HONORARY Oscars are a regular feature of Academy Award night, and this year will be no exception. But the warm glow that in the past has come when a Fred Astaire or a Greta Garbo received an honorary Oscar won't be present March 21 when famed director Elia Kazan, 89, is honored for his long and distinguished career.

The controversy over Mr. Kazan does not stem from his work, which includes two best-director Oscars and such admired films as "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "On the Waterfront." The controversy over Mr. Kazan stems instead from his 1952 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, when he not only acknowledged his brief membership in the Communist Party, but also gave the names of eight other members he knew from his days at New York's Group Theatre in the 1930s.

War on the left

It is Mr. Kazan's decision to name names, not his political views, that is the source of the debate over his honorary Oscar. In the McCarthy era, the House committee's hearings were, as Nation publisher Victor Navasky wrote in "Naming Names," essentially "degradation ceremonies." Their aim was not to discover spies (that had already been done by the FBI), but to stigmatize those who had once been members of the Communist Party and in so doing create a political climate in which the left was permanently damaged. The key to any hearing was getting one witness to inform on another. As conservative California Rep. Donald L. Jackson put it at the motion-picture hearings of 1951, "The ultimate test of the credibility of a witness is the extent to which he is willing to cooperate with the committee in giving full details as to not only the place of activities, but also the names of those who participated with him in the Communist Party."

Blacklisted group

Those who refused to cooperate and were termed unfriendly witnesses often lost their jobs and ended up serving jail time. In Hollywood, the results were particularly devastating for a series of directors, actors and screenwriters who were blacklisted for years.

It wasn't until 1959 that the Motion Picture Academy rescinded its bylaw prohibiting awards to those who had refused to cooperate.

In opting to name names in 1952, Mr. Kazan, then at the height of his career, knew the credibility he was giving the House hearings and the trouble he was making for those on whom he informed.

In his 1988 autobiography, "Elia Kazan: A Life," Mr. Kazan acknowledges at one point thinking he would not cooperate with the House committee and preparing himself for a period of "no more movie work or money." But Mr. Kazan went ahead and became a friendly witness, and a day after his testimony was released took out an ad in the New York Times justifying his actions and urging others to take similar steps.

In the intervening years, he has never publicly expressed remorse for his decision.

With this history in mind, it's difficult to see the justification for giving Mr. Kazan an honorary Oscar. Two years ago, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the American Film Institute rejected proposals to honor Mr. Kazan with lifetime achievement awards. It makes sense for the Academy Award board of governors to do the same.

It's not that at the end of his life Mr. Kazan should have his past rubbed in his face or his pictures ignored. It's rather that an award that speaks of honoring Mr. Kazan for the way "he has influenced filmmaking" is deceptive if it turns a blind eye to the destructive influence he had on filmmaking.

If the academy wants to honor those who were part of the movie industry of the 1950s, it certainly could give out honorary Oscars and reparations to all who were ever blacklisted. Or if it is looking to reward courage and quality, the academy might offer up an honorary Oscar to someone like Kazan contemporary Arthur Miller, who when called before the committee refused to name names because, as he later put it, he wasn't about "to break an implicit understanding among human beings that you don't use their names to bring trouble on them, or cooperate in deforming the democratic doctrine of the sanctity of peaceful association."

Nicolaus Mills, a Sarah Lawrence College professor, wrote this for Newsday.

Pub Date: 3/03/99