The puzzle of Elia Kazan

That’s not an easy question to answer. In certain critical ways the acclaimed director fails the auteur theory that has served to define cinematic ambition and achievement ever since the French cooked it up a half century ago. Kazan’s movies were commercial and critical hits - cultural landmarks then and now - and they collected Oscar nominations like lint. For a 15-year stretch, he was considered possibly the most important filmmaker in the country; he’s still one of the most controversial. But where’s his personality? What do Elia Kazan’s movies say about Elia Kazan?

Starting Friday, the Harvard Film Archive offers a unique chance to find out. The nearly monthlong “Complete Elia Kazan’’ series, running from July 31 to Aug. 24, includes all 19 of the director’s feature films plus a handful of rarely seen shorts. It covers Kazan’s emergence from the New York theater to direct groundbreaking topical dramas for Twentieth Century Fox in the late 1940s; his peak decade of the 1950s, including the three-film collaboration with Marlon Brando that may stand as the best work either man ever did; and the slow decline of the 1960s and ’70s, when the director struggled with the personal expressiveness of the New Hollywood he had helped create.

Best of all, the HFA series rescues a number of Kazan’s less-remembered films from an obscurity that is undeserved. If you haven’t seen “A Streetcar Named Desire’’ (1951; showing Aug. 22) or “On the Waterfront’’ (1954; Aug. 8) or “East of Eden’’ (1955; July 31) on a big screen, by all means do so. But if you can’t, DVD copies are available at every library and even at Blockbuster. These are classic classics, films whose performances and drama are as vibrantly urgent as on the day they were released.

By contrast, few would think to seek out a movie like “Panic in the Streets’’ (1950; July 31) on home video. It’s one of Kazan’s sharpest early works, though, and a rare detour into genre: a fascinating film noir about a heroic government doctor (Richard Widmark) racing across New Orleans to catch a pair of criminals (Jack Palance and Zero Mostel, both young and baroque) infected with pneumonic plague. (That “Panic’’ is probably the only plague noir ever made doesn’t stop it from being the best.)

Other films were celebrated in their time but have fallen from cultural view. “Splendor in the Grass’’ (1961; Aug. 1 and 3) is an intense fever-dream of teenage anxiety that contains one of Natalie Wood’s most incandescent performances. As Deanie, a Kansas high school heroine in the pressure cooker of the Roaring Twenties, Wood is propelled hormonally forward while trying to be a “good girl’’ - while trying to figure out what a “good girl’’ even means. The film owes a lot to playwright-screenwriter William Inge (and rather less to a wooden Warren Beatty in his debut), but it’s the star and director who turn this into a female version of “Rebel Without a Cause,’’ and, as such, a rather more dangerous proposition.

Still other movies in the series have never been given their due. The most notable rediscovery, “Wild River’’ (1960; Aug. 7 and 10), is a CinemaScope epic about a rural community in the 1930s fighting a dam, with Montgomery Clift starring as a New Deal official who falls in love with a local widow (Lee Remick). Never released on US home video, “Wild River’’ may be the great lost Kazan film, and for now this is your only chance to see it.

“Baby Doll’’ (1956; Aug. 21) isn’t a lost work - despite being pulled from theaters in response to a firestorm of protest led by the Catholic Legion of Decency - but it’s the closest Kazan ever came to comedy. Stitched together from a pair of Tennessee Williams plays, it’s a ribald tale of Southern discomfort in which Karl Malden hams it up ferociously as a back-country factory owner insanely possessive of his young bride (Carroll Baker, sucking her thumb in a crib) while rival Eli Wallach sneaks in the back door. In a sense, the protesters were right: The 20-minute seduction scene at the heart of “Baby Doll’’ is as sinfully hot as anything the 1950s dared to offer.

Even before that film came out, Kazan was a polarizing figure in American popular culture. A maverick artist who brought to Hollywood the rude energy and progressive topicality of mid-century New York theater - in particular the socially conscious Group Theatre of the 1930s, for whom he acted and directed - Kazan betrayed the trust of his former colleagues by testifying as a friendly witness to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952.

