A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Right before him
is Cukor’s Little Women, and that’s quite enough to be
getting on with, therefore Kazan sires a number of films by dint of his labors.
Capra is the first to acknowledge him, in It’s
a Wonderful Life.
Richardson’s a taste of honey is equally
admiring in each detail.
Segal’s All the Way Home, Lean’s Doctor
Zhivago, Davis’ Black Girl and Lumet’s Running on
Empty complete the range that critics at the time had no way of intuiting.
And there’s Weekend Update’s
immortal news report on a tree that grows in Amsterdam. “It’s official, Anne Frank just can’t catch a
break.”
There were Oscars for everyone, but it was a busy
year so they gave one to James Dunn.
Certainly the supreme expression of this is
Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.
The Sea of Grass
A complete,
rigorous analysis and understanding was provided by Andrew V. McLaglen in McLintock!, no insight is
to be found among reviewers.
And so, a great masterpiece did not want for
recognition after all.
The Ibsenite meddler is a St. Louis woman married in
Salt Fork, New Mexico amid the high grassland of the title.
The quotations from Citizen Kane
(doctor’s bag) and The Magnificent Ambersons (a rake’s
progress) are structural and functional, repaying what they owe.
Boomerang!
Who killed the
small-town Episcopal minister? It’s just after the war,
an ex-GI is the suspect.
He left town
looking for a job, there’s a lunatic who didn’t want the asylum.
The adverse party
would like to return to power, calls the town government amateurish, and would
even see the GI exonerated for his war record.
The details are
complicated, but the basis of this is Sternberg’s The Town.
Russell’s The Devils is a complete analysis. Hitchcock was so
taken with it he made The Wrong Man as a laboratory distillation,
borrowed the witnesses for “I Saw the Whole Thing” (The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour), and the malfunctioning pistol as well for “Man From
The South” (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, dir. Norman Lloyd).
As a
consideration of war guilt, a comparison can be made to Dmytryk’s Crossfire,
released that same year.
Gentleman’s Agreement
A California
writer comes to New York and writes an exposé of anti-Semitism.
Kazan’s
miraculous direction of the opening scenes is just that, he takes the burden of
the rest all the way.
A
masterpiece that cracks the nut “wide open” with commanding skill
and efficacy.
Pinky
Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof covers the same ground of
loyalty and inheritance and “mendacity”, but you couldn’t
prove it by the critics (Variety, New York Times, Halliwell’s Film Guide).
There’s a
lot to understand, and some have tried, but not Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago
Reader, who says it’s “even more bogus” than Gentleman’s
Agreement.
This is the
“great tap root” past all elevation and lateral nonsense, and if
you don’t know it that’s why Kazan made it, and why Altman made Cookie’s
Fortune.
Condescending as
the reviews are, or insulting (as if there never was or never would be an Imitation
of Life), it’s all as plain as day and everything else.
Panic in the Streets
Wharf rats carry
plague from port to port, one strikes home in New Orleans.
He
matches Kazan’s description, same age, “Armenian or Czech”,
no identification. Right off
the boat he wins at poker, withdraws, feeling sick, and is gunned down in a
fight with the hoods who set him up.
Contact with the
body is deadly. The U.S. Public Health Service organizes a search.
The final images
of a tough hood crawling along the wharf pilings and climbing a ship’s
rope guarded by rat protectors tell the tale.
A Streetcar Named Desire
This settles the
hash of every poetastress down the pike that cometh, whether she’s
teaching Poe, Emerson and Whitman to schoolboys, or hankering after a million
men at the Hotel Flamingo. And it includes her beau who lives at home but stays
in shape and worships her or vainly tries to ravish her.
Thus
Miss Blanche DuBois and Mitch.
Kazan takes this
to Hollywood in the most intensely industrious lighting and set design, working
for a glimmer and blur at the dock, only once revealing the whole Elysian
Fields set. The cinematographic realization is worthy of emulation just as much
as Vivien Leigh’s perfect Blanche and Marlon Brando’s famous
Kowalski, all have their tribute.
The play is
wonderfully analyzed by John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), translated
for the English market.
Viva Zapata!
Steinbeck and
Kazan go directly to Conway’s Viva Villa!, a film highly influential in
every way, for a very close analysis in the form of a variant.
Hack reviewers
have a bit of trouble with this, that includes Variety’s
and Bosley Crowther (who admired it).
The result is,
not surprisingly, a film as influential as the original.
Man On a Tightrope
It is completely
analyzed, transposed, refitted and expanded by Fellini as Otto e mezzo,
and it is completely reflected in Jack Gold’s Escape from Sobibor.
The Brumbach
Circus plays Cirkus Cernik, a great circus in the toils.
On the Waterfront
The mob has taken
over Longshoreman’s Local 374 on the docks (cp. Kubrick’s The
Seafarers).
