VERTIGMOUS LECTURE

To the Editors of the CRIMSONS: A short time ago a great many Harvard students and professors attended the second Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture given by the Broadway and Hollywood director Elia Kazan. From the title of the lecture ("Show Business and the Realities") and from Prof. Levin's introductory remarks ("bridge the gap between drama on the page and drama on the stage"), they must have expected a firsthand account of the problems of directing and staging some of the best movies and plays of recent years. Instead they were treated to a public shrift and absolution. Interspiced with a running account of the intellectual woes of one of the top paid directors of show business.

The performance was in many respects disappointing Despite Mr. Kazan's claim to the passing friendship with Theodore Spencer, we feel that Spencer would not have tolerated the lectureship the ghost would have walked out. Secondly if the lectureship was instituted to give Harvard the privilege of hearing top men in the theater talk about the drama, then Mr. Kazan's lecture was out of place. If the lectures were meant to include the subject of Art and Society ("Show Business and the Realities"), again Mr. Kazan's lecture did not fill the bill. He seems to have used the lecture as a means of public justification like his paid advertisement in the New York Times only this time he got paid. Even as an attempt at moral self justification the lecture failed. Mr. Kazan's told his story from the time he found himself unable to get a picture produced on a Hollywood lot to the time he decided to disclose the names of communists he knew. His ethical awakening ("I don't think unless I'm forced to") followed hard upon the economic pressures that had been brought to bear on him.

In one respect the lecture was pathetically revealing. It was the spectacle of a man on the tight rope of his own confusion; of the vertigo; and of the mutilated ethics. Robert Layzer '53   Michael Mabry '53   Donald O. Stewart '53   Irving Yoskowitz '53