Letter to Elia

Martin Scorsese teamed up with Kent Jones in 2010 to write and direct an hour-long Elia Kazan retrospective and documentary essay for a packaged collection of the director's work. Its title, A Letter to Elia, hints at the loving respect, virtual hero-worship, Scorsese feels for the man whose movies inspired him as an avid pre-teen movie-goer.

Scorsese often reviews movie history, gives lectures, and is as confident in front of the screen as behind the cameras. The one-sided partnership with Jones is presumably based on friendship, as Jones had no other movie industry experience and is a former writer (1996-2001) for The Daily Show on Comedy Channel. He'd worked with Scorsese before on a documentary study of the Statue of Liberty, The Lady by the Sea (2004, for the History Channel, marking the statue's post-911 re-opening).

In 2007, Scorsese narrated Jones's documentary about Val Lewton, Man in the Shadows, a producer of low-budget horror movies (Cat People, Body Snatcher etc) for RKO. That was a 77-minute promotional commission for the Turner Classic Movies channel. It employed Montreal-born Greek-ethnic actor Elias Koteas to provide Newton's voice, and he took the same off-screen role for the Kazan essay, reading extracts from the controversial auteur's autobiography and lecture notes. The Actors Studio graduate later took an on-screen role for Scorsese's Shutter Island.

Scorsese is an unashamed propagandist for cinema as a work of art, a higher-brow publicist than Ebert or Maltin, and an auteur whose own creations' quality justifies his pontification and enthusiasm. Most of the praise, and movie clips, in this essay highlights the classic scenes Kazan composed for East of Eden, On the Waterfront and his semi-autobiographical America, America.

Key factors accounting for Scorsese's admiration for Kazan included the director's ability to evoke the reality, through location environments that movie-goers would recognise or feel they knew. Kazan also elicited exceptional performances from his actors, Scorsese feels, and created characters and scenes with which audiences could also identify. Kazan was part of a global mood change in cinema, alongside France's New Wave and other countries' development of Italy's neo-realism genre. More interestingly, Scorsese reveals how much he identified with Kazan's family life and his films' tormented characters. What isn't so easy to accept is Scorsese's perfunctory acknowledgments to the kills of other artists without whom Kazan could not have succeeded: writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, lighting and sound directors.

Clips from a Kazan interview in later life confirm his transformation from a grinning, cocky young Armenian immigrant into a gloomy soul despised by many Hollywood colleagues. He'd provided the names of eight former fellow Communists to McCarthy's UnAmerican Activities committee. Scorsese cannot ignore the controversy but he slides past it, and lets Kazan repeat the excuse that he'd been forced to choose what was the lesser of two evils for himself (and his career). Others didn't, and fled to Europe or used pseudonyms.

It sounds like special pleading for Scorsese to claim that Kazan's work gained an independent character and superior qualities after his act of self-serving betrayal. It's irritating to be given hints, not facts, about Kazan's ruthlessness in his native Armenia and as a refugee actor in New York. In the end, this is a promotional piece that feels an unworthy, unnecessary effort from Scorsese.