S LOWLY but surely, dissent has begun to surface over the decision to honor Elia Kazan – arguably the greatest American director of the century – with an Oscar for lifetime achievement.
Kazan “dishonored his very own profession and his very own soul by his betrayal,” wrote veteran character actor Alan Garfield in the Los Angeles Times, adding that giving him an honorary Academy Award is “sacrilege.”
Bernard Gordon, who wrote the script for the original version of “The Thin Red Line,” is “appalled” by the notion of honoring “a prize informer.”
Kazan “dishonored” himself by “naming names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee: A member of the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936, he confirmed the identities of eight others from his party cell.
What particularly galled Hollywood leftists is that Kazan, after “snitching,” didn’t just slink off into the night. Instead, he took out an ad in the New York Times in which he forthrightly defended his actions and explained why communism in Hollywood was an important issue.
The decision to testify, the communist Daily Worker vowed, “will haunt him forever.” And when it comes to giving Kazan the honors his life’s work has earned, Hollywood has made good on that threat.
True, Kazan’s films – which include “On the Waterfront,” “East of Eden,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “A Face in the Crowd” – have won Oscars. But prestigious film groups like the American Film Institute and the L.A. Film Critics Association have always denied him awards celebrating his life’s work.
This hatred for Kazan mirrors exactly the unthinking adoration that Hollywood’s elites have shown for those whose contempt for anti-communism they continue to mistake for political courage.
Hollywood has long seen this as a black-and-white story with only angels on one side and only devils on the other. The reality, however, is far more gray – as Kazan himself understood all too well.
No, show-business Communists did not spy for Moscow. And yes, many joined the party out of misguided idealism. But, once in, they willfully subjected themselves to an iron discipline that controlled their thoughts and their art – a sad truth that even McCarthyite rhetorical excess cannot mask.
Perhaps the most famous example was the 1946 star-chamber proceeding at which screenwriter Albert Maltz – now lionized as one of the defiant “Hollywood 10” – was forced to recant an article for the communist New Masses in which he had questioned the CP’s concept of art as a weapon for class struggle. Maltz, Kazan later wrote, had to “crawl in front of the Party” and “beg forgiveness for things he’d written and things he felt.” In a followup article, Maltz confessed his “error” and praised his forced re-education.
Director Edward Dmytryk – who went to prison even though he’d left the CP and who later came to regard his association with the Hollywood 10 as “my real imprisonment” – tells of being lectured in party discipline by fellow “10” member John Howard Lawson: “You believe in freedom of speech for Communists … because what they say is true. You do not believe in freedom of speech for fascists because what they say is a lie.”
Kazan broke with the Party long before the Hitler-Stalin pact, its most shameful moment. Literally overnight, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League abandoned its militant opposition to Hitler and became the American Peace Mobilization – which just as fervently denounced the war against Nazism. “Stop building houses, to the carpenters they said/You supply the coffins and we’ll supply the dead,” chanted the Almanac Singers, whose ranks included Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Those who enthusiastically endorsed such insidiousness had surrendered the willingness to think for themselves. Party discipline was “a noose,” Kazan wrote. The CP “attempted to control thought and to suppress personal opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct.”
But he also recognized anti-Communist hysteria – and understood how it played right into the CP’s hands by making anti-Communist liberals unwilling to side publicly with the McCarthyites: “A lot of good liberals … have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists.”
If truth be told, those who’ve condemned Kazan for “snitching” would today be hailing him as a hero had his target been the pro-Nazi German-American Bund instead of the CP.
Although he’s always defended his decision to testify and insisted he would do it again, Kazan has never self-righteously proclaimed himself a hero.
“What’s called ‘a difficult decision’ is a difficult decision because either way you go, there are penalties, right?” he told French critic Michel Ciment in 1971. “But I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did, and betray my own soul. I didn’t betray it.”
Kazan’s “crimes” are twofold: First, he looked within himself – and not to some party discipline – before making a painful decision. Second, unlike his tormentors, he was on the correct side of history in one of this century’s most important political struggles.
No wonder so much of Hollywood won’t forgive him.