The Big Screen (44 page)

He was an actor and a general assistant with the Group Theatre in the 1930s, and for a year and a bit he was a Communist in the way many creative young people were, though he resented the Party for its secrecy and bureaucratic controls. Kazan believed in himself as being uncontrollable. By the 1940s he was directing onstage: he cast Clift in
The Skin of Our Teeth
(1943) and helped discover Brando for a small but eye-catching role in Maxwell Anderson's
Truckline Café
. Then, in the late 1940s, he directed the two great plays of the era,
A Streetcar Named Desire
(with Brando and Jessica Tandy) and Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
(with Lee J. Cobb).

It was out of this period that the Actors Studio emerged, affected by the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky and the experience of the Group Theatre, but rooted in a belief that American acting deserved to come into its own. There was a notion that this country's acting had been unduly influenced by English approaches—so that it was too smooth, eloquent, and effete. This is a travesty of the range of English acting, but it was borne out in the way many people had acted in movies in the 1930s. The cultural shock of war, the arousing films of neorealism—all those things required acting that felt more real, that was based in a way of finding the character in the actor's own experience or sense memory (sometimes with the help of psychoanalysis). That “real behavior” was not meant to be eloquent or polished; it was rough, awkward, and inarticulate, but it was “honest”—or so the claim was made. Though this began as a theatrical revolution, it had the most impact at the movies—nearly all the Method actors ended up in Hollywood, for the close-up agonizing encouraged by the Method was begging for the camera.

Kazan was drawn to Hollywood in the late 1940s, and he made a string of crafted but impersonal films—
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
(1945),
The Sea of Grass
(1947),
Gentleman's Agreement
(1947) (which still won Best Picture),
Pinky
(1949), and
Panic in the Streets
(1950). He came more alive, working with Brando in
Viva Zapata!
(1952) and the movie of
Streetcar
(1951; where Vivien Leigh replaced Jessica Tandy). But his great autobiography,
A Life
, makes it clear that he was not pleased with his own pictures and did not feel he was “in” them yet.

Not that directors in America were yet supposed to be “in” their movies. The industry still thought of pictures as assignments, and most directors were wary of voicing artistic personality or ambition. The best ones did their jobs and kept quiet—that was the method favored by Hawks, John Ford, and even Alfred Hitchcock, all of whom settled for being entertainers, and had the commercial success to remind them of it.

Kazan was bursting with inner self. It was the way he handled actors: He wanted their inner life to escape. He saw them as his instrument. It was an attitude not too far from other explosive careers of the late 1940s and 1950s—Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock, “free” forces spilling out on canvas and dancing all over the chord structure of popular songs. Norman Mailer's
Advertisements for Myself
(published in 1959) was a new kind of book—it had a big influence on journalism—and it believed a writer should be a star and movie-like.

The trigger releasing Kazan came in an unexpected way that changed his life. His prominence and his record as a Communist made him a target for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He was warned that he would be asked to testify. He resisted, but then he was told that movie employment could depend on it. So, in April 1952, he testified. He named names and let his wife, Molly, publish a letter to the
New York Times
defending his position. For the rest of his life, he never threw off the shame from that incident. But shame confirmed him as an outsider who treasured his own curse and it matured him as a filmmaker because it drew his ego out into the open.

Kazan had imposed himself on texts before. On
Streetcar
he instigated the transformation of a play about Blanche into a production about Blanche and Stanley, the figure who dominated audience response in 1947 and seemed the source of the play's danger. Kazan needed to identify with his male characters. And so in
On the Waterfront
(written by Budd Schulberg after Arthur Miller had withdrawn), Terry Malloy testifies against the waterfront crime mob of which he has been a part.

It is a passionate, muddled film. Brando is electrifying, the supporting cast is authentic, even the extras feel from the streets. The grittiness of the Hoboken waterfront (filmed by Jean Vigo's Boris Kaufman) is cold and abrasive, but the film is operatic, too, carried away by its emotional size. It's unclear what the ending means. It's far-fetched that the gangsters assassinate Terry's brainy brother, Charlie (played by Rod Steiger), when the sensible thing to do is to eliminate Terry. Never mind. There had never been such a bold attempt at street realism before, or a performance as achingly vulnerable as Brando's. It's just that the passion stems from Kazan: it was his film; he was “in” it.

Kazan did a certain range of material very well, though he lacked irony or humor. He was melodramatic, self-pitying, and so pledged to some actors that his films ran the risk of losing sight of anything else—thus the character of Aaron in
East of Eden
(1955), James Dean's brother, is fobbed off so Cal can be made appealing. Still,
On the Waterfront
and testifying start Kazan's richest period, which carries on with
East of Eden
(the discovery of Dean),
Baby Doll
(1956),
A Face in the Crowd
(1957),
Wild River
(1960; with Clift),
Splendor in the Grass
(which paired Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood), and
America, America
(1963), the story of a family like his own coming to the new land.

Kazan's influence lasted long after he had moved on personally from the Actors Studio. That school has been the breeding ground for exceptional actors—the first two
Godfather
films are stocked with Studio players, including Lee Strasberg who took over the school and became its essential if autocratic teacher.

