Elia Kazan - Search and Destroy

meh: a face in the crowd

Man On A Tightrope looks like it could be interesting (filmed in Germany - euro clowns are the creepiest)

also, anyone see Boomerang! with Lee J. Cobb ?(i think that's Kazan)

just saw Wild River for the second time ever; a contender for his best post-Brando, and Lee Remick steals it from Clift.

Very much want to see this this week. Please do not spoil. Well that's not really a fair request. I will just exercise self-discipline and stay off thread.

Self Discipline, are you there? Are you in there, Self Discipline? Hello?

Are you there, Self Discipline? It's me, James Redd.

It's really not easily spoiled, and apparently no one else has seen it cuz it's not on disc.

OK, thanks for the tip. I went to see A Face In The Crowd last week and was quite pleased. Didn't know that Lee Remick was a Kazan discovery. Didn't know Andy Griffith could act so well. The only movie I'd seen him in before was Angel In My Pocket. On my way out I saw one of the cinemaniacs and he was carrying a backpack full of books only slightly more full than the backpack full of books I was carrying. Started feeling self-conscious then I quickly differentiated myself by noting the he was kind of stooped over with the weight of all those books while I was still making an effort to stand tall.

Whatcha reading?

Wild River was gorgeous. And I learned from his wife, who introduced the film, that his name is pronounces elle ee a.

apparaently E.K. made sure Griffith was rip-roaring drunk for his last scene in Face.

I think Toronto's Cinematheque often runs a mirror program to New York's...Cinematheque? I don't know--one of the theatres there. So we're in the midst of the same Kazan retrospective here. Three quick thoughts: 1) Even though its reputation is mixed, I'm really looking forward to The Last Tycoon (I'll be seeing it for the first time); 2) Even more than Brando and Steiger's cab ride, Brando and Eva Marie Saint's walk in the park ("You was a real mess...") in Waterfront might be my favorite scene ever; 3) Baby Doll, which I saw tonight, is just completely nuts--some very smart people getting together and saying, "How much can we get away with here?"

Robert De Niro was never more handsome than in The Last Tycoon, but the movie's a total blank; since the novel's unfinished the movie feels foreshortened. Tony Curtis has a really goot bit though.

Wild River still unavailable on DVD, alas.

alack

Alfred, move to a revival-theater city.

Brando and Eva Marie Saint's walk in the park

"Those nuns usta smack me like I DUNNO WHAT!"

Waterfront's walk in the park definitely has some great comic lines. The moment I love best, though, is when Brando says, "Some faces just stick in your mind," right after he pushes on his nose. The music shifts gears, the camera moves in (I think), and it seems to operate on some other level, almost an intuitive awareness on the part of the director, the cinematographer, and maybe even Brando himself that one day we'll look back at this moment and say "Yeah, that was one of the great faces of the century."

"You turned out very nice."

Wow. Really enjoyed Wild River, although for a second I was kind of scared that the stubborn old lady was going to be just another Agnes Moorehead role. Was that Bruce Dern as the comedic relief amongst the tough guys?

Looks like that was his first screen role. Another Kazan discovery.

Jo Van Fleet sure played a lotta old ladies in her 40s.

Also that was James Earl Jones' father Robert as the faithful tenant Sam.

Really? He was so good.

Part of my attachment to Kazan comes from the fact that he used Nick Dennis in both Streetcar and East of Eden--if you don't know him, he's the small ethnic guy playing poker with Brando's crew. As I've told approximately every person I've ever met, Nick is an actual blood relative of mine; he was my dad's cousin. Also on his filmography were Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Knife (he was also in Aldrich's The Legend of Lylah Clare), Spartacus, and Birdman of Alcatraz. My dad and his cousin drove out to Las Vegas and visited him in the mid-50s; my dad always claimed that Nick tried to talk him into coming out to Hollywood, but he may have been embellishing there, I don't know. He was in a Kojack or two before he died--us Greeks look after our own.

Watching Pinky today. Jeanne Craine is so lovely in an unaffected way.

