Elia Kazan - Search and Destroy

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