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VENICE Reuters - Martin Scorseses latest film pays a personal tribute to Elia Kazan, one of Hollywoods and Broadways most influential directors but also a controversial figure who turned anti-communist informant in the McCarthy era.
In "A Letter to Elia," an hour-long documentary screening at the Venice film festival, Scorsese credits Kazan and his emotionally-charged, raw and realistic style as the inspiration for his becoming a filmmaker.
He recalls in particular the huge impact that two of Kazans best-known films, "On the Waterfront" with Marlon Brando 1954 and "East of Eden" with James Dean 1955, had on him as a teenager.
"Its almost impossible to say how deeply I was affected by Kazans films," Scorsese wrote shortly after Kazans death in 2003 at 94.
Scorsese discovered Kazan as a young boy going to the movies on his own in New York and was at his side with Robert De Niro when Kazan, whose films won 20 Academy Awards, received a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999.
That special award was hotly disputed because in 1952 Kazan had handed over to the House Un-American Activities Committee the names of eight members of the Communist Party who had worked at the Group Theater where he had started as an actor.
Naming names cost Kazan, himself a member of the party between 1934 and 1936 before resigning in protest, many friends in Hollywood and among U.S. intellectuals.
His reasons for doing so after previously refusing to testify is still debated.
In his memoir, Kazan wrote: "Id hated the Communists for many years, and didnt feel right about giving up my career to defend them. Was I sacrificing for something I believed in?
"Ive repeatedly astonished people by what seem to be total reversals of positions and attitudes."
In the documentary, which features a long interview with Kazan, he says that what he did was "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong."
Kazan, the immigrant son of a Greek merchant, says his best films came after that experience, although by then he had already made his name on Broadway with "Death of a Salesman" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" and co-founded the Actors Studios.
On the Waterfront and East of Eden, among others, broke the mold of sugar-coated characters that were Hollywoods main fare until then, bringing to the screen unconfessable passions, troubled family ties and the criminal underworld, Scorsese says.
"They extended the limits of what was emotionally and psychologically possible," he says.
"These were the people I saw every day, the people I knew. It was as if the world I lived in mattered."
Editing by Andrew Roche
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