A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

[mallorys_camera]

Dunno exactly why Thanksgivinukah seemed incomplete without watching A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but it did. So I watched it. This was Elia Kazan's first movie. (I love Elia Kazan by the way, and wouldn't give a rat's ass if he'd ratted out every Stalinist in the U.S. Which he didn't. But if he had? Stalin was way creepier than Joe McCarthy.)

Betty Smith's novel is something of a masterpiece, dismissed in the post-Salinger surge of adolescent neorealist rebellion lit as sentimental tripe but actually extremely well structured and very, very moving. Is it realistic? Not in the slightest. It was written by a middle-aged woman who was a graduate of the Yale School of Drama's playwright program, well tutored in exactly which heartstrings to pluck to achieve maximum quiver.

The movie suffers from a clash in acting styes. It was a studio movie, which meant that Kazan -- who'd already helmed a dramatic naturalism movement in New York directing projects for the influential Group Theater -- had little or no control over casting or crew decisions. The weakest performance is James Dunn's as Johnnie Nolan. It won Dunn an Academy Award, interesting in retrospect because the performance is filled with all those over-the-top inflections and studied pauses that now demarcate "chewing the scenery" from acting. The girl who plays Francie keeps ricocheting back and forth between naturalism and overly stylized recital, but since Francie is not your typical stoical heroic survivor of poverty but rather a girl sitting on a huge reservoir of hysteria who's only surviving through sheer force of denial, the portrayal works.

The film is a remarkably unsentimental look at the tenement lives of first generation immigrants in the early years of the 20th century. Yes, Francie gets out. But she doesn't get out through the sheer force of her personality (with the unspoken subtext: And y'all could get out too if'n ya wasn't so shiftless!) No. She gets out entirely through luck. After her alcoholic father dies, her mother marries a retired cop.

In real life, Betty Smith wasn't quite as lucky. When her father died, she was 14. She was pulled from school and sent to work. (She was instructed to lie about her age.) One of her earliest jobs was in a clipping bureau (described in the novel but not in the movie), which is probably where she began to learn an appreciation for narrative.

Eventually, around age 19, she went back to high school and began spending time at Jackson Street Settlement House. (Settlement houses were part of a movement offering cultural opportunities to immigrants' children in an effort to improve their lives.) There she met another hard-driving poor kid whom she eventually married. He got into law school at the University of Michigan; she followed and never, ever went back to Brooklyn. She hated the place. She was a good enough writer and enough of a pro, though, not to let mere human sentiment deter her from exploiting a great locale.

Comments

[signorinakatina.livejournal.com]

I love that book! I still remember parts of it often.
I never knew the author studied playwriting. makes sense. And what you wrote about her own life gives me a little perspective, although I love to let myself believe in the optimism and beauty of the story--and in some ways I guess I really do believe in it.