T A B L E_.T A L K Are Click and Clack causing your relationship to break down? Readers discuss the shows they love and their partners don't in Table Talk's Media area   Extra! Extra! Find the media books you want to read at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y Strange fruit By James Poniewozik Garden Escape is a new publication grown from the fertile soil of Garden.com. You might call it a catalog; they call it the ultimate service magazine. What if they're right? (03/16/99) Kiddie-porn trafficker -- or crusading undercover reporter? By Susan Lehman Larry Matthews' 18-month sentence for receiving and transmitting kiddie porn raises difficult First Amendment issues (03/11/99) The anti-Marthas By James Poniewozik The Discovery Channel's daytime shelter shows decorate down-market souls in six cheerful shades of Play-Doh (03/09/99) Conservative pinup battles "arm candy" canard By Susan Lehman Ann Coulter will write for George. Plus: N.Y. cops get tough on the New Yorker; doubloon-or-nothing for Wenner (03/04/99) The Teen Millennium By Steve Erickson From "Buffy" to "Jawbreaker," today's culture makes teenagers the battlegrounds of cosmic forces (03/03/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE UNSPUN ARCHIVE		-----{ U N S P U N_.B Y_.S T E V E_.E R I C K S O N } Why Elia Kazan should not receive an Oscar -----------By bestowing a special honor on the director, ---------------who already has won two Oscars, -------------the academy is glossing over history. Watched John Ford's 1956 "The Searchers" on video the other night. My wife had never seen it. At the end, of course, she was drop-jawed stunned, and talked about it for days, not because it's an impeccable masterpiece; at best it's a flawed masterpiece. Leaving aside Jane Darwell in "The Grapes of Wrath," Ford could never direct women to save his life, and every time "The Searchers" switches to the Vera Miles-Jeffrey Hunter romantic subplot, it heads south. Which is to say, every time either Monument Valley or John Wayne isn't on-screen. It was Wayne who blew my wife away, and if you've ever seen "The Searchers" -- or, for that matter, "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" or "Red River" -- and your mind is at least cracked ajar if not wide open, you already know he's the most underrated actor in the history of American film. If his range was narrow, his control of every nuance within that range was untouchable. That he is so underrated is partly his own fault; as time went by, he was seduced more and more by his own iconography, and in the 20 years between "The Searchers" and his elegiac final film, "The Shootist," in 1976, the movies where he was willing to turn that iconography inside out or on its head, such as "Rio Bravo" or "True Grit" or "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," became more and more exceptional. But that Hollywood underrated him also because it hated his politics is as incontestable as the fact that his politics were indeed pretty stupid; this is, after all, the guy who said in a Playboy interview that the Indians deserved to be wiped out because they wouldn't share their country with the people stealing it from them. In its artistic assessments over the last four decades, liberal Hollywood repeatedly made allowances for leftist stupidities it never made for Wayne, whether it was Jane Fonda shilling for the Viet Cong (rather than simply opposing a war that was bad for America) or Vanessa Redgrave dancing around with Palestinian terrorists while waving a rifle over her head. The point, of course, is not that Hollywood or film critics or the culture were wrong about Fonda or Redgrave, but that they shortchanged Wayne -- a better actor than Jane, though not Vanessa. In the end we make allowances for the philosophical absurdities, left or right, of the Fondas and Redgraves and Waynes because their gift to us is their creativity, not their political analysis; we can embrace their art without, say, electing them president. None of which changes the fact that Elia Kazan should not be receiving a special Oscar at the Academy Awards this year. That Kazan should receive this award doesn't stand up to either moral scrutiny or aesthetic logic. It isn't persuasively supported either by the arguments of critics whose personal affections have gotten the better of their judgment or columnists whose ideological motivation is so transparent as to verge on intellectual bad faith. Kazan shouldn't be receiving this award for a number of reasons, having to do with the nature of what Kazan did, and the nature of the award itself. I don't write this in rage. As I watch Kazan being honored at the Oscars this year, I'll even feel a moment's respect for what he's accomplished. While I understand director Abraham Polonsky's bitterness over the award, given what the House Un-American Activities Committee did to him 50 years ago, his recently stated opinion that someone should use the occasion to shoot Kazan was ugly and beneath him. Nor do I write with any particularly romantic view of the blacklist era or the Hollywood Ten. Obviously, during the blacklist era many in the industry were victims of a gross political injustice. But when called before the HUAC in the late 1940s and early '50s to testify about their alleged communist beliefs, most of the Ten handled the crisis not with eloquence or clearsightedness or even wit but a shrill indignation that was sanctimonious at best and hypocritical at worst, shrouding themselves in freedoms for which the ideology they believed had nothing but contempt. I hasten to add I know few who would have necessarily handled it better. And I understand that it's easy for those of us 50 years removed to look back and comment on how others should have behaved. But in retrospect, both the principled and shrewd position would have been to have told the committee anything it wanted to know about one's own personal beliefs and activities, while drawing the line at informing on others. For the most part, of course, the Ten didn't take this position. For the most part, they hid behind the Fifth Amendment, in the process revealing their own profound lack of conviction in the First. For his part, Kazan recanted and informed, in the process denying to others that same freedom of expression he had claimed for himself, to great personal success, in his art. In the current furor over whether Kazan should be receiving this special Oscar, there's been some obfuscation by his champions of what he did and its consequences. If Kazan had named the names of people selling nuclear secrets to the Russians, such testimony would not only have been justified but morally irresistible. If he had gone before the committee and groveled, apologizing for his own early communist activities and begging congressional forgiveness in a sob fest of mea culpas, he would deserve at least empathy, if not respect; confronted with the imminent annihilation of a career, any of us might be presumed capable of moral cowardice. N E X T+P A G E | Kazan's real sin -- he hurt others