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“... that sinners get their comeuppance. If it quotes the Daily Worker’s vile invective against Elia Kazan, it quickly refers to ‘the Party’s ritualistic indignation’. It speaks of America’s and Russia’s ‘rival imperialisms’, scoffs at the notion that the Korean War was a UN ‘police action’, and professes to leave open the question ...”

“... To spend time​ with Tennessee Williams – for months on end in the case of Elia Kazan, the director who put his plays on the stage in the 1940s and 1950s; 12 years in the case of his latest and best biographer, John Lahr; or even as little as six weeks by me while reading Lahr’s absorbing Life, along with the work, and a big chunk of all the stuff Williams wrote and said about the work – is to learn and relearn how soberly Williams was speaking when he told Kazan: ‘I don’t know what it is to take anything calmly ...”

“... Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of our Teeth was Kazan’s first big Broadway hit as a director, in November 1942. Walking out of the theatre one night, he overheard a couple arguing about the play: ‘ “What’s it all about?” the man complained to his wife. “Why, George,” she said, “it’s about love and hate and passion and everything – ever since the world began ...”

“... Timebends, his Life contains some excellent anecdotes, including the revelation that the director Elia Kazan persuaded Miller to group all the Death of a Salesman ‘flashbacks’ together as a kind of interlude, only to be overruled by the producer Kermit Bloomgarden, whose ‘this piece of shit I will not do’ saved a masterpiece. Bloomgarden was then ...”

“... he hit upon that path when he was spotted by a theatre administrator who happened to be married to Elia Kazan. First she wangled a special cash award for him, then she put him into the hands of a remarkable agent called Audrey Wood who immediately began nudging him towards fame and fortune. At one stage, esteemed but not yet famous, he was engineered a ...”

“... the young actor. But was he immune to any woman who saw so deeply into him?The other mentor was Elia Kazan, the essential director of that moment on stage and screen and as devoted as Stella Adler to psychological reality. He was Brando’s type, an intense, conspiratorial director who lived through his actors. ...”

“... new difficulties for himself. He has become the ultimate athlete of cinema.’ The talent of Elia Kazan ‘is essentially of a decorative nature’. ‘The cowboys in Johnny Guitar, ridiculously, call each other “Monsieur” in the dubbed French version, which is superior for once to the subtitled version because it lets us see the film’s ...”

“... only refusing to name names but cutting off his friendship with ‘friendly witnesses’ such as Elia Kazan. In this context, and from a pinnacle of moral rectitude, Miller could imagine, even after 1956, that denouncing Communism would appear to constitute a vote of confidence in a system of fear and intimidation. For a while in the 1950s, this ...”

“... Committee on Un-American Activities, partly because of his ‘friendship’ with the name-naming Elia Kazan (the director with whom he worked on Viva Zapata). At the end of his life, Steinbeck wrote gung-ho, pro-White House pieces from and about Vietnam because ‘he felt strongly connected to Lyndon Johnson, who had befriended him and his wife.’ As ...”

“... an impact in Hollywood as well – mainly in the films of leftist directors such as Jules Dassin, Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray – yet back in Italy, Hollywood blocked the Neorealist path. Italy opened once more to American movies soon after the end of the war and by 1949, the US had some 80 per cent of the Italian market.Producing its own international ...”

“... or lose your job. Like Dmytryk, many prominent ex-radicals became ‘artist stool-pigeons’: Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Budd Schulberg, Sterling Hayden, Lee J. Cobb. ‘That’s the problem: choice,’ Trumbo explained in a letter. ‘Not compulsion: choice’. In the Hollywood community, 250 people were blacklisted – disrupting or destroying ...”

“... he was given the chance to act on Broadway in a new Tennessee Williams play directed by Elia Kazan, Sweet Bird of Youth. Newman played Chance Wayne, a gigolo ‘who’s attached himself to an ageing, alcoholic actress, the Princess’. In one scene, Chance has a soliloquy in which he expresses grief at seeing the love of his life for the last ...”

“... that because ‘Pop Frontism’ was less a particular worldview than a set of emotional responses, Elia Kazan can be seen as making ‘Popular Front’ movies such as On the Waterfront or the TVA celebration, Wild River, long after he became persona non grata for the Front’s remaining adherents by providing the House Un-American Activities Committee ...”

“... the specimens offer a diagnosis of the world they spring from. The book closes with an account of Kazan and Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd: an instructive parable, Hoberman thinks, because it exhibits an enemy no longer traceable to a foreign source. A Face in the Crowd tells of the rise of a country singer and cracker-barrel politician, Larry ...”

“... of course he followed some equivalent of the mysterious pattern which Bosworth attributes to Elia Kazan: ‘Originally, he’d wanted to be a writer; later he became a novelist.’ Can’t win ‘em ...”