Hollywood Honors Elia Kazan: Filmmaker and Informant

By David Walsh (February 1999)

Assignment: Worth 1 quiz grade

At the conclusion of this article are five questions. Answer questions 1-4 questions in complete sentences. Answer question 5 in an essay that uses supporting evidence from the reading. E-Mail with any questions regarding this assignment. It is due on MONDAY, MARCH 30th

The decision by the board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to bestow an honorary award on filmmaker Elia Kazan at its annual Oscar ceremony March 21 is an act with definite political implications. Kazan, the director of 19 feature films between 1945 and 1976, was one of the most prominent figures to turn informer during the anticommunist witch-hunts of the early 1950s. After a first appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) January 14, 1952 at which he refused to "name names," Kazan reappeared on April 10 and identified eight people who had been members of the Communist Party with him in the mid-1930s, along with certain party functionaries. His testimony damaged the careers and lives of a number of individuals and helped consolidate the Hollywood blacklist. Kazan's decision to collaborate with the HUAC inquisitors epitomized the devil's bargain into which a significant section of the filmmaking community and the American liberal intelligentsia as a whole entered during this period.

Perhaps to make themselves feel better, some liberal commentators suggest that Kazan's filmmaking is being honored by the Academy, not his politics. Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, told the Times' Weinraub: "Although I certainly don't approve of what Kazan did during the McCarthy period ... one can maybe learn a lesson from Bill Clinton and compartmentalize, and separate Kazan, the informer, and Kazan, the artist." Victor Navasky, author of Naming Names, commented: "First of all, it's a human thing.... He's not physically well and he made this great cinematic contribution. Second is, with the passage of time, some of the passions have cooled and things are being put in a different perspective."

This line of reasoning fails to take into account that the Academy is planning to celebrate Kazan's lifetime achievement. No one with any sense would deny the filmmaker's talent or suggest boycotting or ignoring his films, but his role as an informer cannot be walled off so neatly from his artistry. Kazan's renegacy was essential to what and who he was, and subsequently became.

Not satisfied with caving in to reactionary forces, Kazan attempted to transform ratting on one's former comrades to the state into a matter of principle. His belated opposition to Stalinism, about whose crimes he remained entirely silent during the 1930s, was of a right-wing and opportunist character. It coincided with a shift in the needs and policies of American capitalism. One needs to cut through the self-serving arguments and excuses and say what is: Kazan behaved like a scoundrel, becoming an informer in 1952 to save his career in Hollywood and all that went with it.

After the officially-manipulated patriotic zeal of the early and mid-1950s had subsided somewhat, and Americans were permitted the luxury of reflecting on what had happened, Kazan and other informers became the objects of a natural and instinctive revulsion. Even many political opponents of those who had been blacklisted found it difficult to stomach such contemptible conduct. Kazan deservedly became something of a pariah. Time and a general rightward shift of various social layers have done a good deal over the last several decades to change the mood within Hollywood's upper echelons.

Whatever the board members' conscious motives, their collective decision to honor Kazan is a means of absolving those who collaborated with and assisted HUAC and the McCarthyites. It is likewise an announcement by the film industry establishment that it would do nothing to oppose and resist a new witch-hunt, should it emerge. This is not an academic question. One can see the right-wing political elements who would spearhead such an operation engaged in countless attempts across the country to ban films and books and, of course, the recent effort to keep a sex scandal going in Washington.

The director was born Elia Kazanjoglou in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1909. In 1913 his family, Anatolian Greeks, emigrated to the US and settled in New York City, where Kazan's father became a rug merchant. The future filmmaker graduated from Williams College and went on to study drama at Yale. He joined the left-leaning Group Theatre as an actor and assistant stage manager. The Group, led for much of the 1930s by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, was one of the focal points of artistic life, and, inevitably, radical thought and activity, in New York City during the Depression years. It attracted actors and directors, as well as a variety of writers, including Clifford Odets,.

