In conjunction with the Clark’s special summer exhibition culminating its 50th anniversary year, The Clark Brothers Collect, the museum will offer a free film series called Brother to Brother: Sunday Afternoon Double Features at the Clark.
This series will explore the tangled fraternal relationship in films that range from the comic to the tragic, from classic to contemporary, from fiction to fact. Presented in pairs, what each film has in common, beyond skilled direction and strong performances, is riveting attention to this powerful sibling bond.
On June 18, the first program will present two films by Elia Kazan: On the Waterfront (1954) at 1:30 p.m. and East of Eden (1955) at 4:00 p.m. In addition to the fraternal theme, this pairing is a doubly appropriate start to the series, because Kazan is a Williams College alumnus and because these films were being made at precisely the time the Clark was originally being built.
Elia Kazan, born in Constantinople to Greek parents, came to this country when he was four and graduated from Williams in 1930. After dropping out of Yale Drama School, he became involved with the Group Theater in New York. Though he began as an actor, his goal was always to direct films. He began directing for the theater while also working on documentary films. By the end of World War II, he had made his first film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and continued to work on Hollywood projects, even while returning to New York to become one of the leaders of the Actors Studio and eventually the most prominent director on Broadway, instrumental in adapting Stanislavsky’s acting precepts into the “Method” and developing a new breed of star such as Marlon Brando. He’d already won an Academy Award for best director, for Gentleman’s Agreement, but was still working toward his signature style, incorporating aspects of Italian Neo-realism into films like Boomerang! and Panic in the Streets, shot on location and using non-actors as well as the intense naturalism of Method actors.
In 1951, Kazan transferred Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire from stage to screen, and then made Viva Zapata!, again with Brando, a sympathetic but knowing look at a peasant revolution. Kazan considered himself a lifelong liberal, but turned against the Communists in the Thirties. When Congress started its Red Menace witch hunt into Hollywood, Kazan was caught in the middle and found his accommodation in naming names that were already known to the House Un-American Activities Committee, thereby saving his career but forever alienating certain critics.
Some took On the Waterfront to be his defense of informing, but that implication makes a small part of a towering work, a popular success that earned eight Academy Awards, for Kazan and Brando, as well as writer Budd Schulberg, cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and supporting actress Eva Marie Saint. Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb, and Karl Malden were all nominated for best supporting actor, but split the vote.
Kazan followed the black & white grit of Waterfront with the Cinemascope color of East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s retelling of the Cain and Abel story set in California farm country, which introduced another iconic male star in James Dean. Kazan exploited the natural antipathy between Dean and Raymond Massey to highlight the conflict between son and father.
Kazan continued his strong run through the ’50s and into the ’60s, directing A Face in the Crowd, Wild River, Splendor in the Grass, and America, America (the story of his family’s immigration), before he fell into disfavor barely remedied by a special lifetime achievement Oscar he received in 1999 (or an honorary doctorate from Williams.) In the interim he had become a bestselling novelist and memoir writer. Now that he has died, it would be well to reconsider his career as a whole, and On the Waterfront and East of Eden, at the Clark on June 18, would be a good place to start.
Subsequent Brother to Brother programs will include:
July 9: “Brothers Under Care”: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993) at 1:30 p.m. and Rain Man (1988) at 4:00 p.m.
July 23: “Brothers in Fury”: Raging Bull (1980) at 1:30 p.m. and American History X (1999) at 4:00 p.m.
August 13: “Brothers at Work”: Big Night (1995) at 1:30 p.m. and Adaptation (2002) at 4:00 p.m.
August 27: “Brothers Documented”: Brother’s Keeper (1992) at 1:30 p.m. and Capturing the Friedmans (2003) at 4:00 p.m.
In September, watch for a "Brother to Brother Encore", a special two-day screening at the Clark of The Best of Youth, the six-hour Italian family epic hailed as the best film of 2005 by the New York Times and others, including me.
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