A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945)

(This review originally appeared on Kubrick On The Guillotine, a great film site that you should check out)

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.

Friendly Persuasion (1956)

Words cannot express my love for this tagline...

Dir.: William Wyler
Plot: A Quaker family in the 1860s try to reconcile their pacifist beliefs with the danger of the approaching Confederate forces.

You'd really have to have a heart of stone not to like this simple but accomplished picture about a Quaker family trying to cope with the Civil War in rural Indiana. Gary Cooper and Dorothy Maguire turn in career-best or near career-best performances as the father and mother of the house. Maguire is an actress I've never really cared for, but she really sells the primness of her character without losing her likeability. Cooper, on the other hand, I've always liked and he has some of the best scenes of his career here - the battlefield sequence in particular stands out as a beautiful piece of acting from the often unfairly-maligned Coop.