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Kazan and HUAC; Trier’s Medea
BY GERALD PEARY
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In 1952, film and stage director Elia Kazan, summoned to Washington, spilled the beans before the noxious House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), "naming names" of supposed Communists whom he knew from working with them in the theater. In 1956, playwright Arthur Miller, likewise subpoena’d by HUAC, refused to give the committee any names of left-wing associates. At one time, Kazan and Miller had been the most symbiotic of pals; then one sang, the other didn’t. Legions of Kazan’s associates refused to speak with him once he testified, including a horrified, repulsed Miller. The obvious gripe about Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and the Blacklist: None Without Sin, which airs this Wednesday, September 3, from 9 to 11 p.m. on WGBH, is that neither of the legendary principals, both ancient but definitely alive, appears on camera to tell his extraordinary tale. I presume the collaborators-turned-political-enemies (Kazan directed the original Broadway productions of Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman) declined to be interviewed for this American Masters presentation directed by Michael Epstein. But where’s Budd Schulberg, screenwriter of On the Waterfront? Or Karl Malden, who acted for Kazan in both On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire? For that matter, why not Marlon Brando, who starred for Kazan in both these films and also in Viva Zapata? And aren’t there people still around who witnessed Kazan and Miller nervously working together again in the ’60s, after not having spoken for many years, when Kazan directed the Lincoln Center stage production of Miller’s After the Fall? Epstein does include some interviews with show-business people who worked with Kazan, such as Streetcar’s Kim Hunter, but hardly anyone is represented who has personal involvements with Miller. Is he that much of a recluse? Better are the conversations with movie people who suffered the blacklist, such as screenwriter Walter Bernstein and the shrewd, highly intelligent actress Lee Grant. Best are the chats about the anti-Communist 1950s with a couple of agile, original-thinking film historians, The Biographical Dictionary of Film’s David Thomson and, a local voice, Brandeis cinema professor Thomas Doherty. And the leads? What we see of Kazan in old clips is self-promoting and slippery. Miller comes across as stiff, self-righteous, icy. The most winning person in this documentary is its female co-star, Marilyn Monroe, who, we learn, had a long-time affair with Kazan (stretching into the period of her engagement to Joe DiMaggio) before she became involved with, and then married to, Miller. There’s incredible footage of a worshipful Monroe at Miller’s side just at the moment when HUAC comes calling. If anyone here is politically courageous, it’s Marilyn, who risks her film career to stand by her ostracized spouse. My real gripe with this documentary is its unfortunate subtitle, None Without Sin, which comes from Dalton Trumbo, a once-blacklisted screenwriter who said (I don’t know why): " . . . in the final tally we were all victims . . . None of us — right, left, or center — emerged from that long nightmare without sin." That’s nonsense. Some of those who were blacklisted did nothing more than have left-of-center political beliefs. What’s sinful about that? It’s heresy for the American Masters filmmakers to equate such victimized individuals with the true sinners, unrepentant finks like Elia Kazan. MY FAVORITE LARS VON TRIER films are pre–Breaking the Waves (1996), before he became so swell-headed about his artistic genius. Case in point: his dazzling Medea (1987), which will be playing at the Coolidge Corner next Friday, September 5. Made for Danish TV, Trier’s mini-masterpiece is Euripides’s Greek tragedy retold through a secular screenplay from Denmark’s greatest filmmaker, Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet), though never brought by Dreyer to the screen. Trier begins with a dedication to his fellow Dane, calling the film "an homage to the master." This Medea takes place in some timeless Viking land, and the heroine (Kirsten Olesen) is less a conjuring sorceress, as in Euripides, than a Gypsy-like peasant who’s been wounded by the cheating and the adultery of her husband, Jason (Udo Kier). The incredible black-and-white photography recalls both early Bergman (The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring) and Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s Japanese retelling of Macbeth. In fact, there are several scenes in this superbly visual movie during which Trier quotes moments from Kurosawa, of characters caught in a fog, then lost — physically, spiritually — in the primæval forest.
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