Dir.: Elia Kazan
Plot: A bright young girl comes of age in a turn-of-the-century Brooklyn tenement, witnessing the tensions and struggles of her family.
Rarely does a young director’s first feature film contain such striking beauty and power as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But then again, rarely is that director Elia Kazan. And the young auteur had hardly set himself an easy task: coming off the back of nothing more than a short film about coal mining in Tennessee, Kazan was to condense an enormously popular 500-page novel by Betty Smith into a 2-hour studio production. The result is an astonishingly assured mini-epic which dampened handkerchiefs across the nation, and launched Kazan into a career that would change American film.
The story takes place in the pre-WWI tenement slums of Brooklyn and revolves around the Nolan family as seen through the eyes of Francie Nolan, a precociously bright child on the cusp of adolescence. While Francie has only remote admiration for her tirelessly hardworking mother Katie (Dorothy McGuire), she is besotted with her father, Johnny, an exuberant Irish fantasist. Like Francie, he has dreams which go beyond the tenements and lives to help his daughter fulfil her ambition of going to a good school. However, he is also a hopelessly improvident alcoholic and unable to hold down a steady job. Francie initially resents her mother’s cold attitude towards Johnny’s flights of fancy, but when her teacher remarks that “pipe dreamers can be very lovable people, but they don’t help anybody”, she begins to see that her father’s empty talk of wealth and success is just as cruel, even if his intentions are pure.
As she grows older, Francie’s relationship with her mother comes more and more to the forefront of both their lives. Katie is at heart a kind woman, but one who must be ruthlessly pragmatic in order to shoulder the burden of keeping the family afloat. This culminates in a decision which uproots Francie’s fragile world and leads to an emotional estrangement between mother and daughter. This is eventually resolved in the film’s most successful scene, in which Katie goes into labour at home and Francie is left alone to take care of her. All of their past hurts and insecurities come to the surface in a sumptuous treble triumph of acting, writing and directing which alone would make the film worth watching.
The central performances are uniformly superb, and although James Dunn won an Oscar for his portrayal of Johnny Nolan, McGuire is even better as the no-nonsense Katie, grown hard while still a young woman. Peggy Ann Garner gives a fairly standard wide-eyed child performance until about midway through the film, when she really comes into her own as the teenaged Francie, holding up her end in some tough scenes opposite McGuire.
That said, what really brings the film to life is the supporting cast who manage to create a vivid picture of a now-vanished time and place. To anyone who has read much about classic age stars this should come as no surprise; the film’s setting closely mirrors the upbringing of many of the era’s actors. Making a particularly memorable impression is 1930s starlet Joan Blondell as Katie’s sister, the brassy and oft-married Aunt Sissy, and the ever-reliable Lloyd Nolan as the soft-spoken policeman who looks out for the family.
At its heart, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is an examination of the psychological effects of poverty. The strained relationship between Francie’s parents arises from their utterly conflicting reactions in the face of grinding hardship. The same can be said of the distance between Katie and her daughter; far from cold and distant, McGuire’s characterisation is a deeply sympathetic one, and perhaps her greatest performance of all time.
Having realized too late that the charismatic dreamer she fell in love with is incorrigibly feckless, Katie’s harsh treatment of Francie must be read as an attempt to protect her daughter from making the same mistakes. However, a terrifically poignant moment near the film’s close involving Francie’s graduation flowers leaves us with the final reminder that although dreams may have to be put aside in hard times, they must never be crushed out entirely.
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