The US Academy Awards ceremony normally is not an occasion to revisit historical wrongs but the 1999 awards on Mar 21 was a big exception when director Elia Kazan received a special “Oscar” for his service to the US movie industry.

The Motion Picture Academy’s intention had been to honour Kazan – famous for such movies as ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ in 1948 and ‘On the Waterfront’ in 1955 – with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his entire body of work.

Yet for protestors outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, and for some celebrities within, Kazan’s real lifetime achievement was his 1952 betrayal of seven colleagues as Communists in testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC) headed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

By giving names Kazan destroyed many careers, and some believe he helped to bolster an unpublicised blacklist of Communists in Hollywood – which prevented many leftist writers, directors and actors from working.

At the time, Kazan later took out a paid advertisement in The New York Times in which he criticised the Communist Party, of which he had been briefly a member, as a “dangerous and alien conspiracy”.

At this years Academy Awards ceremony director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert DeNiro gave Kazan his award to general applause but there were many critics who “sat on their hands.”

Several prominent actors, including Nick Nolte and Ed Harris – both of whom were nominated for acting awards that night – pointedly remained seated as Kazan received his prize. One announcer at the ceremony, comedian Chris Rock, earned a few boos himself when he noted the irony of DeNiro being in the same room as Kazan by commenting, “You know DeNiro hates rats.”

Aged Kazan, now in his 80’s, looked slightly embarrassed and avoided all comment on his past. “I think I’ll just slip away,” he said meekly.

The quiet end of the Kazan dispute reflected in many ways how the passage of time has muted the controversy over naming names: Many of the people Kazan named have died, while others affected by the blacklist largely avoided the ceremony, except for a handful of protestors – also in their ’80s – who jeered Kazan outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Yet when Kazan told the McCarthy committee in 1952 that several of his colleagues in New York’s Group Theatre – including Clifford Odets, Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Paula Strasberg, Edward Bromberg, Tony Kraber and Art Smith – were Communists, his act was considered a crucial betrayal that paved the way for the blacklist.

At the time, McCarthy had created a climate of fear by asserting – falsely, as was proved later – that he had a list of top-ranking Communists working in President Harry Truman’s government.

The threat of Communist subversion was seen everywhere – notably in Hollywood, where then-Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan was one of many informants who were telling federal officials about Hollywood Communists.

Kazan’s act was viewed with particular loathing because, four year’s earlier, he had won an Oscar for best director – for the movie ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, a powerful critique of anti- Semitism.

“Kazan is one of those for whom I had contempt, because he carried down men much less capable of defending themselves than he,” screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, himself a blacklist victim, wrote many years after Kazan’s testimony.

The director himself confessed to ambivalence about his actions several times, such as when he met Jeff Young, a relative of a blacklist victim. “It was disturbing to inform on my colleagues…(But) everyone knew who they were, so it wasn’t a big deal,” Kazan told Young. (One of the people Kazan named, Phoebe Brand, argued afterward that Kazan had not revealed the names of many other Communists he knew.)

But the controversy never really faded, with several film bodies refusing to honour Kazan, primarily because of his HUAAC testimony.

This year, the Motion Picture Academy’s decision was swayed by the impassioned argument on Kazan’s behalf by actor Karl Malden, a longtime leftist who starred in Kazan’s film of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’.

Although the Kazan flap can still provoke anger, the book on the McCarthy era is all but closed: few now would defend either the right-wing crackdown on dissent in the United States or the Stalinism of which the authorities were so wary.

Ironically, as the participants in the dispute age, the lasting memory of Kazan’s work lie mainly in his films – and particularly in their unabashed leftism, loathing of bigotry and depiction of working-class themes, all of which were in turn informed by the Communist past Kazan did so much to repudiate.