The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (219 page)

Still, Kaufman is an outsider in several ways, friendly but a stubborn loner, too. He was fired from
The Outlaw Josey Wales
(76, Clint Eastwood)—which he wrote—because of an impasse with Eastwood. He remains, I think, attached to wry heroes: he did write the story for
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(81, Steven Spielberg). He is a director equipped to handle large American subjects—the life of Nixon, or LBJ, say. He has a better than ordinary grasp of America’s need for rogue tricksters—and of their longing to be treated as good guys.

No one regretted the seven-year wait before
Quills
more than Kaufman. There had been many projects, but nothing to reach fruition. And
Quills
was a low-budget picture, set in France but shot in England, that left one marveling at Kaufman’s wit and skill. This is a man who ought to be making a couple of pictures a year. But
Quills
had no paper to write on—its rare mixture of tenderness and cruelty, black comedy and the erotic, liberty and censorship, found few viewers because it seemed too hard for the mainstream to identify with Sade (despite Geoffrey Rush’s passionate commitment to it).

Twisted
is far from his best work, and after that Kaufman spent several devoted years nursing his wife, Rose.

Aki Kaurismäki
, b. Orimattila, Finland, 1957
1981:
Saimaa-ilmiö
. 1983:
Rikos ja Rangaistus
. 1985:
Calamari Union
. 1986:
Varjoja Paratiisissa
. 1987:
Hamlet Liikemaailmassa/Hamlet Gets Business; Thru the Wire; Rich Little Bitch
. 1988:
Ariel
. 1989:
Leningrad Cowboys Go America; Tulitikkutehtaan Tyttö/The Match Factory Girl; Likaiset Kadet
. 1990:
I Hired a Contract Killer
. 1992:
La Vie de Bohème; Those Were the Days; These Boots
. 1993:
Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses
. 1994:
Pida Huivista Kiinni, Tatjana; Total Balalaika Show
. 1996:
Kauas Pilvet Karkaavat/ Drifting Clouds
. 1999:
Juha
. 2002:
Man Without a Past
. 2006:
Lights in the Dusk
.

In the late eighties and early nineties, the Kaurismäki brothers thrust Finnish movies onto the international festival scene. At first, Aki (a writer-director) worked closely with his older brother, Mika, but subsequently Aki established himself as the more productive. He has a refreshing passion for shorter films (often in the seventy-five-minute range), and he has the cool, dry, ironic affection for American culture that sometimes one sees in Godard. Kaurismäki can be very funny—so long as no one laughs. His vein is not quite black humor, but a droll fatalism that marks the Finns as eternal spectators for the silliness of the world. He was most impressive with
Ariel, The Match Factory Girl
, and
Leningrad Cowboys Go America
, and he was fond of the road picture format. More recently he seems to have lost some edge, but in the early twenty-first century there is plenty of room available if his sardonic eye turned to politics.

Helmut Kautner
(1908–80), b. Düsseldorf, Germany
1939:
Kitty und die Weltkonferenz; Die Acht Entfesselten
. 1940:
Frau Nach Mass; Kleider Machen Leute
. 1941:
Auf Wiedersehn, Franziska
. 1942:
Anuschka; Wir Maken Musik
. 1943:
Romanze in Moll
. 1944:
Grosse Freiheit Nr 7
. 1945:
Unter den Brucken
. 1947:
In Jenen Tagen
. 1948:
Film ohne Fitel; Der Apfel ist ab
. 1949:
Konigskinder
. 1950:
Epilog
. 1951:
Weisse Schatten
. 1952:
Kapt’n Bay-Bay
. 1954:
Die Letzte Brucke; Bildnis einer Unbekannten
. 1955:
Des Teufels General; Ludwig II; Griff nach den Sternen; Himmel ohne Sterne; Ein Madchen aus Flandern
. 1956:
Der Hauptmann von Kopenick
. 1957:
Die Zurcher Verlobung; Monpti
. 1958:
The Wonderful Years; A Stranger in My Arms; Der Schinderhannes
. 1959:
Der Rest ist Schweigen; Die Gans von Sedan
. 1960:
Das Glas Wasser; Schwarzer Kies
. 1961:
Des Traum von Lieschen Muller
. 1962:
Die Rote
. 1964:
Das Haus in Montevideo; Lausbubengeschichten
. 1970:
Die Feuerzangenbowle
.

