Elia Kazan (born 1909) is known as the preeminent director of works by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Kazan emerged as the leading exponent of psychological realism via his film and stage productions of the 1940s and 1950s. His works reflect...

Bernard Gordon, a screenwriter blacklisted during Hollywood's anti-communist crusade in the 1950s, has died. He was 88.Gordon died Friday at his Hollywood Hills home after a long battle with cancer, according to his daughter, Ellen Gordon."He was highly principled, scrupulously honest," his daughter said. "He...

Deborah Kerr, who shared one of Hollywood's most famous kisses while portraying an Army officer's unhappy wife in "From Here to Eternity" and danced with the Siamese monarch in "The King and I," has died. She was 86.Kerr, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, died Tuesday...

The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach. Harcourt, 320 pages, $25.It never mattered whether the part was big or small, whether the movie was wonderful or execrable, Eli Wallach always approached acting like Albert Finney approached eating in Tom Jones:...

As a cinematographer, Haskell Wexler has worked with Elia Kazan ( America, America), Norman Jewison ( In the Heat of the Night), Mike Nichols ( Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Milos Forman ( One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Hal Ashby ( Bound for Glory),...

On the Waterfront is one of the earliest and most effective attempts to suppress politics with morality and private values that the fifties produced. It takes an important first step in detaching the self from a larger social context so that the idea of self can be redefined in narrower, safer terms. Splendor in the Grass, America, America, and The Arrangement merely develop the notion of personality initially presented in On the Waterfront…. Films like Viva Zapata! and On the Waterfront bear the mar...

Questions of personal conscience, individual freedom and social responsibility have often supplied Kazan with his material; in this sense Kazan can be said to have become the victim of his concerns when McCarthyism arose. Despite this ostensible continuity, however, fewer directors reveal sharper changes of emphasis in their careers than Kazan…. In the films of the forties the treatment of moral and social issues is unexceptional. Kazan here is working within well-established genres and a general eth...

As Elia Kazan acquires a measure of financial as well as artistic independence, the importance of the place he holds in the American cinema increases. Intentionally or not, he has become the spokesman of certain contemporary attitudes; and from On the Waterfront to Baby Doll we have the complete circle, the picture of homo Americans as a victim of blindly destructive forces, painfully engaged in waging his battle of conscience. Baby Doll is only indirectly and by implication a social drama: its real subject...