Body and Soul
The Atkinson Muniment Room, Part V
[Being a revisit to a piece titled "The Anti-Kazan" — a consideration-slash-interview of/with Abraham Polonsky on the occasion of Elia Kazan's 1999 "lifetime achievement" Oscar — done for some long-lost newspaper or other... A toast to your dudgeon, Abe.]
"Wherever you may land on the Kazan issue nearly 50 years hence, there’s no getting around the fact that somebody’s getting a Lifetime Achievement Oscar this year for a long career they had during and after the blacklist, and somebody isn’t getting one for a long career they didn’t have because of the blacklist. That second somebody is Abraham Polonsky, easily the most talented and fascinating filmmaker to be blacklisted, and arguably American film’s greatest HUAC loss. Polonsky came to Hollywood as a scriptwriter in 1947 after going to Columbia Law School, teaching at City College and serving during the war with the OSS. He shook the world with his second script, for Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947), and at the urging of star John Garfield wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948). It’s not going too far today to suggest that Force of Evil is far more original, sublime and lyrical than any Kazan film; equally, what it implies for the career that never subsequently happened is momentous. The 50s, at the very least, would not have been the same decade had Polonsky been working at full cry.
"Though he got to eventually write-direct two more films, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1970) and the forgotten Yugoslav epic Romance of a Horsethief (1971), Polonsky is famous now only as the Kazan antithesis, the Hollywood director who lived up to his principles and surrendered his career rather than surrender his friends’. Today, his reflections on Kazan’s final moment in the sun display little mellowing with age. 'About Kazan, I put it three ways: one, I wouldn’t want to be buried in the same cemetery with the guy. Two, if I was on a desert island with him I’d be afraid to fall asleep because he’d probably eat me for breakfast. Three, we’ve already given him the Benedict Arnold award, which is usually reserved for presidential assassins. Except he didn’t kill a president, just his friends. All those people with the Group Theater, they were his best friends.'
"'Seriously, it’s a terrible mistake,' the 88-year-old Polonsky growls from his home in L.A. a few weeks before the Oscar ceremony, waxing enthusiastically about Greenwich Village, his great grandchildren, Charlton Heston ('I was on this radio show and Chuck called in, and I said hey, you’re the king of guns, why dontcha go get a gun, give it to Kazan, he could blow his brains out and go down in infamy, which is all he wants.') and the 'media blitz' he’s enjoying. 'Suddenly everybody remembers the blacklist.' But does he plan to go to the Oscars? 'I’m invited, I’m always invited, I’m a member of the Academy. But why would I go? Did you know you have to pay to get into that? Why would I pay good money to see that guy, to go and sit on my hands?'"
"Romance Of A Horsethief" ought to be revived. Its final image of people walking through a forest lingers in memory as one of the great concluding shots in film history, though the film's absence makes it impossible to detail what leads up to this shot and contributes to its sublimity.
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I wish it were -- I've never seen it.
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Anthology screened "Romance of a Horsethief" recently. It's very uneven -- mostly doomed by the commercial casting of pretty, blank faces as the young leads, not to mention Yul Brynner -- but it has its moments, mainly the humorous banter between Eli Wallach & David Opatoshu. At least it's better than anything Kazan made after 1961.
Reading Polonsky's comments again, I'm reminded about how badly that right-wing wacko Richard Schickel treats him in his Kazan bio. Kazan's '50s masterpieces need a post-political backlash reappraisal, but it won't happen as long as he has defenders like Schickel.
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What about all those communists in Hollywood and elsewhere who betrayed their country, its democratic ideals and human decency itself in order to support a mass murderer like Joseph Stalin and to lend a helping hand to an empire that destroyed the lives of millions of human beings?It is not necessary for us to rehearse every detail of what went on 50 years ago or to take sides in personal matters, however, to draw certain conclusions. The release of the Venona transcripts and other Soviet documents in recent years makes clear beyond any doubt that American communists were part of a conspiracy to betray this country and were in fact engaged in acts, orchestrated from the Kremlin, to undermine the security of this democracy and to render it defenseless in the face of its totalitarian adversary. Propaganda, which was what Hollywood excelled in, was no small national asset. If Hollywood's communists need make no apologies for their role in trying to deliver this asset to America's enemies, then why should Kazan apologize for defending America against them? If the opponents of the blacklist argue that it is such an evil in itself, why then is it acceptable to blacklist Kazan? The sympathizers of leftist dictatorships still want to cover up the fact that the real defenders of freedom were not the "martyred" Hollywood Reds but the courageous men who acted to expose them.
But even if one were to accept the debased ethic of an alienated filmmaker like Polonsky, who said the people Kazan named were his friends? In his autobiography "A Life," Kazan makes very clear that the communists whom he named had not only betrayed his country, in his eyes, but betrayed him, as an artist and man, as well. Why, he said to himself, should I sacrifice my career for people like this?
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