Pevere: Kazan Doesn’t Deserve Accolades

It may be bad form to speak ill of the dead, but at least one writer says that filmmaker Elia Kazan deserves no posthumous forgiveness for his famous decision to “name names” in the Congressional witchhunts of the 1950s. Kazan was a great filmmaker, writes Geoff Pevere, but he chose to preserve the safety of his own situation by deliberately ruining the lives and careers of eight other individuals, and for that single, selfish, short-sighted act, he should forever be remembered not as an artist, but as a rat.