Scorsese Defends McCarthy-Haunted Kazan in Venice Movie: Review
Elia Kazan
Venice Film Festival via Bloomberg.
Director Elia Kazan working on the set of the 1952 movie ``Viva Zapata!'' with Anthony Quinn sitting to his right. Kazan is the subject of a documentary by Martin Scorsese titled ``A Letter to Elia'' and screened at the Venice Film Festival.
Director Elia Kazan working on the set of the 1952 movie ``Viva Zapata!'' with Anthony Quinn sitting to his right. Kazan is the subject of a documentary by Martin Scorsese titled ``A Letter to Elia'' and screened at the Venice Film Festival. Source: Venice Film Festival via Bloomberg.
Martin Scorsese
Venice Film Festival via Bloomberg.
Martin Scorsese poses before presenting his documentary ''A Letter to Elia'' -- about the life of Elia Kazan -- at the Venice Film Festival. The documentary, made with Kent Jones, is a tribute to Kazan, who died in 2003 and is remembered by many for naming Communist colleagues during the 1950s McCarthy witch hunts.
Martin Scorsese poses before presenting his documentary ''A Letter to Elia'' -- about the life of Elia Kazan -- at the Venice Film Festival. The documentary, made with Kent Jones, is a tribute to Kazan, who died in 2003 and is remembered by many for naming Communist colleagues during the 1950s McCarthy witch hunts. Source: Venice Film Festival via Bloomberg.
Elia Kazan is remembered as the stage and film director who ratted on his colleagues during U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s. His artistic output is often overlooked.
In “A Letter to Elia” -- an hour-long documentary made with Kent Jones and screened out of competition at the Venice Film Festival -- Martin Scorsese endeavors to set the record straight. He makes no excuses for the man: He simply reminds us how important Kazan’s films were, particularly to him.
Kazan was born Elias Kazanjoglou in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1909. At age four, he set sail for America with his family, and became a celebrated stage and film director, collecting two Academy Awards and leading nine actors including Marlon Brando to win theirs.
As a young stage director in 1932, Kazan joined the Group Theatre, an influential New York-based collective, and enrolled in its Communist Party unit in 1935 before leaving some 19 months later in disgust at the party’s growing power.
Kazan was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and named eight people who were members of both the Group Theatre and the party -- most of them already known. He avoided the blacklisting that kept peers out of work. Yet his statement haunted him well beyond his death in 2003.
“The largest harm Kazan did was to himself,” wrote Richard Schickel in a 2005 biography.
Kazan told critic Michel Ciment in 1974 that while there was “something disgusting about giving other people’s names,” keeping quiet about Soviet infiltration of the entertainment industry would have been akin to “defecting.”
Making a Man
“I began to make good films, really progressive and really deep, only after that period,” he said. “I think it made a man of me.”
Scorsese doesn’t pass moral judgment on Kazan’s move. He just agrees that Kazan became a better director afterwards.
While other showbiz figures gave names to the HUAC, he says, Kazan defended his actions in a New York Times letter -- and “almost guaranteed he was the one people would remember.”
“Was it destructive? Of course it was,” says Scorsese in his smoothly crafted narrative. “He became a pariah.” Yet, he says, Kazan also became a great filmmaker.
Scorsese’s documentary is mainly a passionate, personal demonstration of that perceived greatness. He cherry-picks movies he identified with most closely as the pre-adolescent son of Italian immigrants, starting with “America America” (1963), about an Anatolian Greek who escapes to the New World.
Stirring clips are shown; it’s as if you were watching the whole movie, with narration by Scorsese.
Contender Confession
Next up is “On the Waterfront” (1954) and the scene with Brando lamenting that he “could’ve been a contender.” There, Scorsese shares some of his own adolescent angst, confessing that the movie’s squalor and bleakness were as familiar to him as “the awkwardness, the sense that you’re a nobody.”
The climactic title in Scorsese’s personal trilogy is “East of Eden” (1955), a young man’s desperate crusade to squeeze affection out of an unloving dad. It taught Scorsese that his own life could be turned into “some kind of art.” Scorsese again alludes to his own quarrelsome home life and to rivalry with his big brother, whom he initially likened to the James Dean character.
Scorsese nearly became Kazan’s assistant after film school. He got lost on the way to the appointment, and arrived late to find Kazan buttoning his raincoat. “He wished me luck, and that was that,” says Scorsese. “I wouldn’t have lasted a day.”
Artistic ‘Father’
Instead, the director of “Taxi Driver,” “Goodfellas” and “Raging Bull” made his own way, befriending Kazan later. He never worked up the words to tell him what his movies meant. He only made sure he was on stage when Kazan -- his artistic “father” -- got a lifetime-achievement Academy Award in 1999, while others chose to stay seated during the standing ovation.
With “A Letter to Elia,” Scorsese, 67, adds another fine documentary to his expanding slate. Committed more than any contemporary to the legacy of his art, he runs a nonprofit foundation devoted to preserving old movies, and endorses great films of the past in such tributes as “My Voyage to Italy.”
In a generation or three, someone will come along to pay tribute to Scorsese -- hopefully without the distraction of controversy, and with equal doses of passion, sincerity, and attention to detail.
Rating: ***.
What the Stars Mean: **** Excellent *** Good ** Average * Poor (No stars) Worthless
(Farah Nayeri writes for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this review: Farah Nayeri in Venice at farahn@bloomberg.net.
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