Kazan became a member of the Communist Party in the summer of 1934, and quit in the spring of 1936 in protest, he asserts, over the party leadership's heavy-handed and undemocratic attempt to wrest control of the theater company. He maintained close relations with many in and around the Stalinist movement until his HUAC appearance in 1952. In 1954, Kazan directed On the Waterfront.

On the Waterfront tells the story of Terry Malloy (Brando), a longshoreman and former boxer, who ends up telling a crime commission everything he knows about the operations of the corrupt and murderous local union leadership. Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, also a HUAC informer, made the film in large measure to justify their own actions. In his autobiography Brando makes two remarkable claims: first, that "I did not realize then ... that On the Waterfront was really a metaphorical argument" by Kazan and Schulberg "to justify finking on their friends"; second, that when shown the completed film, "I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the screen room. I thought I was a huge failure." The film stands up, despite its reactionary and self-serving theme, primarily because of the performances of Brando and Eva Marie Saint and its overall grittiness. It also has an extraordinary score by Leonard Bernstein.

The notion, however, that On the Waterfront captures metaphorically the truth of Kazan's relationship to the Communist Party, on the one hand, and HUAC, on the other, is fanciful, as is the idea that the film somehow brings out the "dilemma" facing the potential informer. Where is the "moral ambiguity" in Malloy's position that Kazan has referred to on various occasions? If Brando's character does not speak to the authorities and seek their protection, he is likely to be rubbed out. He is fighting for his life and has no choice, within the framework established by the film's creators, but to turn on his former associates. Kazan and Schulberg have stacked the deck entirely in their favor.

How do the fictional circumstances in On the Waterfront resemble the reality of the early 1950s in the US? In turning informer, it was Kazan who joined a political lynch mob. The Communist Party was not simply synonymous with its Stalinist leadership and program. It contained devoted and self-sacrificing individuals, who believed they were fighting for progressive social change. Terry Malloy's traumatic experiences have more in common with those endured by the actors, directors and writers who faced the blacklist than with those who accepted and profited from it.

If Kazan had made "On the Set" instead, about a well-paid and successful director who cravenly surrendered to right-wing political forces, would it have had the same resonance? (Brando's failure to see any connection between Kazan's informing and his own character's behavior is comprehensible precisely because the situation set up in the film is so at odds with the director's actual circumstances. Indeed, the strength of the film is that one would not regard it as a defense of cowardice and opportunism without a knowledge of the historical and personal facts.)

Abe Polonsky once asserted that Kazan suffered from a "bad conscience" in the films he made after giving his HUAC testimony. A Face in the Crowd (1957), also written by Schulberg, could be seen in this light. The Caprasque story of a malevolent country singer and huckster who becomes a huge television star and the agent of a fascistic US senator is semi-hysterical in its efforts to demonstrate its makers' progressive social views. Andy Griffith, apparently at the director's urging, plays at top volume from beginning to end and simply grows wearisome. Much in this film is over-inflated, unconvincing. Patricia Neal is affecting, however.

Anticommunism and the film industry

At least from the onset of the great economic crisis of the early 1930s, the authorities in the US have been alert to the potential danger represented by motion pictures. They consistently acted to weaken or, if necessary, suppress any radical or socially critical tendencies in filmmaking. One historian has asserted that the Hollywood Production Code imposed in 1934 was intended both to exclude sexual conduct and violence from the screens and to "use popular entertainment films to reinforce conservative moral and political values." Adherence to the Code, for example, required such changes that MGM dropped plans to film Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, the author's vision of the rise of American fascism. The Production Code Administration insisted that Fritz Lang's anti-lynching film, Fury (1936), not include a black victim or any criticism of the Jim Crow South.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was formed in May 1938. The committee pioneered many of the techniques later used by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy: indiscriminate accusations, pressure on witnesses to name former associates, hearings in which being questioned or mentioned became an indication of guilt, guilt by association. The committee was permanently established by the House of Representatives in 1945; two years later a federal appeals court upheld its power to cite uncooperative witnesses for contempt of Congress.