A Letter to Elia is on several public television stations tonight.

missed it. I assume it'll be rerun frequently and on disc shortly.

Not a bad way to spend an hour, but don't go out of your way. A lot of Scorsese talking about how important East of Eden was to him.

I missed the first 15 minutes or so, and watched/listened to most of the rest. I was surprised by how comparatively little there was on A Face in the Crowd. The remembrances after Scorsese's thing were pretty good, but does Alec Baldwin have any first-hand connection to Kazan? Everyone else did--he doesn't seem old enough.

I assumed the bulk of it only really covered what was really personal to Scorsese, and Kent Jones made him throw something about A Face in the Crowd in there.

It definitely would have fit Scorsese's thesis that HUAC transformed Kazan from a "director to a filmmaker"--A Face in the Crowd was as intricately connected to McCarthy as anything Kazan did. (I read up a bit on Baldwin; he played Stanley Kowalski on Broadway, so he gets to ruminate on Kazan.)

Cannot lie. I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41FUaq4-3oL.jpg

a tree grows in brooklyn was surprisingly moving and grim, loved joan blondell and all the acting really

the v underrated Wild River on BluRay

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/wild-river/2542

a face in the crowd: terrific first third, willing to jump out of scenes excitingly early and get abstractly hellish in places (montage of VITAJEX commercials was a high point), gets clunkier and duller as it goes until rallying for its opera-nightmare final moments. matthau as the voice of flowery authorial righteousness gets tighter and less embarrassing lines than william holden in network but gives a much blander performance. but i thought griffith was just great, all through. some of his quickchanges from belly laughs to reptilian contempt reminded me of patrick bateman picking up his dry cleaning: an easy trick to overdo but he didn't. (his first couple seconds onscreen, in the jail, when he's nakedly enraged at being bothered but then lights up with charm the instant he sees the pretty girl and the microphone, were really efficient tone-setting.) i liked the switchboard girls handling all the outraged sponsorship-cancellation calls near the end ("what did he say?") but who doesn't like switchboard girls. i also laughed every time we saw the economy-size bottle of vitajex.

was the theme tune "you gotta move"? it kept sounding like it.

"meaty" volume of Kazan's letters

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/books/review/the-selected-letters-of-elia-kazan.html

Criterion Blu of Waterfront looks great, and the 20-min interview of Scorsese by Kent Jones is excellent. "It's more than a movie to me now... It's a phenomenon."

Also there's a half-hour primer on the Jersey docks from the fin de siecle thru the '50s... After the film's release, the longshoremen voted THREE TIMES to recertify "Johnny Friendly's" mob union. So the happy ending is, indeed, an utter fantasy. But who cares.

btw in her CC interview Ms Saint says (and she should know) that the park scene was not improv'd -- she dropped the glove in rehearsal, and Kazan decided that and Brando putting it on was the engine of the scene.

america america is incredible. so many scenes that feel so true. just a staggering film about the migrant experience. one of the greatest films ive seen the last few years actually. sometimes a little awkwardly placed between old and new hollywood styles/methods but the performances and scenarios have a docu-like truth to them. ive not seen all his films but it has to be right up there.

I saw America, America for the first time yesterday in a 35mm print of the Scorsese/Film Foundation restoration. It's hardly perfect -- the Greek neophyte who plays the lead has limited range, for sure -- but it's visually hypnotic however much 'anonymized peasant' dialogue it has. (And that's not all there is, as when the kid's uncle in Constantinople, learning he's lost the family's bankroll, says, "Here, Ruination, sweep.") Also, the fiancee's rug seller father is maybe the most fully etched spokesman for Old World values in popular cinema.

It's interesting that it was made the same year as Visconti's Leopard, cuz the two of them together seem like the largest 'arty' influences on Godfather I-II. Early on Stavros sees a hand-kiss supplication to power through a semi-ajar door; I wonder if Coppola intended a blatant hommage. And AA even has John Marley.

I thought I read a Coppola interview from the '90s acknowledging its influence.

Kazan started scripting his own movies at this point too. Anyone read his novels?

