On Screen
DWORKIN, MARTIN S.
On SCREEN By Martin S. Dworkin Kazan's Style: What It Is And What It Is Not The film is the director's medium, in which he uses actors and cinematic techniques as paints and brushes to fill in...
...In one climactic scene, for example, the composition is established by a tree in the center of the screen...
...The director creates the film, endowing a concept of his intellect and imagination with life in terms of cinema...
...He does not hesitate to use tilted framing or a swinging camera to emphasize emotional disturbance...
...In the case of Kazan, it seems that he must especially beware the seductions of his own creatures...
...This seems more apparent in East of Eden than ever before...
...it reveals that the true essence of the Kazan "touch" on the screen is not simply the filmic transliteration of the "Actors Studio style" of mannered naturalism, and that Kazan himself may be misled into thinking that he is committed to any one fashion of performance...
...Most of his films, significantly, deal prominently with themes of social conflict, manifesting continunity with Kazan's apprenticeship in the theater of proletarian protest of the Depression...
...Today, only a handful may be said to have sizable fol-lowings...
...It is important to regard East of Eden in the context of Kazan's whole screen production—especially as following On the Waterfront, a director's masterpiece...
...Only Dean's shrugs, grimaces, slouch and Brandoesque postures are masks from other movies—and yet they powerfully disconcert the unity of the film...
...His role is not analogous to that of the symphonic conductor, who is essentially an interpreter, as is even the most gifted virtuoso...
...This "social commentary" is incidental to the drama, which concerns an adolescent's struggle for his father's love and his own self-respect...
...With his Director of Photography, Ted McCord, he manipulates the Cinemascope, Warner-colored screen with new flexibility...
...In East of Eden, from a portion of John Steinbeck's novel, there is some penetration of the meaning of World War I to a small town, as well as talk of war and pacifism that is unusually frank for our screen at this time...
...It is a matter of choice and responsibility, and of the presence or absence of love—the film arguing, in the perennial contention with the Manichees, that evil is not an essential principle, but the privation of good, the denial of love...
...A director must always battle for his film—especially against the habits, forms and conventions from other films...
...Boomerang, Gentleman's Agreement, Pinky, A Streetcar Named Desire, Panic in the Streets, Viva Zapata and On the Waterfront make an impressive list, both for concern with serious problems and for cinematic accomplishment...
...As the scene builds, three characters are placed so that at last one is superimposed, back to the screen, obscuring the other two and the tree, even as he rants out his own dark jealousy...
...Kazan's direction, however, is not wholly successful in dealing with this enormous theme—principally because he seems to rely on the momentum of his characters, perhaps still in the flow of the enormous effort of Waterfront...
...This is a significant lapse...
...Julie Harris, Raymond Massey, Burl Ives, Richard Davalos, Jo Van Fleet and Albert Dekker perform admirably as people in the world of this film...
...First of these is his characteristic control of montage, and his unique syncopation of the rhythm of dialogue and of cutting from one shot to another...
...For the electric quality that infuses Kazan's films is built out of the deliberate balance and imbalance of all the many filmic elements...
...But while virtuoso directors are comparative rarities, to be sure, popular directors are even rarer...
...There have been directors who were great names: Griffith, Chaplin, Lubitsch, De Mille, Eisenstein, and a few others whose appearance on theater marquees would draw people, in contrast to the usual magnetism of the star system...
...Less obvious, but more telling, are his compositions of figures and scenic backgrounds, and his placement of movement within the elongated Cinemascope frame...
...But Paul Osborn's screenplay intends a deeper meaning, that places the film in line with the others...
...Thus, he allows the leading actor, James Dean, to evade the full realization of the character of the agonized boy by consciously reproducing the superficies of the acting of Marlon Brando, whom Kazan has directed so many times...
...Kazan's direction of the other principals is harmonious...
...On SCREEN By Martin S. Dworkin Kazan's Style: What It Is And What It Is Not The film is the director's medium, in which he uses actors and cinematic techniques as paints and brushes to fill in the cartoon of the writer's scenario...
...Of those working in the U.S., Walt Disney, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Elia Kazan and one or two others, perhaps, can help their pictures at the box office...
...Evil within individuals as well as in society is presented as something not simply determined by ineluctable forces—of heredity, economics, time or place...
...Kazan's new East of Eden not only shows off his unique "touch," displaying many elements of his style of controlling actors more clearly than in his previous work...
...The speeches of the actors seem to accord less to any autarchy of character, and to be more organically related to the filmic interplay of movement, sound, color, music...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 13