The witch-hunt began in earnest in the film industry in October 1947 when HUAC held a series of hearings on the subject of "subversives" in the film industry. After several days of testimony from "friendly" witnesses--anticommunist producers, directors, actors--HUAC began its questioning of "unfriendly" witnesses, the group that became known as the Hollywood Ten. These leftist screenwriters and directors--CP members or supporters--refused to cooperate and were cited a few weeks later for contempt of Congress. (Many of them later served one-year prison terms.) In the face of HUAC's determination, backed up by the media, liberal support for the Ten in Hollywood rapidly evaporated.

Film producers meeting November 24-25 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York adopted a resolution, declaring, "We will not knowingly employ a Communist." The blacklist was officially on, or, rather, unofficially on, since there was no authoritative list of unemployables. As historian Ellen Schrecker puts it, "writers stopped getting calls for work, actors were told they were 'too good for the part.'" A variety of reactionary organizations, including the American Legion, and Hollywood's own network of anticommunists and informers worked closely with the studios to enforce the blacklist. From this point onward, the combined efforts of the government, industry, and right-wing and church groups did not let up until a systematic purging of left-wing and radical elements from the filmmaking ranks had been effected.

This was only part of a much larger effort by the American ruling class, after decades of political instability, to settle accounts with radicalism and socialism. Anticommunism became virtually a state religion in the United States in this period. In 1947 President Harry Truman established a loyalty program for federal employees and asked the attorney general to draw up a list of "subversive" organizations. Between March 1947 and December 1952 some 6.6 million government employees were investigated. During that same period, 1947-52, Congressional committees held 84 hearings into "Communist subversion." HUAC provided data on 60,000 people to employers. At least 15,000 federal employees were fired or forced to resign by government loyalty boards. By one estimate 13.5 million Americans came within the scope of federal, state and private loyalty programs. Approximately 20 percent of the working population had to take an oath or receive clearance as a condition of employment.

There was a general ideological assault on the American population--intended to stigmatize concepts such as Socialism, Marxism and Revolution--to encourage their identification in the popular consciousness with infinite wickedness and social catastrophe and, more generally, to cultivate an atmosphere of stifling conformity. A Communist, according to the official version, was un-American, non-Christian, an alien, a creature from hell.

The last of the Hollywood Ten went to prison in September 1950. The HUAC inquisitors returned to Hollywood in the spring of 1951. As Ceplair and Englund write in their history of political life in the film industry from 1930 to 1960, the new hearings followed a series of events that strengthened the committee's position: "the conviction of Alger Hiss, the fall of China to the Communists, the first successful atomic explosion by the Soviet Union, the arrest of atomic spy Klaus Fuchs in England, the dawning of Joseph McCarthy's special brand of anti-communism, the passage of the McCarran Internal Security Act, ... the outbreak of the Korean War, the Supreme Court's approval of the Smith Act [under which the Trotskyists had been persecuted in 1941] ... and the arrest of the Rosenbergs."

One hundred and ten men and women were subpoenaed during the second set of HUAC hearings from 1951 to 1953; fifty-eight turned informer. The more prominent ones--31 individuals with at least four film credits--gave an average of 29 names to the committee. Most gave way abjectly. The first witness, actor Larry Parks, "reduced himself nearly to groveling and pleading" in face of the committee's demand for names. In the end, after a certain amount of public soul-searching, he identified 10 individuals. The price of hesitation was high. A headline in the Los Angeles Examiner two days later read: LARRY PARKS LOSES $75,000 SCREEN ROLE. Parks's career was more or less finished. The lesson was not lost on most of the others who testified.

Four prominent directors became informers: Frank Tuttle, a dependable journeyman, perhaps best known for This Gun For Hire (1942) with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; Edward Dmytryk, the "Judas" of the Hollywood Ten, director of Murder My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945); Robert Rossen ( Body and Soul (1947) and The Hustler (1961)), who refused to name names in 1951, capitulated in 1953, and was apparently tortured by the decision the rest of his life; and Kazan.

