The death of Elia Kazan at 94 calls up memories of political controversy, along with some of Now everybody knows that Academy Awards, while they have often honored excellence, are I won’t go into their politics, except to note they were altogether different. It’s enough to Kazan and Wyler’s approach to directing actors was also altogether different. The late Gregory Peck, who worked for Wyler and many of Hollywood’s best directors — Some observers have said Kazin encouraged “overacting” actors. One of them, Rod The death of Elia Kazan at 94 calls up memories of political controversy, along with some of Hollywood’s greatest movies and Broadway’s greatest plays: “On the Waterfront,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Death of a Salesman,” to cite just three. Kazan’s detractors despised him as a man for “naming names” of alleged Communists in testimony before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-392","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-6k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHollywood’s greatest movies and Broadway’s greatest plays: “On the Waterfront,” “A Streetcar
\nNamed Desire,” “Death of a Salesman,” to cite just three. Kazan’s detractors despised him as a
\nman for “naming names” of alleged Communists in testimony before the House Committee on
\nUnamerican Activities in 1952. His admirers regarded him as, among other things, “the best
\nactor’s director there ever was,” according to
\nTimes. (Free registration required.) <\/I>The obit puts the icing on the cake: “In his films, he
\nguided his performers to 21 Academy Award nominations — and 9 Oscars.”<\/P>
\n
\nhardly a true measure of artistic distinction. But if you want to guage whether a director has done
\nwell with actors by counting Oscars and Oscar nominations, then Kazan is not “the best actor’s
\ndirector there ever was.” To set the record straight, that honor would have to go to Willy Wyler,
\nwho “guided more actors to Academy Awards than anyone by far: 14 out of 35 nominations,” as
\nnoted in Wyler’s biography
\nTalent for Trouble.”<\/EM><\/FONT><\/B><\/A> Of course, I carry a special brief for Wyler,
\nhaving written that biography out of admiration for him — both as a man and as a director. <\/P>
\n
\nrecall that Wyler co-founded the Committee for the First Amendment (with John Huston,
\nscreenwriter Philip Dunne, both close friends of his, and character actor Alexander Knox) to
\ndefend the right of witnesses summoned by HUAC from having to testify at all, let alone name
\nnames, based on the fundamental privilege of free speech
\nand not on the basis of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.<\/P>
\n
\nStanislavsky “method” to probe the psychology of a role. Wyler never made a study of it. No
\ndirector, to pinch a few more words from the biography, “had a more intuitive approach to the
\nsubtleties of acting performances or went to the extremes he did to shape them.”<\/P>
\n
\nincluding Kazan and Alfred Hitchcock — explained that Wyler “was a pragmatist. What worked
\nworked, and he knew how to recognize it. … He sensed the interplay between actors. There’s a
\nwhole parade of moments, with nuances and subtexts. He understood them. This was ‘the Wyler
\ntouch.’ It’s why so many actors won Oscars with Willy, because he recognized the moments that
\nbrought them alive on the screen.”<\/P>
\n
\nSteiger, who was not above fits of scenery-chewing, once told me that Kazan’s direction of “On
\nthe Waterfront” was over-rated. It’s not uncommon for an ornery actor of Steiger’s
\nrare intelligence and skill to feel that way about a director. But he was particularly exercised by
\nthe credit Kazan got for his famous “contenda” scene with Marlon Brando, whose lacerating
\npathos (“I coulda been a contenda. I coulda been somebody”) turned “Waterfront” from
\nmelodrama into tragedy. Steiger had no more love lost for Brando than he did for Kazan, but said:
\n“It was all Brando.” He claimed the director was just an onlooker, and neither he nor Brando
\ncared to have him looking on. In fact, that scene wasn’t “all Brando.” There was plenty of
\nSteiger.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"