He had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, then resigned in disgust 18 months later when local party officials tried to gain control of the Group Theatre. In his 1988 “A Life,’’ one of the most pugnacious autobiographies in all of American letters, Kazan painstakingly leads a reader from his initial refusal to “name names’’ to his choice to come clean. “The ‘horrible, immoral thing’ I would do, I did out of my true self,’’ he wrote defiantly. “Everything before was seventeen years of posturing.’’

The decision cost Kazan the respect of almost every one of his peers without quite costing him his career. Brando agonized over whether he could ever work again with the man who directed him in “Streetcar’’ on stage and screen - who midwived the Brando pop explosion - but still signed up for “On the Waterfront,’’ which finally won the actor an Oscar. “Waterfront,’’ about standing tall against union corruption, was widely perceived as a rat’s rationale on the part of Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, another friendly witness. Kazan didn’t disagree. “Every day I worked on that film,’’ he wrote in “A Life,’’ “I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go and [expletive] themselves.’’

To read the autobiography is to understand why Kazan doesn’t fit into the neat boxes of auteurist theory. Unlike, say, John Ford or Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock, he saw himself as more than a filmmaker. In his public life, he was an actor, a dramaturge, a best-selling novelist. In private, he was a married man and unapologetic womanizer, a gifted egotist so thin-skinned he hated his own nickname (“Gadg,’’ short for Gadget, earned in his jack-of-all-trades theater days). He was, always, the star of his own movie. When he finally came to tell stories of himself, they were epics of immigrant experience (“America, America,’’ 1963, Aug. 2) and second-generation disillusionment (“The Arrangement,’’ published 1967, filmed 1969; Aug. 17), and they suffered from a strained sense of importance.

Kazan, it has to be said, relied on the kindness of his collaborators: writers like Williams, Inge, Schulberg, and John Steinbeck; actors like Brando, Wood, Vivien Leigh; cinematographers like Harry Stradling, Boris Kaufman, and Joe MacDonald. Yet he did what directors are supposed to do, which is to pull all the elements together into a coherent and powerful whole. You can see Kazan taking tentative steps in his early issue dramas for Fox - “Gentleman’s Agreement’’ (1948; Aug. 24) tackles anti-Semitism; “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’’ (1945; Aug. 15) urban poverty; “Pinky’’ (1949; Aug. 1) racism in the deep South - without establishing a voice of his own.

By the early 1950s, though, he had found his rhythm, and Kazan’s best films do have a deeply personal theme: the unimaginable stress of the self-styled outsider. Sometimes that outsider is a woman: Leigh in “Streetcar,’’ Wood in “Splendor,’’ both tormented by the cruelties of brute men in a brutal world. In “Waterfront’’ and “Viva Zapata’’ (1952; Aug. 22), it’s Brando, palooka and martyr, who’s the director’s stand-in. (Kazan later wrote that “Zapata’’ was an anti-communist parable about a man who fights for power only to walk away from it.)

He made mistakes. “The Sea of Grass’’ (1947; Aug. 9) is easily the worst of the nine films Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together, a lumpy, graceless multigenerational prairie saga. “A Face in the Crowd’’ (1957; Aug. 23) is an astonishingly prescient fable about media fascism nearly wrecked by stridency. Kazan’s final film, “The Last Tycoon’’ (1976; Aug. 16) mummifies F. Scott Fitzgerald’s uncompleted novel with miscasting and the self-regard of a man who always kept Hollywood at arm’s length. The final shot of “Tycoon,’’ movie executive Monroe Stahr (Robert De Niro) striding into the darkness of a shooting stage, was conceived as the director’s valedictory to his own career.

The real valedictory came 23 years later, in 1999, when he accepted an honorary Oscar for a lifetime of work at the 71st Academy Awards. On the sidewalk outside, pro-Kazan and anti-Kazan demonstrators hurled epithets at each other. Inside the theater, over half the audience refused to stand and applaud the man who had shepherded a new psychology of acting to the screen and who burned every bridge except the one he himself built. Kazan, 89, acknowledged the Academy’s “courage,’’ hugged presenter Martin Scorsese (and would Marty even exist without Gadg?), and said, “Thank you all very much. I think I can just slip away.’’

The HFA series brings him back, still kicking hard, still daring you to make up your own mind.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.