Richard Schickel’s day job is a film critic for Time magazine and his biography of Kazan his highly opinionated. He doesn’t stuff around – from the beginning he opens with a spirited defence of Kazan’s naming names. Not that this is a hagiography of Kazan, he criticizes the director a fair bit – he doesn’t like East of Eden or his novels – but he is on Kazan’s side about the naming names thing. I agree too much has been made of this in recent years, but it is an issue that flames passions – I remember getting in an argument with a friend at a picnic in 1999. This is a pretty good biography, which isn’t so much interested in facts and events as in analyising films and political background to the time. Schickel is a little easy on McCarthyism – yes, it was a lot less nasty than Stalinism but it still wasn’t very nice.
At times I wondered if this book and some of its attitudes was partly a dig at Patrick McGilligan, who has written extensively on the blacklist and got stuck into Shickel over the latter’s Clint Eastwood bio (McGilligan had a similar Eastwood bio and he thought Shickel went way too easy on Eastwood.) I enjoyed the book a lot, and it made an ideal companion to Kazan’s brilliant memoirs. Kazan was a feisty character – sadly he went a bit ga ga in his final few years.
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