The score by
Leonard Bernstein can be compared with The
Red Pony and To Kill a
Mockingbird. Kazan is with the British New Wave or the Nouvelle Vague in his complete assurance
with city exteriors. These forces figure in the rooftop dialogue of Terry and
Edie, which adds the actors’ response and Schulberg’s dialogue, and
each element is on a different level. The conversation that follows is in
two-shots at reverse angles.
Terry’s
confession is handled out of Lang’s Das
Testament des Dr. Mabuse, with a pile-driver. Johnny
Friendly’s “investigation” of Terry is almost comical, Bernstein sounds a fanfare against it.
Kubrick recalls
the death of Charley in 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and here Kazan pays direct homage to Force
of Evil. The barroom scene is repeated in One-Eyed Jacks, where Henry Hathaway
got it for Nevada Smith.
All thematic
elements combine to produce Terry’s bloodied walk, a Via Dolorosa.
East of Eden
The two brothers
are Caleb (Cal) and Aaron. If Caleb, then Joshua, if Aaron, then Moses. They
are twins, therefore Jacob and Esau. Cain and Abel are specifically mentioned.
Cain, a tiller of
the soil, his sacrifice rejected, kills Abel. Esau sells his birthright for a
mess of pottage. Caleb sees the promised land and
defies the people to wholly follow Jehovah. Moses for his wrath is denied the promised land.
Abel’s
sacrifice is accepted and he is killed by Cain. Jacob wrests Esau’s
birthright from him. Aaron erects an idol in the wilderness that is destroyed.
Joshua leads the people into the promised land.
The circus of
identifications is not complete, their father is Adam and Isaac and Jehovah
(and Moses), their mother is a madam (Eve, the Whore
of Babylon and Miss Sadie Thompson all in one).
Cal in his
innocence sees war as profit falsely, the loss is Aaron. The disaster is
ameliorated by Abra (whose last name might be Cadabra, she opens the doors of
perception), a figure of Mary.
The
Magnificent Ambersons is an
important basis of Kazan’s filming. Zorba the Greek takes off from
Kate and Cal on the road. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland are an ideal presented
by Kazan to Dean and Harris, their performances are equally matched.
Rosenman’s score all but cites Lulu in the transition to
Kate’s office for the meeting with Aaron.
The Great War is
the locus of Steinbeck’s consideration, with patriotic parades and
German-baiting and the lone isolationist who goes to war as disillusioned as
the profiteer, finally. Knowledge is the theme,
innocence and experience are the dichotomy that transcends the crucial
structure, wisdom the desirable outcome.
Baby Doll
What a head of
steam Williams & Kazan get up on their Southern chuffer about a belle whose
heart belongs to Daddy (homme d’affaires), she won’t give it
to Archie Lee (cotton-gin operator) till a certain day in their marriage (her
twentieth birthday), by agreement. The syndicate moves in, wipes out the cotton
gins in Tigertail County, Mississippi, and by various encounters takes the
womenfolk by storm.
Parallel to
Sirk’s Written on the Wind, a good deal after Gone with the
Wind, a source of imagery in Altman’s Images (the ghostly
Vacarro). As per the central hallway of a Southern house, you can spy the
settin’ sun right through the manse called Tigertail.
Aunt Rose Comfort
in one of Williams’ prophetic bits goes to County Hospital to eat candy
sent by well-wishers.
Kazan is well
ahead of his time in the brute facts of his direction (Zeffirelli has a keen
apperception in The Taming of the Shrew), the
acting is under the control of a master dramatist, far and away the best thing
going.
It foretells a
state of affairs in which dog food is sold as steak.
The
housewife’s friend on “The Voice of the Mid-South” peddles
nostrums in New York and lines up for the Cabinet.
This is the film
Sarris thought he saw in Capra’s Meet John Doe, “a barefoot
Fascist”, and is the missing link to the Chayefsky/Lumet remake, Network.
Wild River
The
Shakespearean simplicity of the jest, “abit onus, obit anus”, as the basis of a marriage fantasy,
springs forth a multitude of structural relationships.
The Yearling and The Klansman have the
screenplay’s touch. An island hand sings, “Hurry sundown, see what tomorrow brings”. A Kind of Loving shares the theme, Straw Dogs the nighttime assault (The Chase is indicated), Sometimes
a Great Notion the marshal’s flotilla, Hearts of Age the surreal underpinnings, The Grapes of Wrath the tragedy, Doctor Zhivago and Mister
Moses the dam, Intruder in the Dust
the small Southern town.
The Twilight Zone is a constant source of analysis, “Nothing in the Dark”,
“The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, “The Passersby”,
“On Thursday We Leave for Home”. The TVA man arrives and departs by
plane like the Führer in Triumph des Willens,
it’s quite a grab bag.
