Word: kazan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Directed by ELIA KAZAN Screenplay by CHRIS KAZAN...
...Kazan should have done better by the play he directed. The film is too much composed of short, jerky cuts and reaction shots and transparent attempts to "open it up" by using many scene locales rather than the single two-room set of the play, a style which does nothing to enhance the fluidity and concentration of the original. By far the worst sin of the film can be attributed to the censors, who apparently disliked even the idea of Stanley attacking Blanche, let alone its graphic illustration. So the climatic rape scene is not climactic but ambiguous, which leaves...
...moreover, the rarity--a vehicle for actors which actually goes somewhere, propelled not by the air of its histrionics but the pull of its emotion. All of which makes especially regrettable the collision between the play Streetcar and the people responsible for its adaptation to the screen: while Elia Kazan, directing a film for the first time, was distorting Streetcar by introducing realistic elements which Williams scrupulously avoided, the nameless censors from the Production Code office were removing almost all hints of improper behavior--a damaging process for a play which features a libertine as the heroine and an antagonist...
...Assassins fits a similar pattern, except now Kazan's subject is the whole United States of America-as a terminal case. Military hardware lies slowly disintegrating in the desert, the law softens and bends, violence flourishes, youths rot their minds with chemicals. This is certainly not the country of Kazan's autobiographical novel America America, the young immigrant's dream and fulfillment. In the new book, a father tells his acidhead son, "If you want to live a big life, get a big cause," and the kid doesn't know what his father is talking about...
Yeats' rough beast again? No, Kazan's - a shaggy stage prop animated by mechanical grunts and dramatizing the sort of pseudo realism that Vivien Leigh may have had in mind when she once described Kazan as "the kind of man who sends a suit out to be cleaned and rumpled...