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| Elia Kazan |
Those with an interest in films now considered classics, and celebrities such as Marlon Brando, Arthur Miller and Vivien Leigh will find a trove of insights and anecdotes here.
Sadly, given his fine directorial skills, Kazan gave the names of various colleagues and friends during the House Committee Against Un-American Activities, (HUAC) during the 1950s’ McCarthy hearings. Kazan strives to justify this betrayal, by his loyalty to the American government, based on its having allowed his family, including himself as a boy, to escape the tyrannies practised in Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire, shortly before the First World War. Still, the fact remains that information he provided wrecked the careers of others, in a successful effort to shield his own. Almost all of us can understand, with reluctance, the survivalist instinct which impelled these betrayals.
Kazan becomes truly offensive when, having recounted pretending to like someone more than he did as part of a seduction, along with countless infidelities to wives, he asks, with grating repetition, “But reader, have you not done the same ?”
As such a reader, I ached to respond, “No, Kazan.”
While few of us have lived flawless lives, many of us do not find it acceptable to lie and deceive as part of our human condition. He becomes even more distasteful when attributing his constant bedding of renowned beauties to his having been so poor, as a university student, as to be forced to wait on tables for the upper-class students as part of his tuition. Demeaning as this may have been, the repetition of this shame soon begins to pall, as it leans towards a rationale for hedonism.
