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Elias Kazanjoglou was born in Turkey in 1909, and he would change more than his name in America. Elia Kazan transformed movies and made stars of Marlon Brando and James Dean while introducing the troubled anti-hero to film. Half man, half casting couch, the director also wooed starlets from Marilyn Monroe to Theresa Russell. In spite of all his success and plunder, however, he remained Elias Kazanjoglou, an immigrant kid who resisted the melting pot.

Kazan never made fraternity at Yale, and his acting career was ended by a Hollywood Reporter insult: "Because of his looks, [Kazan] presents a casting problem."

Kazan kept the clipping. Indeed, resentment fuelled his work, as is evident in the Cinematheque Ontario series called American Outsider: The Films of Elia Kazan (running until Nov. 23).

A communist during the Depression, the director brought 1930s activism and a poetic naturalism to theatre, staging plays by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Two of his early films in the Cinematheque series, Pinky (1949) and the 1947 Oscar-winner Gentlemen's Agreement, with Gregory Peck, are landmark studies of American racism.

Hollywood offered Kazan the opportunity to express his rage. "Revenge began to be a motive in my life," he wrote. "My obsessive attraction to other men's women was born." Kazan turned to adultery the way some men reach for a drink. The night he was ordered before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he made love to Marilyn Monroe as she told him of her engagement to Joe DiMaggio.

To continue in Hollywood, Kazan cut a deal with HUAC in 1952, naming New York theatre pals Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman and John Garfield as communists. Kazan's act of moral expedience gave him a fresh start. He had always seen himself in his players. Staging A Streetcar Named Desire, he tilted the story toward the sexually rapacious Stanley Kowalski. Unencumbered by liberal dogma, Kazan began telling stories about people like himself - flawed characters in desperate straits.

As the Cinematheque series makes clear, Kazan's post-HUAC films were his best: On the Waterfront (1954), with Brando as a heroic dockworker who turns snitch; East of Eden (1955), the story of Cain and Abel transported to a California lettuce farm. Kazan's most beautiful and understated movie, Wild River (1960), with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick, gives us a muddled bureaucrat who is beaten up for telling the truth. Warren Beatty's debut, Splendor in the Grass (1961), is the story of a nice Midwest girl (Natalie Wood) who goes crazy for lack of sex.

The two last films didn't make money - a crime worse than communism in Hollywood. Still, Kazan's influence remains with us. He introduced a new masculine ideal to American film. His heroes were easily bruised and emotionally volatile - a stark contrast to the unyielding, monolithic John Wayne-Gary Cooper types who previously represented the U.S. male. Kazan's characters were outsiders whose eloquent suffering illuminated the turbulent American experience.

For more information see http://www.cinemathequeontario.ca or call 416-968-3456.