Of the four and perhaps the entire group of informers, Kazan certainly possessed the greatest stature as an artist and intellectual. His decision to collaborate with the witch-hunters had far-reaching consequences. One "director-victim" told Victor Navasky, for his book Naming Names, "If Kazan had refused to cooperate ... he couldn't have derailed the Committee, but he might well have broken the blacklist. He was too important to be ignored." Navasky comments: "Probably no single individual could have broken the blacklist in April 1952, and yet no person was in a better strategic position to try than Kazan, by virtue of his prestige and economic invulnerability, to mount a symbolic campaign against it, and by this example inspire hundreds of fence sitters to come over to the opposition."

As it turned out, Kazan did not have it in him to do that. In the various attempts at self-justification he has made over the years, he asserts that matters of principle--opposition to the conspiratorial methods of the Communist Party and the crimes of Stalin--impelled him to name names. In his autobiography Kazan denied doing it "for the money." He writes: "It [saving his career in Hollywood] was not the reason. In the end, when I did what I did, it was for my own good reasons and after much thought about my own experiences."

Testimony from his contemporaries suggests otherwise. Lillian Hellman, not the most reliable of witnesses it must be admitted, claimed that Kazan told her, "I earned over $400,000 last year from theater. But [Twentieth Century-Fox president Spyros] Skouras says I'll never make another movie [if I don't cooperate]." Theater producer Kermit Bloomgarden informed Navasky that Kazan "told me he'd been to Washington and met with J. Edgar Hoover and Spyros Skouras and they wanted him to give names.... He said 'I've got to think of my kids.' And I said, 'This too shall pass, and then you'll be an informer in the eyes of your kids, think of that.'" Kazan refers in his autobiography to Skouras's proposing a meeting with Hoover, but never specifies whether or not it took place.

In that same work, the director makes fairly plain his own frame of mind, citing a diary entry from 1952 that described a conversation with Arthur Miller: "I mentioned that Skouras had implied I couldn't work in pictures anymore if I didn't name the other lefties in the Group, then told Art I'd prepared myself for a period of no movie work or money ... But that I didn't feel altogether good about such a decision. That I'd say (to myself) what the hell am I giving all this up for? To defend a secrecy I didn't think right and to defend people who'd already been named or soon would be by someone else? I said I'd hated the Communists for many years and didn't feel right about giving up my career to defend them."

Some gave names to the Committee with obvious reluctance, a few later repudiated their conduct (actor Sterling Hayden, for example), others were deeply troubled by the decision. Kazan obviously had to see himself acting not out of self-interest, but in defense of principle. Two days after his HUAC appearance, Kazan took out an ad--written, he says in his autobiography, by his late first wife--in the New York Times justifying his behavior. It is a fairly filthy document.

Kazan's essential claim is that "Communist activities" represent "a dangerous and alien conspiracy" that needs to be exposed. The American people "can solve this problem wisely only if they have the facts about Communism." He asserts that "any American who is in possession of such facts has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate Government agency." This is apparently what Kazan has done by placing the facts about his own life "before the House Committee on Un-American Activities without reserve."

He explains, in his ad, that up until this point he has refrained from telling his story sooner because he has been held back by "a piece of specious reasoning which has silenced many liberals. It goes like this: 'You may hate the Communists, but you must not attack them or expose them, because if you do you are attacking the right to hold unpopular opinions and you are joining the people who attack civil liberties.'"

This argument, he has come to realize, is "a lie. Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it serves those who are interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of a lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists. Liberals must speak out."

Kazan's membership in the Communist Party has given him "Firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought control.... It left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods and the conviction that these must be resisted always."

What were the consequences of McCarthyism within the US? In his Times ad, Kazan claimed he valued "free speech, a free press." Under the cover of pursuing the Communist menace, right-wing and corporate interests consolidated their hold over the media, helping establish a conformist, pro-capitalist climate unlike anything that exists in any European country. The paralyzing narrowness of American political life, with its minuscule differences between two big business parties, can be traced back to this period.

