Elia Kazan by Richard Schickel

Author:Richard Schickel [Schickel, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-203153-2
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

12

Testimonies

On January 14, 1952, Elia Kazan appeared at an executive session of a subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and testified about his membership in the Communist Party fifteen to seventeen years previously. He spoke fully about his own membership in, and disillusionment with, the party, but refused, as “a matter of conscience,” to name the others in his “unit.” Kazan knew his testimony had not satisfied HUAC’s curiosity, and that sooner or later he would either have to give up some names, take the Fifth Amendment or flatly refuse to name names. He understood that if he took either of the last two courses his career as a movie director would be finished for the foreseeable future, although he might be able to continue directing in the theater.

Which, for the moment, after a hiatus of three years, he had resumed doing. At the time of his closed testimony he was rehearsing, again under Irene Selznick’s management, a play by George Tabori, a Hungarian-born novelist, playwright and screenwriter, called Flight into Egypt. It was about a Viennese couple, Franz and Lili Engel (Paul Lukas and Gusti Huber, an Austrian actress making her American debut), trying to make their way to America. Accompanied by their twelve-year-old son, they are stuck, impoverished, in a Cairo hotel, awaiting a visa. Franz is ill—the result of an injury sustained in a concentration camp—and in what most reviewers thought was the play’s best scene, he wills himself to rise from his wheelchair and walk across the room to prove his fitness for the visa to an American consular official. His ploy does not work. His wife gives herself to an evil, crippled doctor to get money and, at the end of the play, Franz kills himself, thus freeing his family to continue their journey “away from smallness and oldness and the guns.”

One can see why the play attracted Kazan. The notion of America as a shining ideal, the great destination for would-be immigrants, would become one of his great themes, the subject of his novel and film, America, America, as well as a powerful motif in at least three of his other novels. The piece drew on Tabori’s own experiences as an émigré and so had a certain heartfelt authenticity about it. On the other hand, it was dramatically quite conventional, no more than an exotically set problem play with predictable melodramatic beats. The critics, mindful that Selznick and Kazan had last given them Streetcar, were inclined to be kindly to Flight into Egypt when it opened on March 20. They were respectful of its intentions, paid tribute to its good acting—they particularly liked Huber—but thought the drama did not quite plunge them into the felt life of its characters. In general, their reviews might be characterized as “unmoved” and the play ran for only forty-six performances.

Selznick, in her memoirs, accuses Kazan of softening the play and attributes this to his HUAC problems. He had come to her in December, confessed his former Communist Party membership and said that he would soon be compelled to testify.

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