After studying art history, philology, and theatre at Munich University, Kautner wrote and directed cabaret and stage productions. He also worked as an actor
—Kreuzer Emden
(32, Louis Halph)—and appeared in many of his own early films. He came to prominence in the years after 1945 and was associated with several worthy, prestigious, and dull movies:
Des Teufels General
, with Curt Jurgens in the Zuckmayer play; O. W. Fischer as
Ludwig II;
an adaptation of his own play,
Himmel ohne Sterne; Der Hauptmann von Kopenick
, from a Zuckmayer script; and
Der Rest ist Schweigen
, a Hamlet in modern Germany with Hardy Kruger as the prince. Belatedly, he went to Hollywood in 1957, but only to direct two clotted weepies at Universal:
The Wonderful Years
, with Teresa Wright, and a June Allyson–Jeff Chandler picture,
A Stranger in My Arms
.

He played the lead in
Karl May
(74, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg).

Danny Kaye
(David Daniel Kominski) (1913–87), b. New York
Danny Kaye is one of those people who was a wonder once, but who looks frantic and alien now. He was called a genius.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
was an international event. When he appeared to do stand-up routines on stage, there were stories that he gave command performances after the official curtain fell—for royalty, celebrities, or sick children—that went on into the early hours, riots of improvisation. You had to be there. But to be a wow in pictures you only have to do it
now
. Later will sort itself out. Danny Kaye had his now: it is even said that Laurence Olivier got a crush on him. (Kaye was especially popular in England.) And even now one can pick up the feeling of nearly inhuman energy in Kaye on screen, somewhere between child, machine, and rogue cuckoo clock.

Kaye had a mixed career in entertainment before his screen debut. He was a vaudevillian, a dancer, a singer, and comedian, and a flop in all directions. He even appeared in some two-reel comedies that failed dismally. But he made a Broadway debut in 1940 and then had a success in
Lady in the Dark
. He also met and married lyricist Sylvia Fine, the “brains” behind his subsequent success. She wrote most of those tortuous songs and controlled his material. It was Samuel Goldwyn who brought Kaye to the screen in
Up in Arms
(44, Elliott Nugent). In the years immediately after the war Kaye was all the rage: twins in
Wonder Man
(45, H. Bruce Humberstone);
The Kid from Brooklyn
(46, Norman Z. McLeod);
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
(47, McLeod), a beautiful subject vulgarized by Kaye;
A Song Is Born
(48, Howard Hawks);
The Inspector General
(49, Henry Koster); and
On the Riviera
(51, Walter Lang).

The woeful miscalculation of
Hans Christian Andersen
(52, Charles Vidor) marked the first slackening in his popularity. After
Knock on Wood
(54, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama) and
White Christmas
(54, Michael Curtiz), which he merely shared, he made
Assignment Children
(54) for UNICEF. Only seven films after that:
The Court Jester
(56, Frank and Panama);
Me and the Colonel
(57, Peter Glenville); the moderately lively
Merry Andrew
(58, Michael Kidd); as Red Nichols in
The Five Pennies
(59, Melville Shavelson);
On the Double
(62, Shavelson);
The Man from the Diner’s Club
(63, Frank Tashlin); and
The Madwoman of Chaillot
(69, Bryan Forbes).

He did work all the time for UNICEF, and he became a cooking enthusiast. But he seemed a little bewildered by the change in his reputation—he may never have approved that much of what he had done; perhaps he was torn over playing the fool. His last work was on TV as a concentration camp survivor caught up in anti-neo-Nazi action in
Skokie
(81, Herbert Wise).

Elia Kazan
(Elia Kazanjoglou) (1909–2003), b. Constantinople, Turkey
1945:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
. 1947:
The Sea of Grass; Boomerang; Gentleman’s Agreement
. 1949:
Pinky
. 1950:
Panic in the Streets
. 1951:
A Streetcar Named Desire
. 1952:
Viva Zapata!
. 1953:
Man on a Tightrope
. 1954:
On the Waterfront
. 1955:
East of Eden
. 1956:
Baby Doll
. 1957:
A Face in the Crowd
. 1960:
Wild River
. 1961:
Splendor in the Grass
. 1964:
America America/The Anatolian Smile
. 1969:
The Arrangement
. 1972:
The Visitors
. 1976:
The Last Tycoon
.

