E-Mail This Article to a Friend Action! Elia Kazan 1909–2003 BY STEVE VINEBERG

If Elia Kazan didn’t precisely invent modern American acting, he was its most significant craftsman. Kazan, who died September 28 at the age of 94, trained as an actor in the 1930s with the Group Theatre, the pioneering organization that introduced Stanislavsky’s approach to performance to American audiences. A diminutive, wiry, first-generation Greek, Kazan fit the Group profile — ethnic, urban, colorful, ebullient. But he didn’t stay an actor very long; after a couple of movies, he turned to directing and, briefly but importantly, to teaching. Kazan was fond of denigrating his own acting, but in fact he was memorable in his supporting roles as a gangster in City for Conquest (1940), where he shared the screen with Jimmy Cagney, and as a jazz player in Blues in the Night (1941). You can see the Group imprint in these performances — the vivid character work, punched-up but authentic, filling in the gaps left by busy screenwriters with other priorities. He might have turned into a solid character actor and hung around the margins of movies and plays for decades. Instead he became the most famous American stage director of the 1940s and ’50s and one of the signal filmmakers of the post–World War II era, the man who discovered Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Warren Beatty and brought most of the major plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller to Broadway.

If Lee Strasberg was the guru of the Method, teaching it to the young professionals in his controversial, temperament-filled classes at the Actors Studio, Kazan was largely responsible for disseminating it through the show business world. In 1947, the year the Studio opened its doors, Kazan was splitting his time between holding his own seminars there and directing both in New York and in Hollywood. This was the year he made Gentleman’s Agreement, which won the Academy Award (and in which Kazan’s former Group Theatre buddy John Garfield did his finest work), and staged A Streetcar Named Desire, which made Brando a star and inserted the phrase "Method acting" — the Yankee-tinged version of Stanislavsky — into the American cultural vocabulary. Kazan taught only briefly at the Studio, but he was quick to employ his students in his plays and movies, and in less than a decade — by the time Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, and the Group Theatre alumnus Lee J. Cobb (Willy Loman in Kazan’s Broadway mounting of Death of a Salesman five years earlier) had mesmerized moviegoers in Kazan’s On the Waterfront — the revolution in American acting was complete.

The Method, with its psychological underpinnings and its premium on genuine emotion, has been so essential for so long to what we think of as American acting style that it’s easy to underrate Kazan’s contribution to defining it. When Kazan won an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1999, some of Hollywood’s liberals, who hadn’t forgiven him for naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the ’50s, voiced moral objections, and though most of the audience at the ceremonies applauded, a few notable actors, like Nick Nolte and Ed Harris, sat on their hands. A friend of mine complained, "Those guys wouldn’t have careers if it weren’t for Elia Kazan," and he was right. You can’t see what he would bring to American film acting in his first movies — the ones he made in Hollywood, before he got fed up and returned East to shoot on location in New York. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Sea of Grass (1947), Pinky (1949), and even the highly regarded Gentleman’s Agreement aren’t all that much different from the bland, middle-of-the-road attempts at cultivated entertainment that the higher-toned studios had been passing off as art since the early days of the studio system. But A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront (1954), Baby Doll (1956), and parts of the feverish, engaging, messed-up East of Eden (1955) are still exciting to watch half a century after they were released. You can still feel the actors defining the dramatic arc of these movies, sculpting the space rather than just inhabiting it. A courtship scene between James Dean and the touching, inventive Julie Harris in East of Eden gives the impression that the actors are making everything up, feeling their way through the burgeoning relationship, rethinking the Steinbeck material in terms of characters that have come out of their own psyches. The chaotic, farcical domestic scenes in Baby Doll — a wonderful adaptation of a couple of Tennessee Williams one-acts — have a prickly texture not remotely like anything else you can see in an American comedy of the mid-’50s, and in the background are the real folks of Benoit, Mississippi, as an improvised Greek chorus. And no imitator has ever approximated the three-dimensionality of Brando as Stanley Kowalski and Terry Malloy, or suggested the risk of his high-voltage, spontaneous acting.

The prevailing style of Kazan’s movies is poetic realism, a variation on American naturalism that’s heightened — by the lyricism of the language, by the addition of expressionistic devices or episodes, by non-realist visual choices. In the theater this style is most famously represented by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, both of whom owe much of their fame to Kazan’s success in finding ways to convey their dramatic visions. He never brought any of the Miller scripts he staged to the screen (he was the original director on All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and After the Fall), but his 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire suggests what he must have done with it onstage — though without the close-up camera, without the famous bluesy score by Alex North and the evocative black-and-white cinematography by Boris Kaufman, and without the incomparable Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois. (Jessica Tandy created the role onstage; the rest of the movie cast — Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden — made the journey with Kazan from Broadway to Hollywood.)

Streetcar is one of the triumphs of filmed theater, like Olivier’s Henry V and Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, Sidney Lumet’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and the Louis Malle-André Gregory Vanya on 42nd Street. Simultaneously theatrical (the crackling atmosphere; the intimacy; the raw, unarranged performances) and cinematic (the immensity of the personalities, the evocative use of shadows, the rendering of New Orleans’s Latin Quarter), it’s as much about how to adapt a great play to the screen as it is about the Williams themes of repressed and unleashed sexuality, and illusion taking a beating from reality.

By contrast, Baby Doll, released half a decade later, never betrays its theatrical origins; it feels conceived for the screen. Kazan softens the tone of the Williams one-acts on which it’s based; outrageous as the humor often is in this story of a cotton miller (Karl Malden, in his best performance) whose virgin child-bride (Carroll Baker) is seduced by the Sicilian (Eli Wallach) he’s cheated out of his livelihood, Kazan mixes in the distinctly Southern colors of faded hope and regret. In the early ’90s a good production of one of the source plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, showed up on TV with Peter Boyle, Lesley Ann Warren, and Ray Sharkey in these roles. It was a fascinating comparison to Baby Doll — you could see that what made the original effective was largely its brutality, and that its dramaturgy was thinner and more direct.

Kazan made only a handful of first-rate movies. (I have strong visual memories of Panic in the Streets (1950), which came out the year before Streetcar, but it isn’t on video or DVD, and I haven’t seen it in many years.) A Face in the Crowd (1957) has a far better reputation than it deserves. He had a weakness for Steinbeck, who wrote the unfortunate bio Viva Zapata! (1952) (starring Brando in a gargantuan mustache), and a hunk of whose novel East of Eden he filmed in 1955. And — like his Group Theatre mentor and Actors Studio co-founder Lee Strasberg — he was so high on Freud that he couldn’t always differentiate between the good Freudians (Tennessee Williams) and the second-raters. He staged several of William Inge’s plays and filmed his screenplay, Splendor in the Grass, in 1961. It made a star of Warren Beatty and persuaded a lot of people who should have known better that Natalie Wood was an actress, and it connected with audiences, especially young ones. But it wasn’t much good, and The Arrangement, made in 1969 from his own novel, was overwrought in similar ways (though the protagonists were middle-aged rather than adolescent). His penultimate film, The Visitors (1972), was mostly notable for an extraordinary performance by the young Steve Railsback as a psychopathic Vietnam vet bent on revenge; his final one, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1976), was a wash. But the Kazan classics, A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, aren’t simply among the best movies of their era; they’re unforgettable. And the responses of my students, born a couple of decades after these movies were first seen, tell me that they’re as overpowering and indelible in the 21st century as they were in the mid-20th.