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.