Another name needs to be remembered in any survey of American naturalism. Paddy Chayefsky was born in the Bronx in 1923. After war service, and being wounded, he tried to write plays and scripts and he ended up in television. He did a version of Budd Schulberg's Hollywood novel,
What Makes Sammy Run?
He was coached by Molly Kazan, the director's wife. And then, in 1953, for the Goodyear Playhouse on television, he wrote
Marty
, the love story of a humble butcher and a shy girl, played by Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand. It was live television, and it was meant to remind viewers of life.

Marty
was directed for TV by Delbert Mann, and when the movie version was made in 1955 by the production company of Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster, Chayefsky insisted that Mann do the film. But the cast was changed to Ernest Borgnine (the villain in
From Here to Eternity
, fondly recalled by Burt) and Betsy Blair. The casting of Blair took more than usual nerve. The actress was under suspicion for Communist associations. Lancaster, too, at that time was being questioned. So Gene Kelly, Blair's husband, asked M-G-M chief Dore Schary to pull strings. “You play charades with Betsy every Saturday,” he told Schary. “She's not going to overthrow the country.” In this case, the friendly plea worked. Blair got the part and won a nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Borgnine won for Best Actor.

That
Marty
won Best Picture and the Palme d'Or at Cannes is a sign of how much naturalistic acting was in vogue, and it speaks to another hope for early television, that of showing life as it seemed to be lived. Walter Winchell predicted
Marty
would be a sleeper hit.
Variety
announced, “Rarely has a single picture so influenced the film industry.” It earned $3 million on an outlay of just over $300,000 and it prompted reviewers to tell Hollywood to watch television more often—if they had sets in their houses.

Today,
Marty
is not easy watching. The “real” works for a moment, but then it feels studied and dull. Chayefsky would veer away from its sobriety and plainspoken characters: by the 1970s he was writing flamboyantly rhetorical scripts for
The Hospital
(1971),
Network
(1976; still a scathing and prescient attack on television), and even a sci-fi picture,
Altered States
(1980).
Network
is one of the liveliest talking pictures we have, and one of William Holden's best world-weary roles. But
Marty
was a marvel in its day, full of the hope that America had discovered respect for reality.

Humphrey Bogart was another actor who reckoned he would produce his own pictures—and make a killing from them. In the late 1940s he decided not to renew his old Warner Bros. contract. Instead, he set up Santana Productions, named after the yacht he cherished. He formed a partnership with Robert Lord, a writer-producer from Warners and the man behind
Black Legion
, an important Bogart picture of the late 1930s in which he played a man who joins the Ku Klux Klan.

Santana made four films, none of them profitable.
Tokyo Joe
(1949),
Knock on Any Door
(1949), and
Sirocco
(1951) were routine. But
In a Lonely Place
(1950) was remarkable. Bogart had befriended the new director Nicholas Ray—in fact, Ray did
Knock on Any Door
.

Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1911, Ray developed slowly. He worked in radio, as a folklore researcher and as an assistant to Kazan. But in 1949, for RKO, with John Houseman as his producer, Ray released one of the most exciting of American debut films:
They Live by Night
, a rural noir in which Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell try to keep their love precious as fate closes in on them. The taut dramatization of endangered feeling had seldom been so striking. No one guessed it in the late 1940s, but Ray was to become an emblematic figure in the arguments over what a director was. In 1958 the French critic Jean-Luc Godard went so far as to claim, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.” In strangers' eyes, Ray had become a vagrant hero. But John Houseman, always an acute observer of talent, knew the man himself:

There was a bond between Bogart and Ray. In the early 1940s, Bogart had become someone the public admired, a guy with integrity, but the aggressive edge of his gangsters from the 1930s lingered. In life he was a famous needler, and Ray saw a way to get back to the innate hostility that had been genre conventional in the 1930s. In addition, they were two men with younger wives—Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame—who might have wandering eyes, or arouse their husbands' suspicions. Bogart had never enjoyed the Hollywood system: He had fought steadily with his boss, Jack Warner. He had been bruised and humiliated by the flight he led to Washington in 1947 to protest the early HUAC assault on possible Communists in the business. Bogey the resolute had been compelled to climb down and apologize, to protect his career. But he was an old pro, while Ray was an incipient and helpless rebel. Together they made a Hollywood picture that leaves
Sunset Blvd.
looking a little prim.

In a Lonely Place
is the story of a screenwriter, Dixon Steele (Bogart), who has made too many compromises and who nurses his temper along with his disappointed talent. It is a portrait of idealism turned morose that nearly anyone reared in Hollywood would recognize. He meets a woman, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), and they fall in love. But their affair is put in jeopardy when Steele becomes a suspect in a murder case. He isn't guilty, but the events of the film will show Laurel that he is angry and violent enough to be dangerous. Indeed, he comes close to killing her. The “lonely place” is paranoia, or being out of control, but it is also the plight of creative hopes gone sour in the movie capital. The story was heightened by the fact that Ray and Gloria Grahame broke up during the shoot.