None Without Sin: Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, and the Blacklist(2003)

Directed by Michael Epstein

American Masters (

120 min.

The political life of a democracy is, by its very nature, grand theater. But theatricalized politics often take the form of tragedy. None Without Sin: Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, and the Blacklist, a documentary in the American Masters PBS series, is a powerful portrait of one such episode. In revisiting the familiar mid-century terrain of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the movie industry’s crackdown on communist sympathizers in Hollywood, however, the film brings fresh focus to the moral dilemmas faced by two giants of American art who were swept onto this public stage.

Director Elia Kazan and playwright Arthur Miller met in 1947, when Kazan directed a Miller script (All My Sons) on Broadway. Fast friends, their collaborations brought both acclaim—Kazan earned a Tony for All My Sons, while Miller garnered the 1949 Pulitzer for the next play they brought to the stage, Death of a Salesman. On the heels of these successes, the two looked to take their partnership to Hollywood. But in departing the confines of the theater, Miller and Kazan were stepping on to a bigger stage and into a personal and political drama that would destroy their friendship and bring American culture into painful confrontation with itself.

HUAC had eyed Hollywood with suspicion for years, motivated by a mix of old-fashioned anti-Semitism and growing fears of domestic subversives. Matters intensified in 1947 when HUAC brought contempt charges against a group of studio employees, the “Hollywood Ten,” which refused to cooperate with their investigations. The movie industry surrendered, agreeing in 1948 to fire the ten and actively purge itself of suspected Communists. The age of “the blacklist” had arrived.

Kazan and Miller sat atop the entertainment world as they began peddling a screenplay for “The Hook” to major studio executives. One by one, studios turned them away – the screenplay’s narrative of unionized dockworkers fighting off the encroach of organized crime was politically untouchable. Both men’s pastsalso contributed to these reactions:Kazan, like so many of his generation devastated by economic calamity and enamored of Soviet antifascism, had briefly joined the Communist Party in the 1930s. Miller, while never a party member, sympathized openly with the American left.

But when HUAC brought Kazan to testify in 1952 about his knowledge of Communist agents in the industry, it was pure stagecraft. By then, Kazan was a committed anti-Communist. Unlike contemporaries who had disavowed the party in light of the USSR’s repressive and anti-Semitic practices, Kazan’s disillusionment dated to an episode when party officials had pressured him to organize a party “cell” within his New York theater group, which he saw as a violation of the intimate confines of his creative practice.

Kazan was as disdainful of the committee’s demagoguery as he was of Communism, and at first refused to cooperate, but the prospect of the blacklist left him with a stark choice. The film portrayshim as a man authentically torn. Called again, however, he publicly identified the names of old acting friends and others who he knew to have been Communists. Kazan had saved his career, but lost his friendships, including his almost brotherly bond with Miller, who himself would defy HUAC in 1954. They would not speak again for a decade.

The documentary’s real contribution is in revisiting how Kazan, through his artwork, and Miller through his, engaged in a pointed dialogue about the moral implications of Kazan’s testimony. Miller condemned Kazan with the Broadway debut of The Crucible (1953). The documentary’s extended treatment of the play, which took the Salem witchhunts as its historical setting, constitutes the program’s emotional center. With a series of stunning black & white stills overlaid by audio excerpts of the play, we begin to understand how Miller was addressing not just red-baiting tactics of HUAC, but what he judged to be Kazan’s profound moral failing. Kazan shot back on film with On the Waterfront (1954), which was a transparent adaptation of “The Hook.” Once a stridently working-class statement, “The Hook” had transformed into self-commentary, with Kazan’s protagonist, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), testifying against waterfront mob bosses in a murder trial. Miller’s pro-union story now unfolded as one celebrating a lone individual heroically confronting authority in an act of righteous self-sacrifice. As the documentary notes, On the Waterfront maintained a progressive temper that Kazan never abandoned. However, it was one that resonated with Cold War liberalism’s antiauthoritarian and individualist pretensions rather than the collectivist stance of Miller’s original script.

It must be mentioned that another figure looming large in None Without Sin is that of Marilyn Monroe. We don’t learn much new about her here, but her relationships with both men— first as Kazan’s mistress, and later as Miller’s muse and wife—voyeuristically underscores how emotionally entangled the two men’s paths were. Also enriching the film is commentary by film historians and interviews with various figures directly involved with Kazan and Miller in the early 1950s.

Director Michael Epstein has produced an attractive and important documentary. Smartly, it avoids recapitulating the decades of vitriole aimed at Kazan, instead exploring the intimate personal drama of Kazan and Miller within its own historical moment. It insists neither on sympathy nor damnation for Kazan. But in emphasizing his humanity, the film counsels us to see the episode as one that raises questions that defy overheated absolutism. In an interview (see the American Masters website), Epstein speaks of how the era of the blacklist has new relevancy in a post-9/11 political culture in which fear, whether justified by events or manufactured by fear-mongerers, sometimes leads us to efface moral ambiguity in the search for clear answers. Teachers of history should indeed find the film a useful way of opening conversations about the mid-century confluence of politics and art or more contemporary considerations of the American political psyche.

Michael Wakeford

University of Chicago