A talent for telling stories and making enemies

Passion ruled life, politics and movies of Elia Kazan

Appreciation

Elia Kazan was all about passion. He put it on the screen, he infused his life with it, and he elicited it from all manner of audiences.

Few directors have engendered so much controversy in their lifetimes, or hewn so stubbornly to beliefs that, while perhaps not universally popular, were definitely their own. When he died last Sunday at his New York home, Kazan left a legacy that critics and commentators still will be wrestling with decades from now. For each bit of praise lavished upon a master craftsman, there's a social libertarian demonizing the man who ratted on his friends, who named names during the McCarthy era, destroying careers and legitimizing a government-sponsored witch hunt.

Whatever one thinks of his politics, Kazan's artistry is undeniable. He directed at least a half-dozen great movies -- Gentle-man's Agreement, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Water-front, East of Eden, A Face in the Crowd and Splendor in the Grass -- and at least that many more good ones. And his movies made a difference, sometimes in the way we think (Gentleman's shed a light on anti-Semitism that desperately needed to be shed), sometimes in the way we watch movies (the raw emotions of Streetcar hit audiences like a bomb blast), sometimes in the way movies are made (is there an actor today who doesn't try to channel Marlon Brando in Waterfront?)

Kazan was already an accomplished Broadway director when he hit Hollywood; his first film was 1945's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Two years later, he won his first Oscar, for Gentleman's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck as a magazine writer pretending to be Jewish to experience bigotry firsthand.

Seen today, the film seems simplistic and outdated -- certainly, far too earnest to be effective on modern audiences. But this was brave filmmaking for 1947, and the movie shouldn't be faulted for tailoring its message to its time.

Gentleman's Agreement may have been the pet project of 20th Century-Fox chief Darryl F. Za-nuck (one of the few studio heads at the time who was not Jewish), but it was Kazan's movie; his stage experience translates effortlessly to the screen. In a film where character is everything, Kazan challenged his actors to rivet the audiences' attention with their best work, and they did (Celeste Holm won an Oscar, and John Garfield was never better). Kazan may have later criticized the picture , but it gave him the high profile he needed to begin changing the Hollywood landscape.