Kazan is a fascinating twentieth-century American. An immigrant, he was brought to America when he was only four. While he has never lost his Greek-Turkish roots—as witness
America America
—few native directors made films that so persistently dealt with American problems and subjects, or that were so absorbed in the American regard for sincere intensity of performance.

He is a superficial radical. From 1934–36, amid the Group Theater, Kazan was a member of the Communist party, and yet, in 1952, he reversed an earlier stand and declared the names of fellow Communists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Some may have consented to that admission, but others felt betrayed and noted that shortly after the hearing Kazan signed a contract (at reduced salary) in Hollywood. From this, the question arises: how committed are his films? Is he an exponent of radical concern, or just a master of naturalistic melodrama? Is Kazan an original author of films or a great director of actors who manages to disguise conventional material and commonplace attitudes?

He joined the Group Theater in 1932, originally as an actor: he appeared in
Waiting for Lefty
and
Golden Boy
by Clifford Odets and later acted in two films directed by Anatole Litvak—
City for Conquest
(40) and
Blues in the Night
(41). But direction was his real aim and by the mid-1940s he was the leading director of new plays on Broadway. This side to his work continued throughout most of his career:
Truckline Cafe
(46),
All My Sons
(47),
A Streetcar Named Desire
(47),
Death of a Salesman
(49),
Camino Real
(53),
Tea and Sympathy
(53),
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(55),
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
(57),
JB
(58),
Sweet Bird of Youth
(59), and
After the Fall
(64).

Kazan’s first six films—all but one made for Fox—are barely recognizable as his. Their realism is in the muted postwar fashion, they are muffled by players like Dorothy McGuire, Gregory Peck, and Jeanne Crain, they take on controversial issues in a literal or discreet manner, and they seem to reflect the character of Darryl F. Zanuck as much as Kazan himself.
Boomerang
and
Panic in the Streets
profit from being thrillers, enhanced by unfamiliar locations and making their social points indirectly.
Panic
, especially, has some effective deep-focus photography of New Orleans by Joe MacDonald that dramatizes the contrived sense of community. But the crusading pictures—
Gentleman’s Agreement
and
Pinky
—are naïve and clumsy, showing very little awareness of the medium, and smothering their issues with sentimentality.

Kazan’s personal impact began only with
Streetcar
, a film taken from the stage, employing a method nurtured at the Actors Studio, founded by Kazan and Bobby Lewis in 1948. It was the new actor—originally Brando—that best expressed Kazan, although in this instance he was burdened by a traditionally florid actress, Vivien Leigh. Thus the film is more a conflict of acting styles than the poetic struggle Tennessee Williams described.

Of course, Kazan had directed
Streetcar
on Broadway. In that process, through the casting of Marlon Brando and the very physical promotion of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, Kazan actually countered some of the playwright’s intentions. Kazan was
not
a homosexual. He invariably needed some kind of sexual investment in a show—imaginative and actual. So he made the Stanley-Stella bond more central and arousing than Williams had intended. He also shifted Blanche, from heroine to natural victim. And so the play worked in part, in 1947, because its poetry had been converted into a raw need Kazan could feel. That incident is a clue to his appetite for acting and actors. For Kazan backed the psychological thrust of Method acting most when he could himself identify with a character. In a real sense, he made the theatre as sexy as movies.

The next films are deeper explorations into emotional naturalism in acting: Brando as Zapata; Brando, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, and Lee J. Cobb in
On the Waterfront;
James Dean, Raymond Massey, and Julie Harris in
East of Eden;
Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, and Malden in
Baby Doll. Zapata
still looks an original movie, but
On the Waterfront
is glossy with skill and has less to do with the New York docks than with the mixture of grand guignol and neorealism. It is certainly emotional, but the feelings are all planned in advance, and the possible comparison between the Brando who informs on the mob and Kazan’s own readiness to talk is embarrassing.