However, for all the rubbish that was produced in Hollywood in the 1950s it would not be correct to argue that the immediate impact of the witch-hunt was the artistic collapse of the American film industry. Classical studio directors, whose careers predated the McCarthy era and who had largely remained aloof from the political controversies of the early 1950s, continued to produce serious works for at least another decade. The generations that have come after them, however, have had progressively less to say and have possessed, in general, neither political nor artistic principles.

In any event, I suspect the powers that be had already grasped that another medium had supplanted film as the most powerful and direct influence on the populace: television. Although some blacklisted writers got jobs in the new industry, under assumed names, as a whole, television programs of the 1950s promoted some of the most repressive conceptions ever advanced about the human condition.

Conclusion: Some behavior is inexcusable

Reviewing Kazan's fate, a number of questions pose themselves, none of which can be answered exhaustively here: From the point of view of the ruling class, why was McCarthyism necessary? Why did this very reactionary trend meet so relatively little resistance? And, more generally, why is it so difficult to take a principled stand in America?

It should be kept in mind that while the witch-hunt was a sustained and zealously pursued campaign, it was not for the most part accompanied by physical repression. There was, of course, the horrifying example of the Rosenbergs. Some Communist Party members went to jail; many left-wingers lost their livelihoods. But large numbers of people, like Kazan, capitulated without fear of any particular reprisals. Many commentators note that Kazan could have pursued a career in the theater or in Europe. This makes his behavior all the more revealing.

Why did so few, particularly in the liberal and artistic intelligentsia, play honorable roles? One cannot simply cite personal weakness, singly or collectively, by way of answer.

An irony is surely at work here. The US is famously the land of individualism, yet perhaps nowhere else is there such an intense, unrelenting pressure to conform. Kazan is probably telling the truth when he says he did not inform "for the money." It is more likely that he testified from fear of social ostracism and the loss of recognition.

In the final analysis, the immense rewards for conforming and the high price of resisting have been bound up with the condition of US capitalism. The American bourgeoisie launched its ideological scorched-earth policy in the late 1940s in part because it could. It emerged from the war the most powerful ruling class in the world, with nearly unchallenged economic hegemony and enormous financial resources. Its state had the credibility of having played a major role in defeating Nazi Germany, a credibility reinforced by the US Communist Party with its dreadful super-patriotic line ("Communism is 20th century Americanism.") The ruling class in the US was in a unique position to combine bribery, flattery and intimidation to neutralize real or potential opposition.

The ideological weaknesses of the population came into play as well. Their lack of strong socialist traditions, relatively low level of class consciousness and difficulty in drawing generalized political conclusions from experiences rendered large numbers of people vulnerable to anticommunist propaganda, particularly under conditions of generally rising living standards and economic prosperity. Within the intelligentsia specifically, the absence of traditions of opposition along clearly defined social and class lines played a damaging role. Stalinism had contributed significantly to this problem, with its cynical promotion among intellectuals and artists in the late 1930s of "friendship for the Soviet Union" (i.e., "friendship" for the bureaucracy and silence about Stalin's crimes) instead of socialist politics.

Figures like Kazan went along with an anti-capitalist social wave at the height of the Depression. Everything these individuals lacked, however, everything that was unthought out and uncritical, proved their undoing when the current dramatically shifted. Now (by the late 1940s) prosperous or on the road to being prosperous, recognized, even feted by the entertainment industry, Kazan and others were not inclined to remember responsibilities to the working class or the social cause in which they had once believed. Having tasted of celebrity, the thought of isolation was most terrifying. In America, after all, if you are not an immense success, a star, you are nothing, a human zero. To take a stand against official society means, above all, leading a life out of the limelight.

In asking, why is it so hard to take a principled stand in the US, one is also hinting at a related question: why is it so hard to be a great artist in the US? Because great art requires extraordinary mental independence and rigor, immense powers of resistance to external pressures and unyielding commitment to the truth of one's inner self. Where these qualities are in short supply artistic work will not rise to the highest levels.