Not I. He only did 3 features after this, and The Arrangement (based on his novel), which was supposed to star Brando, but ended up a dud w/ Kirk Douglas, Dunaway and D Kerr, is the only one where he's the credited writer.

His son wrote The Visirors, and Pinter adapted Last Tycoon.

AA was a Kazan novel as well.

what films have sequences shot on location at Ellis Island besides AA and The Immigrant (James Gray)? Apparently the scene in Godfather II was a set in an Italian fish market.

I read his autobiography a couple of decades back and thought it pretty good.

just saw streetcar for the first time (play or film)

it is pitiless in every direction

The ending of the film was originally softened (there are two different cuts I believe, one that differs from the play's by suggesting Stella has qualms about returning to Stanley)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Streetcar_Named_Desire_(1951_film)#Differences_from_the_play

in this one she just ran upstairs w/the baby

saying she wd not go back (tho in the story so far she always has: i guess the implication is either way, so the play is bleaker)

found this film devastating as a teen, i'd never seen anything like it before

still turning this film over in my head (unilke THIE BIG EASY lol)*

the play was written 70 years ago last year: i went to bed thinking "is it mostly a story of THEN or is it also a story of NOW?"

some elements are probably more timelocked than others: "faded southern belle, once propertied but no longer", would i think inflect very differently now -- and the potential ways out for her would seem different, but i couldn't help thinking the play's ruthless argument (NO WAY OUT) might be the same

(i would not have thought this 20 years ago: i worry now that i do)

*while recuperating from flu i am embarked on a big watch of new-orleans based moves (i didn't perhaps actually learn very much abt new orleans from this one but that doesn't matter)

pls tell me hard target is on that list

it is :)

so is hatchet

in 2018 a gay man would get cast as Blanche

u gotta add king creole! (it is the best elvis movie, great photography, originally envisioned for james dean but then, well, events)

i can see that obviously, but there's also a resurgent hard-fought politics round the respectability (and otherwise) of sex work, which seems germane

not to mention everything swirling round kowalski: on the one hand, toxic masculinity to the max obv, on the other, his manifestation as (A) a counter to B's deliberate self-delusion re the possibility of the existence via pure torpid* continuity of a world of delicacy, grace and courteous kindness, and (B) an avatar of a kind of wounded pride that he is not of her corrupted demimonde

*if we want this world to exist (via continuity or ab novo) we're going to have to fight for it: tho perhaps that does come back to alfred's gay man

xp to alfred, DONE to tracer

mark pls to start a new orleans movie thraed

am planning to BG

yaaaas

I missed the first 15 minutes or so, and watched/listened to most of the rest. I was surprised by how comparatively little there was on A Face in the Crowd. The remembrances after Scorsese's thing were pretty good, but does Alec Baldwin have any first-hand connection to Kazan? Everyone else did--he doesn't seem old enough.
― clemenza, Monday, October 4, 2010 10:49 PM

I saw A Letter to Elia tonight and there was no Alec Baldwin. So this was a director's cut?

Anyway it's great, esp if you were one of the troglodytes who kept Kazan out of ILX's Top 50 Film Directors.

Blacklisted was he?

Watch till the end.

Orson always getting haughty about Elia Kazan is one of my favorite things in the world. pic.twitter.com/yKf2tnJpVY

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) October 11, 2020

He really was the fucking best.

his autobiography was pretty good, has been a while since i read it though.

Wild River's an odd one: an uneasy mix of the epic and the personal. Monty Clift's an agent in the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority ordered to clear Jo Van Fleet and her family off an island before the water submerges it. The racial politics -- Van Fleet's rather kind to her Black sharecroppers -- are fascinating in this post-Montgomery pre-1963 film. Clift delivers one of his more credible post-accident cryogenic performances.

Panic in the Streets is hella tense and effective. He knew how to use a camera this early in his career.

I've started watching his films again, have seen A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. I've noticed that Panic in the Streets is on the Criterion Channel. Also want to watch Gentleman's Agreement.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, his earliest film, doesn't seem to be available