Defined by 1952
Mark Steyn
Donald O'Connor and Elia Kazan have nothing in common other than that they died in the same week. But together they're as neat a summation of Hollywood as you could devise. Each man was defined by a moment, and both moments occurred within a few weeks of each other in 1952. For O'Connor, it was his wonderful solo in Singin' In The Rain, in which he tries to persuade a glum Gene Kelly that being an entertainer is just as important as being a great artist:
Now you can study Shakespeare and be quite elite And you can charm the critics and have nothin' to eat Just slip on a banana peel, the world's at your feet Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Laugh!
The producer Arthur Freed lifted the tune and the basic idea from a song in an earlier film of his, Cole Porter's Be A Clown', and simply rewrote the lyric. But it's O'Connor's performance that lifts it to the heights. An uncomplicated song 'n' dance man, he took a lifetime's experience and compressed it into a three-minute valentine to vaudeville. Everything in it was cooked up by O'Connor for the movie, except for the finale, which Kelly insisted should be the trick he'd seen Donald do as a boy on the stage years ago. And so the dancer runs up the wall and backflips, and runs up another wall and backflips, and runs up another wall, but it's a cardboard prop, and he crashes through it.
'Make 'Em Laugh' is the essence of entertainment: its only purpose is to delight. Which is a lot harder than it sounds. O'Connor worked on and off after Singin In The Rain, as recently as the 1997 Walter Matthau /Jack Lemmon geezer comedy Out To Sea. But SingM' is the last time he mattered to a movie. Intentionally or not, the film plays off a certain cheesy insincerity about the Kelly persona, and for that to work you need someone utterly natural and likeable alongside. Freed's original choice for the role, Oscar Levant, would have been disastrous. Afterwards, the boyish charmer bulked out and found no one needed a portly, middle-aged Donald O'Connor. He'd been on the boards since he was 13 months old, dancing the Black Bottom with his parents and siblings. A sister got run over and his pop died on stage, and by the age of four little Donald had been promoted to a solo. At ten, he was in movies. He made six pictures with Francis, the talking mule. No one will have a CV like that ever again. He was 16 years younger than Elia Kazan but, even in 1952, at the apogee of the MGM musical, the younger man symbolised the old and the older man the new.
Kazan made his name at New York's Group Theatre in the Thirties, directed the Broadway productions of Death Of A Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, and co-founded the Actors' Studio. In defiance of the song, he charmed the critics and had plenty to eat. And he was the greatest single influence on Marlon Brando, James Dean, Rod Steiger and Warren Beatty, the midwife to an entirely new school of film acting.
Why does he never get quite the credit he should? It's because of his moment, because of what he was doing off-screen in 1952 when Donald O'Connor was up there hoofing. Kazan was testifying before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee — and, in the phrase lovingly dusted off by his obituarists this week. 'naming names'. Four years ago, when the director was given a lifetime-achievement Oscar, mediocre hacks like screenwriter Abraham Polonsky emerged from obscurity to protest the honour, and many of today's Hollywood establishment thought it cooler to sit on their hands. The movie world's fetishisation of the McCarthy era is humbug: Mr Polonsky wasn't blacklisted by the government, he was blacklisted by Hollywood — by Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal and Disney, the same companies his hip new friends are more than happy to work for today. Easier to denounce a 'rat-fink' like Kazan, whose 'snitching' looms larger to them than any of the magnificent movies he made. What he did in '52 was an affront to contemporary Hollywood's belief in its own heroism.
His experience produced a masterpiece: On The Waterfront (1954). Budd Schulberg's script reads like transcripts from the Congressional hearings: `I just want to ask you some questions about some people you may know'; 'Stooling is when you rat on your friends', etc. Yet it's not about Communism in the movie business, but organised crime on the New York waterfront. Kazan had hit upon the perfect analogy — for until Hollywood Leftists began demanding that personal loyalty trumps one's obligation to speak out against wickedness, the notion that `ratting' was the ultimate sin was confined mostly to the mob.
In Kazan's story, the union longshoremen are 'D & D' — deaf and dumb to the evils committed in the name of a bogus working-class solidarity. You couldn't find a better parallel to all those 'well-intentioned liberals' in the arts who stayed true to the theoretical ideals of Communism no matter how large the mound of corpses grew. To elevate personal friendship above all is an absurdity, nicely caught in an exchange between Brando's washed-up prizefighter and Karl Maiden's outraged priest: 'Johnny Friendly used to take me to ball games when I was a kid.' Ball games?' says Malden, contemptuously. 'Don't make me cry.' When his many detractors have been forgotten, Kazan's film will remain one of the key documents of the period.
But, if you don't think Communism was a big deal or a serious threat in the late Forties, here's another side of Kazan from that film. The Method isn't about naturalism but about psychological reality: Roger Ebert called Brando's performance a 'riff on reality', which is just right. It's full of little bits of business — like the scene where Eva Marie Saint drops her white glove and, before handing it back, he absentmindedly slips it on. It's more conscious but in the end not so very different from the bits of business Donald O'Connor does — flirting with a tailor's dummy, using whatever's to hand — in 'Make 'Em Laugh'. In different ways, both the Method and the musical exist in a kind of heightened reality — which may give O'Connor and Kazan something to talk about up there in the clouds.
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