Oscar-Night Cliffhanger

Has Hollywood finally forgiven Elia Kazan? Or are the wounds still too raw nearly 50 years after he informed on his friends at the height of the notorious Hollywood blacklisting?

If anyone is qualified to predict what might happen Sunday when the 89-year-old film titan makes a dramatic appearance at the 71st annual Academy Awards to accept an honorary Oscar, it’s Daily Variety columnist Army Archerd, who has been covering the Oscars since 1953.

“I know the people doing the show are worried,” he says. “We could have some real Oscar drama. This is better than any scene Kazan could have directed.”

Kazan’s days of Hollywood exile finally ended when Karl Malden, a longtime friend, proposed an Oscar for the legendary director at a Jan. 7 board meeting of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The 39-member board voted unanimously to approve the award.

The gesture seemed to signal forgiveness for Kazan, who has been a Hollywood nonperson in recent years because of his April 10, 1952, testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Called before the committee at the height of the Red Scare, the director informed on eight of his old friends from the Group Theater who, like Kazan, had once been members of the Communist Party.

Kazan’s testimony, and his refusal to apologize for it in later years, has been cited as the reason for his being snubbed by a variety of prestigious Hollywood organizations, including the American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., both of which refused Kazan life achievement awards.

So far, Kazan has not responded to the noisy denunciations that greeted the announcement of his honorary Oscar. Hard of hearing and in uncertain health, he has not given an in-depth interview in years. In 1995, when asked about his actions, he gruffly replied: “I’m 85 years old. I don’t care anymore. What new is there to say?”

However, his wife, Frances, in a rare interview, says she believes Kazan’s critics are still hounding him because he has refused to apologize for his actions. “He’s become the focus of this free-floating anger about that era because he won’t be cowed. But he has nothing to be contrite about. He did what he did out of principle.”

Is there any possibility of Kazan offering an apology on Oscar night? “Too [expletive] bad--it’s not going to happen,” says Frances Kazan. “What’s he got to apologize for? Elia is a very courageous, tough character. What people say doesn’t bother this household at all. He deserves an Oscar. It’s overdue, long overdue.”

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Decision Sparked Widespread Debate

Instead of signaling an end to the debate over Kazan’s actions, the honorary Oscar has sparked a heated war of words that has spread from the Hollywood trades to publications as far left as the Nation and as far right as the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Abraham Polonsky, an 88-year-old blacklisted screenwriter and outspoken Kazan critic, told Entertainment Weekly: “I’ll be watching, hoping someone shoots him. It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. defended the director, calling the criticism of Kazan an “orgy of self-righteous frenzy.” He added: “If the occasion calls for apologies, let Mr. Kazan’s denouncers apologize for the aid and comfort they gave to Stalinism.”

Arthur Miller, a friend and collaborator who broke with Kazan after his testimony, believes time has healed any wounds. “History ought not to be rewritten,” he recently wrote in the Nation. “Elia Kazan did sufficiently extraordinary work in theater and film to merit its acknowledgment.” However, Bernard Gordon, another prominent blacklisted writer, is not ready to confer any lifetime awards on Kazan: “The major achievement of his lifetime was to contribute to one of the worst civil liberties violations in the country.”

Polonsky and Gordon are part of a group of older writers and actors, the Committee Against Silence, that will protest the award with a press conference Thursday outside the academy’s Wilshire Boulevard headquarters. There are expected to be pickets at the Oscars on Sunday, but academy director Bruce Davis says security is not a concern.

“Nobody’s advocating bomb-throwing or even tomato-throwing,” says Davis. “It’s been a very genteel campaign by a small group of people. Because we get so much media attention, there are pickets every year. We’re prepared--we take security very seriously.”

Many other prominent entertainment figures gave names, including Budd Schulberg, Sterling Hayden, Edward Dymytryk, Lloyd Bridges, Burl Ives and Clifford Odets. But it was Kazan, the most critically acclaimed filmmaker of his time and director of many socially conscious films and plays, who has always been a magnet for criticism.

“A lot of the other guys later admitted that what they did was wrong,” says Polonsky, who was blacklisted for 18 years after refusing to testify. “But Kazan went before the committee, kissed their ass and never apologized. If he gets an award, it should be the Benedict Arnold award.”

So how will the Hollywood elite respond when Kazan, now aged and infirm, takes the stage Sunday? Will he hear boos and catcalls? Will people sit on their hands? Or will he receive the thunderous standing ovation given in 1972 to Charlie Chaplin, when the world-famous comedian returned to America after years of Red Scare-inspired political exile?

“I think Oscar night will be a pageant of reconciliation,” says Neal Gabler, author of “An Empire of Their Own,” an influential social history of Hollywood’s pioneering Jewish moguls. “First you have ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ a movie which hearkens back to a war before the Cold War, to the last time this country felt united behind an ideal. And then you have Kazan, who is being forgiven for his own Cold War transgressions. With both winning Oscars, it’s a way of saying, ‘It’s finally all over.’ ”

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Making Distinction Between Life, Work

If Kazan’s political actions were taken out of the equation, he surely would have been honored long ago. For more than half a century, he has towered over the artistic landscape, first in the theater as a brilliant interpreter of the touchstone plays of Miller and Tennessee Williams, then as director of such acclaimed films as “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “East of Eden” and “On the Waterfront.”

The last won six Oscars in 1954, including best director for Kazan, one of two such awards he won--the other was for the 1947 film “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” He discovered James Dean, made a star out of Marlon Brando and coaxed great performances out of the young Warren Beatty in “Splendor in the Grass” and Robert De Niro in “The Last Tycoon.”

But Kazan’s detractors argue that the life and the work are one. “Kazan himself never separated his life from his work,” says Walter Bernstein, who wrote “The Front,” a semiautobiographical film about his experiences as a blacklisted screenwriter. “He boasted that ‘On the Waterfront’ was his answer to his critics--that you could be a righteous stool pigeon. It doesn’t make sense that the industry’s most prestigious organization would give an award to a man who helped hurt the industry so much.”

Many Kazan defenders have been uncharacteristically mute. Brando has been silent. De Niro, Beatty and Kirk Douglas, who starred in Kazan’s “The Arrangement,” all refused to discuss Kazan with The Times. So has Paul Newman, who appeared in several Kazan-directed plays as a young actor. Martin Scorsese and James Brooks, longtime admirers of Kazan, have also avoided speaking up. Even Malden no longer gives interviews, saying he won’t discuss the issue until after the Oscars.

Only a handful of contemporary filmmakers has taken a stand. At the Directors Guild Awards, Steven Spielberg said, “You have to look at his body of work. I may not agree with the decision Kazan made--what he did was wrong. But it didn’t make his films wrong for me.”

Gale Anne Hurd, who helped prevent Kazan from being given an AFI Life Achievement Award a decade ago, says her opposition came at a time when the arts were under fire from the extreme right wing. “Kazan absolutely deserves an honorary Oscar,” she says now. “[His films] were classics in their time and remain so today.”

More on Kazan

* Letters: Readers weigh in on the Oscar controversy. F3

* Coming Tuesday: A look at the history behind Kazan’s decision to inform on friends and collaborators.