Kazan’s Works May Now Outweigh His Transgressions

The Motion Picture Academy’s decision to give an honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan, 89, on March 21 is an act it regards as a matter of giving an overdue honor to a man who deserves it. It may be that, but it also has larger reverberations. When Kazan accepts the Oscar, a contentious time in our history can well be said to belong to the past.

It’s the blacklist, of course, a dark time in the republic, when Congress all but tossed the Constitution into the trash. Kazan, the director of 19 films, including “On the Waterfront,” one of the most enduring of all postwar American films, found himself on the wrong side of the issues. Ever since, though he has been respected as a director, he often has been reviled as a man.

More than one generation has grown up and old since that time, so perhaps a little historical recap is in order: After World War II, the country was in the grip of anti-communism, now called “McCarthyism,” for the Wisconsin senator who rode that particular nag the hardest. The movie studios, reeling from the coming of television and a Supreme Court decision that forced them to sell their theaters, were worried about more government intervention. When the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began looking for Communists in Hollywood, rooting them out like French pigs digging for truffles, the studios said, in effect, we’ll fire, and no one will rehire, anyone you say is an unrepentant Communist.

Men and women were called to Washington to testify to their political activities and to name others they knew to have been Communists, who in turn would be asked to give more names. Those who didn’t comply were deemed “unfriendly witnesses” and became unemployable. Ten wound up in prison.

Kazan was a member of the Communist Party for 18 months between 1934 and 1936 when he was part of the Group Theatre in New York. He acknowledged his own membership and, after first refusing, eventually gave HUAC the names of eight of his old colleagues. Hollywood never quite forgave him. Until now.

Directors who succeed are not easy personalities. They’re hard, many of them, and Kazan might well be the toughest nut of all. He has never asked for sympathy or forgiveness. In his memoirs, “A Life” (1988), he says he did what he did out of the belief that it was right. “Reader, I don’t seek your favor . . . if you expect an apology now . . . you’ve misjudged my character. The ‘horrible, immoral thing’ I would do, I did out of my true self.” In a forthcoming book, “Kazan,” by Jeff Young, Kazan is quoted as saying, in the early 1970s, “Maybe I did wrong, probably did. But I really didn’t do it for any reason other than what I thought was right.” That’s about as far as he’s likely to go in the way of an apology.

This award would have been unlikely without the end of the Cold War. Communism as an international force is spent. HUAC itself seems out of a black-and-white past. Though there are divisive issues today, the economy is good; Hollywood’s dominion in popular entertainment has never been stronger. It’s a good time to set the house in order.

In our high decibel era of screaming heads pretending to thought, and sex lies that shake the nation, this award seems a gentle move, more akin to Christian charity than the desperate publicity-seeking maneuvers more usually associated with Hollywood. Yet, it will not be without controversy. The blacklist still roils tempers. Kazan has long been the focus of resentment. Still, anger is easing. Even the blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, 88, a hard liner in the matter of Kazan, was sounding a tiny bit softer when he told this newspaper, “He made a lot of good pictures, so you could say he deserves an award for his work--I just wouldn’t want to give it to him.”

The old debate in literature about the separation of an artist’s character from his art is at the core of the argument. We can be engaged by the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound or Celine and still find their social views distasteful. Whatever his reasons, Kazan damaged specific people. Their livelihoods were taken away. His own was protected. Theory doesn’t count for much in the face of that. Still, it was 47 years ago. Perhaps now Kazan’s creations can be said to outweigh his transgressions.

This olive branch from the Academy’s Board of Governors began with Karl Malden, 84, a former president of the Academy and an actor who has done some of his own best work for Kazan, including “On the Waterfront.” Malden proposed the honorary Oscar and saw it voted in. It’s fitting that the award comes from the elders of the picture business. They represent the generation that lived through the blacklist and they are the ones to say if it can be remanded to the past. Theirs is a generation taking its leave. The last word belongs to them, and now they’ve spoken.