The New York Times referred to Greek-American film and theater director, producer, screenwriter, and actor Elias Kazan as “one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history.”
Kazan’s controversial testimony as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952, during the peak of the Hollywood blacklist, marked a professional blunder in the trajectory of his life.
In layman’s terms, he exposed eight Communists to Senator McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee. Many friends and associates reacted negatively to his decision to collaborate and name people. In 1999, Elia Kazan accepted a Special Lifetime Achievement Oscar to the cheers of some colleagues and the icy indifference of others who could not forgive him for naming names.
The professional lives of his erstwhile colleagues, Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, both actors, and the writer Clifford Odets, were “damaged if not shattered” by his vehemently anti-communist testimony. Walter Bernstein added,’ He did a bad thing.’
Orson Welles didn’t hold back when discussing his coworkers. In a speech he delivered at a Paris film school in 1982, he spoke bluntly. He sourly claimed, “Mademoiselle, you have chosen the wrong metteur en scene, because Elia Kazan is a traitor.”
“He is a man who sold to McCarthy all his companions at a time when he could continue to work in New York at a high salary,” Welles explained after pausing for a moment. “And having sold all of his people to McCarthy, he then made a film called On the Waterfront, which was a celebration of the informer. And therefore, no question which uses him as an example can be answered by me.”
Before the HUAC began its inquiry, Kazan stopped identifying as a communist. He is quoted as stating, “What the hell am I giving all this up for? To defend a secrecy I didn’t think right, and to defend people who’d already been named or soon would be by someone else? I said I’d hated the Communists for many years and didn’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them.”