“We’re
new,” he says, “we don’t have any
customs.” Wings Over the World, the last of the
warlords in Things to Come.
Kazan couches the
whole thing in Renoir’s The
Southerner.
Splendor in the Grass
Inge’s screenplay
derives its peculiar structure of imbrication and ellipsis from
Wordsworth’s poem, the full title of which is “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”. The agricultural
method is employed to suggest the basis of any economy, with specific reference
to the events of 1929. Thus Inge repays a wresting of sense toward
Mallarmé’s essential question in “Toast Funèbre”, and
his answer, asserted from Voltaire.
This is
constructed, in a manner dangerously close to Twain’s satire of Scott,
with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table merely superimposed to
suggest the feudal autocracy of Mr. Stamper and the problems of succession.
The central scene
is the second English class when the question is put to Deanie, “What does
the poet mean by ‘splendor in the grass’
and ‘glory in the flower’?” She is unable to answer, except
with reference to the discussion of chivalry in the earlier English class. The
dramatic value of this scene is pivotal, cinematically it creates by ellipsis
the intuition of Bud’s infidelity at the falls by way of chance remarks
in the crowded hallway, the other girls thronging to look out the window,
Juanita serenely content seated in front of her.
Kazan’s
direction is applied to Inge’s screenplay very rigorously because of the
rigorous structure, and this is how the acting is treated, as another level of
expression. To say the performances have been overpraised is simply to point
out that they hew to precise lines in a Hitchcockian manner enforced (but not
tortured) by Kazan from the screenplay. It will be noted that the acting is
equally fine in every role, major or minor, for this very reason.
America America
Because, at three
hours long, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times became bored and restless
like a child, Schlesinger produced a streamlined version of the same story,
suitably addressed in every artistic detail, as Midnight Cowboy.
Kazan’s
dramatic sense is his forte on the screen, analysis goes into the script and
appears in the actors, here he consciously uses the camera on location in
Anatolia to give a sense of landscape lending to the drama such force as it
undeniably possesses.
The
degrees of humiliation, leading to a humble station.
The mise en
scène is a succinct, effortless statement of facts. It can easily be
compared to Cacoyannis’ Zorba the Greek in every respect.
The Arrangement
A nervous
breakdown summarily described, a perfect analysis of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone masterpiece (directed by
Robert Parrish), “A Stop at Willoughby”.
All the
consequences are figured in the drama, the “sickness unto death” is
even diagnosed once or twice.
Social
implications make up a large part of the imagery, so delicate is the
arrangement.
|
If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, They’d immediately go out. |
The entire
structure, from Kazan’s novel, goes into The Last Tycoon on another basis, from Pinter’s screenplay of
Fitzgerald’s novel.
Vincent Canby
regarded the film as “incomprehensible kitsch”, the novel as
nugatory, and thought Kirk Douglas ought to have been replaced by
“someone on the order of a young Sam Jaffe.”
“A
confused, overly-contrived and overlength film peopled with a set of characters
about whom the spectator couldn’t care less” (Variety).
“It
isn’t successful” (Ebert).
“Very
forced, simply glib and indulgent” (Time
Out Film Guide).
“A
real shame” (TV Guide).
The Visitors
Vietnam is
described in Fuller’s terms as exactly the way it looks on television,
but there are people shooting at you.
On that basis,
and with a fulsome analysis designed in the last measure to be exhaustive, the
war comes home.
Screenplay and
direction coincide on ten thousand points independently, what seems like
careful effort toward nonchalance is a certainty that nothing’s missed.
The points occur almost instantaneously and are left to register with the
audience. Critics are shortchanged by this procedure.
An advantage of
the intimate technique is that it affords a view of Kazan’s stage
direction as well.
The Last Tycoon
The
muse of cinema.
As
distinguished from the boss’s daughter.
Vincent Canby of
the New York Times says it’s “full of echoes,” Variety
that it’s “unfocused though craftsmanlike,” Time Out Film
Guide “often pretty ponderous”, Paul Brenner (All Movie Guide) “curiously
constipated”.
Halliwell’s
Film Guide says it’s
“astonishingly inept and boring” and cites Pauline Kael, Sight
and Sound, Michael Billington and Punch to the same effect.
“I want a
quiet life.”
“I
can’t stop looking at you. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I want a
quiet life.”
The loveliest
song in the cinema, sung by Jeanne Moreau.
“I
don’t know what’s wrong with the scene. I thought that was a pretty
touching scene.”
Goya’s
lampshades.
The endgame is
ping-pong with a real Red.
“Mr. Stahr,
we’ll see the studio doesn’t fall.”
Theory of
moviemaking, cf. Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another
Town most importantly, it is not the work of writers, strictly speaking.