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 the House Committee on
Unamerican Activities in 1952. His admirers regarded him as, among other things, “the best
actor’s director there ever was,” according to his obituary in this morning’s New York
Times. (Free registration required.) The obit puts the icing on the cake: “In his films, he
guided his performers to 21 Academy Award nominations — and 9 Oscars.”
Now everybody knows that Academy Awards, while they have often honored excellence, are
hardly a true measure of artistic distinction. But if you want to guage whether a director has done
well with actors by counting Oscars and Oscar nominations, then Kazan is not “the best actor’s
director there ever was.” To set the record straight, that honor would have to go to Willy Wyler,
who “guided more actors to Academy Awards than anyone by far: 14 out of 35 nominations,” as
noted in Wyler’s biography “A
Talent for Trouble.” Of course, I carry a special brief for Wyler,
having written that biography out of admiration for him — both as a man and as a director.
I won’t go into their politics, except to note they were altogether different. It’s enough to
recall that Wyler co-founded the Committee for the First Amendment (with John Huston,
screenwriter Philip Dunne, both close friends of his, and character actor Alexander Knox) to
defend the right of witnesses summoned by HUAC from having to testify at all, let alone name
names, based on the fundamental privilege of free speech
and not on the basis of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Kazan and Wyler’s approach to directing actors was also altogether different. Kazan made a study of it, using the
Stanislavsky “method” to probe the psychology of a role. Wyler never made a study of it. No
director, to pinch a few more words from the biography, “had a more intuitive approach to the
subtleties of acting performances or went to the extremes he did to shape them.”
The late Gregory Peck, who worked for Wyler and many of Hollywood’s best directors —
including Kazan and Alfred Hitchcock — explained that Wyler “was a pragmatist. What worked
worked, and he knew how to recognize it. … He sensed the interplay between actors. There’s a
whole parade of moments, with nuances and subtexts. He understood them. This was ‘the Wyler
touch.’ It’s why so many actors won Oscars with Willy, because he recognized the moments that
brought them alive on the screen.”
Some observers have said Kazin encouraged “overacting” actors. One of them, Rod
Steiger, who was not above fits of scenery-chewing, once told me that Kazan’s direction of “On
the Waterfront” was over-rated. It’s not uncommon for an ornery actor of Steiger’s
rare intelligence and skill to feel that way about a director. But he was particularly exercised by
the credit Kazan got for his famous “contenda” scene with Marlon Brando, whose lacerating
pathos (“I coulda been a contenda. I coulda been somebody”) turned “Waterfront” from
melodrama into tragedy. Steiger had no more love lost for Brando than he did for Kazan, but said:
“It was all Brando.” He claimed the director was just an onlooker, and neither he nor Brando
cared to have him looking on. In fact, that scene wasn’t “all Brando.” There was plenty of
Steiger.
