The Belcourt's Elia Kazan retro showcases a director who felt every setting keenly but never felt at home

Film history still thinks of Elia Kazan mostly as an actor's director. Not without good reason, of course, since the Greek-American director's movies gave us so many iconic performances, including Marlon Brando's legendary turns in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, as well as James Dean's starring debut in East of Eden. The Belcourt's four-film mini-retrospective, which includes these well-known titles plus the marvelous 1950 thriller Panic in the Streets, offers an opportunity to revisit a handful of the director's best films—and what you see may shock you. The acting is great, sure, but the sense of place in these films is even more striking. For Elia Kazan was as much a director of places as he was of people.

It's understandable if you look at the director's personal history. Born Elias Kazanjoglou to a family of ethnic Greeks in Turkey in 1909, Kazan came to the U.S. with his family at the age of 10. They settled in New York, where Kazan would live most of his life, but he always felt himself to be something of an outsider in American society. He discusses his alienation at length in his intensely revealing 1988 autobiography A Life, one of the greatest of all memoirs about film or theater. Kazan saw himself often as going along to get along. One could argue that this mentality fed his decision to join the Communist Party in the 1930s, as well as his later decision to "name names" in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The bitterness of this act was still felt in 1999, when the Academy presented the multiple Oscar winner with a Lifetime Achivement Award—while many in the audience sat stone-faced and silent.

That alienation also made Kazan unusually perceptive to both the subtleties of human behavior and the effect of setting on his characters. The intense hothouse atmosphere of the New Orleans of Streetcar (showing Nov. 7-9) is there in Tennessee Williams's script. But Kazan's camera, with its off-kilter close-ups, its chiaroscuro clutter, heightens it to melodramatic extremes. It has to—the size of the performances practically demands it. Decades of revivals and parodies (including The Simpsons' brilliant musical restaging, Streetcar!) have perhaps coated the story itself—about a nomadic, decaying Southern belle's failed attempt to find a home with her younger sister and her passionate brute of a husband—with a fine layer of canonical dust. But watching Kazan's film again, one is struck by how alive and big and alien the whole thing feels.

Amazingly, the film was not made in New Orleans—unlike the previous year's Panic in the Streets (Nov. 14-16), which was filmed in the Big Easy and which features heroic doctor Richard Widmark racing against time to isolate an outbreak of "pneumonic plague" that has broken out among the city's criminal and immigrant underclass. One can practically touch the air in this film—Kazan makes it all so palpable that it's hard to see how our hero will ever prevail against a blistering atmosphere so crowded with portent and disease. You want to wash your hands for an hour after seeing it.

Though the film is ostensibly a genre piece, Kazan brings the full breadth of his talent and sensitivity to it. A subplot about an older Greek couple who regard the authorities with suspicion, only for the wife to succumb to the disease, constitutes some of the most touching moments of his entire filmography—not the least because the director clearly saw in the bickering older couple a reflection of his own parents.

Compare both of these films to the cool, windswept paranoia of On the Waterfront (Nov. 21-23), in which Brando traded in his sweaty, torn T-shirt for a thick longshoreman's coat (as well as his first Oscar). Here, the drama lurks not in the screaming poetry of the dialogue—though there's plenty of poetry here, courtesy of screenwriter Budd Schulberg—but in the cold, gray exteriors of the locale. Produced independently, Waterfront was one of the first major features to be shot on location in New York after the mass filmmaking exodus of the 1920s and '30s had taken the entire industry out West. It's easy to see why Kazan insisted on location shooting at a time when Burbank soundstages were practically a sacrament.

Setting is also paramount in East of Eden (Nov. 28-30), which opens with a title pitting its two main locales, the town of Salinas and "the rough and tumble fishing village of Monterey," against one another. The main attraction, historically speaking, may be James Dean's Method tour-de-force. But in telling his story of fathers and sons and the dark secrets that lurk at the heart of American families, Kazan turns John Steinbeck's Northern Californian stomping grounds into a demilitarized zone of the soul. Early on, when Dean's Cal Trask returns home to Salinas after discovering that his long-lost mother is a whorehouse madam in Monterey, Kazan shows the young man riding atop a train, shivering as he wraps his sweater tightly around himself for warmth. It's a famous Dean image, certainly, but it's also the iconic image of the immigrant, refashioned here into a spiritual nomad. Watching this young man, it's hard not to think of the Greek-Turkish-American-Communist-Anti-Communist independent studio filmmaker Kazan, forever unsure of where he fits in.

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