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A solid, conventional career documentary (basically a talking-head interview punctuated with film clips) about one of the movies' greatest innovators. As a performer and director with the Group Theater in New York in the 1940s, Kazan was present at the birth of "Method Acting," and he brought a startling new emphasis on naked psychological realism with him to Hollywood. As the documentarian, film critic Richard Schickel, recalls, Kazan's visual style was shaped by his work on semidocumentary noir thrillers like
Boomerang (1947) and
Panic in the Streets (1950), shot on gritty urban locations with nonprofessional supporting casts--a look that was praised for its originality when William Friedkin revived it in
The French Connection almost 30 years later. In the early '50s, Kazan oversaw landmark performances by Marlon Brando (
A Streetcar Named Desire) and James Dean (
East of Eden). In light of the protests that greeted Kazan's 1999 Honorary Oscar, it would be nice to have more coverage here of his appearance as a "friendly witness" before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Kazan himself has defended the action more vigorously elsewhere than he does in Schickel's soft-ball interview.
--David Chute
