Elia Kazan

Kazan, Elia 

Born Sept. 7, 1909, in Constantinople. American film director, Greek by nationality.

Kazan graduated from the Yale University drama school and from 1932 to 1939 was an actor and director in the progressive Group Theater in New York. He made his film debut as an actor in 1940 and then as a director in 1945 with the film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In this film, as well as in Boomerang, Gentleman’s Agreement (both 1947), and Pinky (1949), Kazan focused on critical social problems, such as the bad conditions of workers, corruption in the American judicial system, anti-Semitism, and racism. However, he proposed compromising solutions that worked to the advantage of reactionary circles. In his films of the 1950’s, such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata (1952), and East of Eden (1955), Kazan continued to focus on real problems, such as the disintegration of the human personality, social protest, and the ruin of the bourgeois family. Kazan saw the flaws of bourgeois society simply as a product of the biological nature of man. Kazan’s autobiographical America, America (1962) was his most famous film of the 1960’s. In 1972 he made the film The Visitors, which dealt with the moral decay, animosity, and cruelty of those who took part in America’s criminal imperialist aggression in Vietnam.

V. A. UTILOV