Word: kazan
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Stage and screen director Elia Kazan will give this year's Theodore Spencer Memorial Foundation lecture, Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and chairman of the Foundation's invitation committee, announced yesterday...
...Kazan, recognized as one of the top men in his field, has staged such plays as "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Death of a Salesman." He also won the 1942 New York Drama Critics' Circle director of-the-year award for his staging of Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Feeth...
...Kazan put it: "I--and for that matter the public--was presented with a finished fact. My picture had been cut to fit the specifications of a code which is not my code, is not the recognized code of the picture industry, and is not the code of the great majority of the audience...
Where the film departs from the stage production is in the emphasis of the direction. Perhaps to make up for the confinement of the setting, Elia Kazan set his cameramen and actors to highlight every eccentricity in the cast. Brando responded to this kind of direction by developing an overgrowth of quirks, brilliantly freakish, that dominate every scene in which he enters. As he appears before fastidious Blanche for the first time, the camera-eye stares fascinated at a huge sweat-stain on his T-shirt, just above the area where he is scratching himself; for half a minute...
...Brando may well be heading for Academy Awards. Likewise, Kim Hunter does an outstanding job in the supporting role of Stanley's wife Stella, and Karl Malden is excellent as an awe-struck suitor. Camera work and the musical score are both exceptional. But the net effect of Kazan's direction is more controversial. He has charged the atmosphere to the saturation point with crisis and climax. After two hours trapped in a narrow room with Blanche, sitting under her spray of words alternately cloying and hysterical, the onlookers are likely to sympathize with Kowalski's growing impatience...