‘The big shot had become the outsider’: Empathy and circumstance in Elia Kazan’s ‘southern trilogy’

This article brings together three consecutive films within Elia Kazan’s filmography, Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Wild River (1960) and conceptualizes an informal ‘southern trilogy’ within the director’s body of work that attempts an empathetic understanding of the situation that America’s White southerners found themselves in during a time of social and economic upheaval, whilst simultaneously petitioning for the necessity of widespread change. The suggestion is that Kazan’s personal experience as a friendly witness to the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and the resulting ostracization from his artistic community, lent the director a unique voice that imbued these films with a sense of understanding regarding the tension between personal circumstance and evolving cultural environments. Collectively the three films document Kazan’s journey as he sought to justify his political decisions through an insightful and humane discussion of how the changes taking place in the American South throughout the 1950s impacted the everyday private dramas of the region’s inhabitants. Whilst Kazan had struggled to be right in a world that he thought had gone wrong, he portrays his White protagonists as struggling with being wrong in a world that Kazan sees as going right.