Word: kazan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...UNDERSTUDY by ELIA KAZAN...
...director, Elia Kazan earned a niche in theatrical history with considerable help from classic scripts (Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire) and talented actors (Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Lee J. Cobb). Kazan's second career in the solitary business of writing has so far resulted in three commercially successful novels that tend to thrash about in alien corn. There is nothing wrong with The Understudy, for instance, that a good script and some believable characters would not help...
...third act that proved troublesome. In order to assure the play's production, Williams felt compelled to knuckle under to director Elia Kazan's desires that Big Daddy return on-stage in the last act, that Brick undergo a change of character as a result of Act II, and that Maggie become more sympathetic. Williams saw some merit only in the last, but went along with all three. In Kazan's production, Big Daddy came back to hear Maggie's false claim of pregnancy and to tell a smutty joke. This was a half-hearted compliance...
...King's Men (1949), with Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, at 8 p.m., and Elia Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, at 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday, April...
What we don't understand is why director Elia Kazan changed the ending of the play when he made the movie. The play ends in near perfection, after an ambivalent reconciliation between Stella and Stanley and another new deal: "This game is seven-card stud." Kazan's Hollywoodized ending affects a high-handed moral tone that doesn't exist anywhere in the play. Frankly we blanched...