Kazan, Budd Schulberg and the rest of the informers acted like scoundrels and cowards to save their careers. Sterling Hayden in his autobiography had the elementary honesty to acknowledge this. "I think of Larry Parks," he wrote, "[who] consigned himself to oblivion. Well, I hadn't made that mistake. Not by a goddamned sight. I was a real daddy longlegs of a worm when it came to crawling.... I [then] swung like a goon from role to role.... They were all made back to back in an effort to cash in fast on my new status as a sanitary culture hero." Kazan saved his skin and made another 11 films after his informing. But what was left of him?

"Kazan" and "informer" became forever inseparably linked. From the point of view of Kazan's own intellectual and artistic development, the most terrible thing about his deed was that it ineluctably condemned him to a life that would be largely devoted from then on to self-justification. He would never again have the luxury of being able to devote himself single-mindedly to any other problem. He effectively destroyed his own freedom of artistic movement.

No doubt Kazan simply wished to rid himself of a past toward which he no longer felt any attachment or sympathy and which threatened to disrupt his promising career. No one is obliged to hang on to ideas he or she rejects. Going over to the side of the most deadly enemies of social progress is another matter. Kazan thought he could play games with history and escape unscathed. But if there is one lesson that might be drawn from the debacle of his life and career, it is that such actions have consequences.

As for Kazan, somewhere around page 600 in his autobiography he sums things up fairly well: "For years I declared myself an ardent liberal in politics, made all the popular declarations of faith, but the truth was--and is--that I am, like most of you, a bourgeois. I go along disarming people, but when it gets to a crunch, I am revealed to be a person interested only in what most artists are interested in, himself."

A remarkable comment. Kazan thinks he is being very clever here, that he is revealing an essential, if unpalatable, universal truth. In reality, he only displays his extraordinary philistinism. What is the logic of his comment? Life is, first and foremost, about taking care of oneself; art presumably serves a function insofar as it enables one to do that. The individual who considers art as a means, as something extraneous to the purpose of his or her existence, is not a serious figure. The great artist, one might say the truly ambitious artist, is one who understands that the fate of his art is of far greater consequence than his personal destiny.

Kazan's comment is a libel against art and an attempt to minimize his own sins by suggesting that anyone might be capable of committing them. Not anyone, a certain type. To the extent that the current cultural landscape is over-populated with artists who think only of themselves, it is in part due to the example and legacy of Elia Kazan and those like him. The media praise Kazan because he fits their idea of the artist: a man or woman capable of sophisticated work--but nothing overly disturbing; prepared to stand on political principle--as long as it does not create problems with the authorities; dedicated to art--unless it demands too much.

The honoring of Kazan is part of a trend, the general rehabilitation of anticommunism and McCarthyism. It was fashionable for a time in some circles to be on the "left." Now one senses a deep hunger, an irrepressible impulse on the part of some erstwhile liberals and radicals to ingratiate themselves, after the fact, with the witch-hunters, to be, at last, on the "winning side." This is a prelude to and a justification in advance for a new and serious assault on democratic rights.

In applauding Kazan the members of the Academy are applauding themselves. What are they saying? "In similar circumstances, we would behave in precisely the same way." The film industry establishment is setting up the artist-informer as a model for the present and the future. Nothing good can come from such a celebration. We condemn the decision of the Academy. Beware of those who reward cowardice and lack of principle! As James P. Cannon, a genuine anti-Stalinist, observed two months after Kazan's HUAC testimony, in regard to another specimen of the McCarthy days, Whittaker Chambers: "American capitalism, turning rotten before it got fully ripe, acclaims the stool pigeons and informers, who squeal and enrich themselves, as the embodiments of the highest good they know. By their heroes ye shall know them."

1. What planned event led the author to write this article?
2. What was the purpose of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)?
3. What role did director Elia Kazan play in HUAC’s investigation of the motion picture industry?
4. What justification did Kazan offer his actions?
5. What position does the author take regarding Kazan’s justification for his actions before HUAC? What evidence does he provide to support this position?