair” as an illustration of “McCarthyism” but never mention the salient facts. The most outstanding item to consider is the fact that HCUA was a project of the House of Representatives; McCarthy was a senator.

Even today, people will invoke the “terror” of the “blacklist.” Kazan’s exposure that peeled open the Communist infiltration was the reason for the blacklist (supposedly). Hogwash and balderdash! The blacklist would have occurred even without Kazan’s exposure. On their own, after the HCUA hearings, Hollywood executives felt compelled to deny jobs to about three hundred Communists in Hollywood. About 150 more people were denied jobs in television and radio. [2] Nevertheless, the reporters who do not know history will spout off that “thousands” of people (Communist or not) had their careers ruined because of Kazan and others such as McCarthy. Nonsense! What is not reported are the correct numbers (as supplied above). Furthermore, a number of those blacklisted could continue to work under assumed names. The above illustrates why the McCarthyism mantra continues to this day — people are unaware of the facts at best or at worst they are in sympathy with Communism (debased woke folk). [3] Today, the Caustic Cancel Culture Pogrom, managed by the same Commie crowd and their puppets (useful debased woke folk), have the upper hand terminating the jobs of many people who dare question the new Communist woke worldview.   

Just two years after his testimony, Kazan directed “On the Water Front,” which he considered an allegory about his life. The brave Budd Schulberg, who also turned against Communism in 1951, wrote the script. This work by these two brave former Communists inspired the public and Hollywood. Kazan forged ahead to produce many more wholesome movies. Other well-known actors that stared in his movies included Montgomery Cliff, Lee Remick, Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, and Kirk Douglas. In the 1970s, Kazan devoted more of his time to writing.

In his autobiography “Elia Kazan: A Life,” he wrote “No one who did what I did, whatever his reasons, came out of it undamaged… I did not. Here I am, thirty-five years later, still worrying over it. I knew what it would cost me. Do I now feel ashamed of what I did? ... The truth is that within a year I’d stopped feeling guilty or even embarrassed about what I’d done...”

The measure of the success of Communist infiltration in Hollywood is the virtually total absence of movies to this day that chronicle the primary drama of the last century: the struggle for freedom against totalitarian communism. There are just a few exceptions with the motion picture Dr. Zhivago being one notable example. Nevertheless, not one Hollywood film has ever depicted the horrors of the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine, the Gulags, the Moscow show trials, or the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet military. For the cogent un-woke folk reader, this sure proves the salient point. Specifically, the debased lamestream media and Hollywood were, and are, indeed Communist fronts.

In 1983, Kazan was honored with a Life Achievement award at a Kennedy Center ceremony. In 1999, he received an Honorary Oscar, and your author can clearly remember the television footage showing Warren Beatty applauding while Nick Nolte remained seated with his arms folded in his lap. This award was due in part to the persistent lobbying by Karl Malden and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (sponsor of the Oscar night). Sad to say, the announcement of this event gave birth to some bitter protests, and right on cue the debased lamestream media made much of Kazan’s supposed “betrayal” of old friends. What a bunch of debased Communist creeps. 

In 1932, Kazan married playwright Molly Day Thatcher and they had four children. She passed away in 1963. In 1967, he married the actress/writer Barbara Loden and she passed away in 1980. In 1982, Kazan married Frances Rudge.

On September 28, 2003, Elia Kazan passed away, in his Manhattan home. The debased lamestream media gave just a fleeting mention of the passing of this wonderful 94-year-old man. Films directed by Kazan garnered 22 Academy Awards, 62 nominations, and two Directing Oscars. Kazan had a liberal worldview, but he would be “moderate” by today’s standards. He gave us wonderful memories of the once upon a time decent entertainment industry.

Notes:

  1. Conversations with Marlon Brando by Lawrence Grobel, 1991
  2. The “Hollywood Ten” were in this “list.” These were the unfriendly Communist witnesses who refused to cooperate with HCUA. While it is not illegal to be a member of the Communist Party, each of the Hollywood Ten served time for contempt of Congress.
  3. “Debased woke folk” is Fred’s term for those who have lost critical thinking skills (debased) and have a programed mind (woke) because of the psychological operations of the media and education systems. The opposite: cogent non-woke folk.
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Cogent Author and Publisher, Frederick R. Smith
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