DVD in 'The Elia Kazan Collection' 11/9/10; but...

I think On the Waterfront was the film that truly reflected Kazan's conflicted nature about testifying before HUAC. America America was his paean to all this country meant to him, how it proved the salvation of his family.

He also made an explicitly anti-Communist film in 1953 that's in the set, Man on a Tightrope, that was typically offbeat, and based on a true incident. That was probably another way of proving his anti-Communist bona fides for the witch-hunting idiots on the Committee.

You're right about it being important to at least understand Kazan's actions during the HUAC tyranny. I'm not judgmental about people like Kazan who "named names". It's easy for others, decades after the fact, facing no danger themselves, to get on their high horses and loftily condemn someone else for such an action. I'm speaking in part about what happened when Kazan received an honorary Academy Award for his career in 1999. Self-righteous types like Nick Nolte ostentatiously refused to stand or applaud and beforehand issued loud denunciations of what Kazan had done almost half a century before. Well, how would they have acted in his place? Would they have so willingly thrown their livelihoods away? Not one of them could possibly know the dilemma people like Kazan, Sterling Hayden and others were placed in. Sure, in one sense they acted selfishly. But then look what happened with the "Hollywood Ten", the first targets of HUAC's headline-hunting fanatics, in 1947. All of the ten (and almost everyone called before HUAC had in fact been a member of the Communist Party, though usually for misguided social reasons rather than a commitment to totalitarianism) followed the instructions of John Howard Lawson, a hard-line Stalinist, to obstruct the Committee and refuse to answer anything, leaving it to non-Communist liberals to defend them until they themselves were imperiled and realized they were being used. Years later director Edward Dmytryk was the only one of the ten to offer so-called "cleansing" testimony so he could go back to work. Dmytryk was denounced by the same people who denounced Kazan but as he pointed out, they should have had the honesty and guts to have stood up for themselves in the first place and not throw that responsibility on others. And he, Kazan and the others had come to realize how they had been used by the Party and what fools they had been to believe in its line. Maybe they felt that by exposing it they were forcing others to make a choice and stand up for themselves.

That's the moral of On the Waterfront: Is it better to keep one's mouth shut and allow evil to go unpunished, or to expose those who are doing that evil? I don't know whether what Kazan did was moral or not -- perhaps there was no truly "moral" choice available -- but I think he can be credited for doing what he thought was right, and not just for the sake of salvaging his own career. Things were far more complicated than that. And the people who so easily condemned him had no qualms about exercising a judgmental tyranny of their own.