The direction he chose

A portrait of Elia Kazan admires his movies, defends his politics

Biography

Elia Kazan: A Biography

Richard Schickel

HarperCollins / 510 pages

From his formative years, Elia Kazan's role models among directors included Stanislavsky, Dovzhenko and the maestros of European expressionism. As a quintessentially American genius of stage and screen, passionately believing in "roots," Kazan unveiled Marlon Brando and James Dean for audiences far beyond America's shores. During his heyday (1930-1960), Kazan virtually re-explored the terrain of John Dos Passos' trilogy, U.S.A. - a continent and a power wonderfully absorbed in itself.

Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel has produced the first "life" of Kazan (who died in 2003 at age 94), but he is quick to warn that this is a "critical biography."

"It offers no more insight into Elia Kazan's personal life," Schickel writes, "than he himself offered in his own autobiography."

If "personal" means "private" (money, women, dreams, shrinks), this is certainly true. Not only is Schickel's book about half the length of Kazan's A Life (1988), but its virtues - an impressive knowledge of the terrain, soundly balanced judgments - tend to blur the living personality of a man whose fierce competitiveness was inseparable from his flair as a showman.

Arthur Miller commented that Kazan's purpose was always "to hit the audience in the belly because he knows all people are alike in the belly, no matter what their social position or education."

As actor and director, Kazan progressed from the avant-garde Group Theatre of the 1930s (famous for productions such as Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty) to a blatant enjoyment of the salaries and saunas on offer in the Hollywood studios. He abandoned acting.

His personality seems to have gone through a violent mutation, from a lonely, rejected, sexually envious "frozen wolf" at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. (the lupine image was his own) to the upfront, often effusive, sexually conquering superstar of the Truman-Eisenhower era. Yet the wolf's far-from-casual snarl is heard again in his autobiography - passages of defiant, in-your-face vulgarity, savage celebrations of sexual conquest in alleys and doorways, the predatory prowl of a loner looking for a pretty face in Central Park.