Witness.

Elia Kazan: A Biography, by Richard Schickel (HarperCollins, 544 pp., $29.95)

OUTSIDE of North Korea and the English departments of certain American universities, Hollywood is one of the last places in the world where it's advantageous to be an unrepentant Stalinist. That's why Elia Kazan got into hot water when the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted to give him an honorary Oscar in 1999.

You'd think the director of A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront would have been an easy sell--but of course you'd only think that if you'd forgotten that Kazan, a Communist who changed his mind, "named names" to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, having since decided that Communism was, as he put it, a "dangerous and alien conspiracy" against the "free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect." Because of this lapse from grace, a smallish but significant number of movie stars and lesser functionaries, among them Nick Nolte and Ed Harris, ostentatiously refused to applaud as the rest of the Academy gave the 89-year-old director a long and heartfelt ovation on Oscar night.

Richard Schickel, Time's film critic, was in the audience, having produced the brief film tribute with which Kazan was introduced. Now he has paid a more ambitious tribute to Elia Kazan, this time in the form of a full-length critical biography. It's not a tell-all gossipfest (though Schickel is candid about Kazan's philandering) but a thoughtful attempt to sum up the career of the only major American director to have worked simultaneously and successfully in both film and theater. Just as important, though, Elia Kazan: A Biography tells the unvarnished truth about Stalinism on Broadway and in Hollywood. I never thought I'd live to see a mainstream-media figure write such a book--but, then, I never thought I'd live to see the Berlin Wall smashed into a million chunks and sold off to souvenir hunters, either.

Though Kazan is now mainly remembered for his films, his work on Broadway was more significant. Not only was he the preferred director of Tennessee Williams (Streetcar, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, All My Sons), but he also staged such much-discussed plays as William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Archibald MacLeish's J.B., Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, all in a steam-heated style that Mary McCarthy summed up with her usual blend of cattiness and precision. Writes Schickel:

   McCarthy would describe the typical
   character of "the so-called American
   realist school" [of playwriting] as
   belonging "to the lower middle class
   sociologically, but biologically he is a
   member of some indeterminate lower
   order of primates" and call Kazan "the
   whip-cracking ringmaster of this school
   of brutes," staging plays full of "the
   sounds of furniture breaking, heavy
   breathing and, eventually, a sobbing
   confession of some sort of failure, possibly
   alcoholic or homosexual."

That style was shaped in the crucible of the Group Theatre, the left-wing producing collective that gave Kazan his start on Broadway in the Thirties. The Group Theatre sought to put Russian ideas about naturalism in acting on the New York stage (the performance style now known as "Method acting" originated there). But its members were no less interested in Russian ideas about politics, and the plays they produced were for the most part exemplary of the hard-left, lower-middlebrow populism that was the Communist party's chief contribution to American culture. It was during his Group Theatre days that Kazan became a Communist, breaking with the party when its officials ordered him to mount a takeover of the company. The experience turned him into a devout anti-Stalinist, though it had little effect on his underlying political and aesthetic convictions. Not only did Kazan remain a sentimental leftist, but his later work would be deeply informed by the Popular Front's art-for-the-people style of didactic realism, to which he added, first on Broadway and then in Hollywood, a degree of intensity so pronounced as to border on the operatic.

Though Schickel, who is old enough to have seen most of Kazan's postwar stage productions, devotes plenty of space to his Broadway career, he knows there is nothing so evanescent as the work of a stage director. "Movies, treated so contemptuously at the time by haughty Broadway, are different," he adds. "Because they are physical products, immutable reels of celluloid, they persist." Fortunately, Kazan was personally responsible for transferring A Streetcar Named Desire from stage to screen in 1951, leaving most of the Broadway cast intact (except for Jessica Tandy, the original Blanche DuBois, who was replaced by Vivien Leigh). Not only did the resulting film make Marlon Brando a star, but it gave later generations of theatergoers a sense of what Kazan had brought to Broadway. Superficially realistic in its portrayal of working-class New Orleans, Streetcar is in fact an exercise in high-voltage sexual romanticism with a gay twist--a tipsy mix of D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster--and though the director was as straight as a stick, he responded to Williams's overripe pseudo-poetry as eagerly as though he'd written it himself.

With one exception, the film version of Streetcar embodies all of Kazan. The only thing missing is his politics, and by then he was mere weeks away from passing through the refiner's fire of the HUAC hearings. After he fingered eight Group Theatre Communists in public testimony before the committee, a goodly number of his left-wing friends became ex-friends, an experience that scarred him for life. Even now, few liberals in the entertainment business are willing to speak frankly about the compelling reasons that serious-minded ex-Communists like Kazan chose to testify. Schickel, by contrast, gets it dead right: "The failure of the Communist left to own up to Stalin's crimes against humanity in a timely fashion was--let's put this as mildly as possible--illiberal behavior. The failure of much of the American left to acknowledge this fact is illiberal behavior.... Kazan, as well as others who shared his liberal beliefs yet testified cooperatively before HUAC, were generally right about the Communists."

Kazan's decision to become a "friendly" witness inspired On the Waterfront (1954), the story of Terry Malloy, a failed boxer turned big-city stevedore who becomes entangled in the murderous doings of his corrupt union bosses, then purges himself by becoming a government informer. Working in close collaboration with screenwriter Budd Schulberg, another ex-Communist who named names, and Brando (who gave the greatest performance of his life as Malloy, the shy, battered boy-man who "coulda been a contender"), Kazan turned this tough little tale into a Streetcar-like fusion of meticulously observed realism (nearly all of the film was shot on location in New York) and wildly extravagant romanticism (suitably accompanied by Leonard Bernstein's Copland-meets-Puccini score). Beautifully shot and impeccably cast, On the Waterfront was Kazan's cinematic apologia, and though conservatives are now inclined to overrate the film for political reasons, it nonetheless embodies much of what was characteristic about American art in the early Fifties.

Certainly Kazan never made a stronger movie, in part because the prevailing winds in Hollywood, as Schickel explains, had already started to blow in a different direction. In order to compete with TV, Hollywood producers were increasingly opting for wide-screen Technicolor extravaganzas that were "slower, dumber, less artistically and intellectually stirring than they had been." Though Kazan would try briefly to keep up with the de Milles, shooting East of Eden in color and CinemaScope with James Dean, his days as a Hollywood big shot were numbered, and he would spend his old age writing barely readable blockbuster novels, dying in 2003 at the age of 94.

Was he a great filmmaker? Though Kazan's verismo style has always seemed to me both overwrought and essentially false in its Popular Front-style glamorization of the proletariat, I find a few of his films, especially On the Waterfront, quite watchable. Most other critics, Schickel among them, rate him far more highly than that:

   Kazan's best films, I firmly believe, are
   far more effective [social] criticism (and
   much more enjoyable products) than
   any works that emanated from the more
   ideologically rigid Communist left,
   which, culturally speaking, remained
   irrelevant to the American "masses."
   There are moments in them that are,
   quite simply, touchstones of the modern
   conscience, constantly quoted, referred
   to, treasured by civilized people.

That's coming it a bit high, but Schickel himself deserves all the praise in the world for setting the record straight on Kazan's life as a Communist--and his afterlife as an ex-Communist. Alas, one doubts such scrupulous candor will serve either man well in Hollywood, where honesty has ever and always been the worst policy.

Mr. Teachout, the drama critic of the Wall Street Journaland the music critic of Commentary, blogs about the arts at www.TerryTeachout.com. He is writing a biography of Louis Armstrong.