America, America (1963)

****
Country: US
Director: Elia Kazan

If I hadn't already known that America, America was directed by Elia Kazan, I doubt that I ever would have guessed it, so different is this picture from anything else by Kazan I've seen. Kazan used unfamiliar actors and technicians for the film—it was photographed by Haskell Wexler and edited by Dede Allen, both little known at the time but within a few years to become luminaries in their fields—and shot it almost entirely in Greece and Turkey. With its location shooting, cast of unknowns, use of the hand-held camera, and post-sync sound recording, it has a distinctly European feel, almost in the tradition of Italian neorealism. The thing which most sets it apart from the rest of Kazan's work, though, is its screenplay. Kazan is known for his masterful interpretation of screenplays written by other people—Tennessee Williams, William Inge, John Steinbeck, Budd Schulberg for example—to which according to Kazan he often made uncredited contributions, but America, America was the first picture he conceived and wrote by himself. In his 1988 autobiography, Kazan explains how, nearly twenty years into his career as a film director, he came to the decision to write his first screenplay: "In someone else's hands, it would lose its flavor. I'd grown up in that environment, remembered every sight, sound, smell, and taste. . . . I had to write that screenplay myself."

The film opens with a montage of landscapes of Anatolia in Turkey and Kazan's voice-over: "My name is Elia Kazan. I am a Greek by blood, Turk by birth, American because my uncle made a journey." It is the story, handed down orally in Kazan's family, of how his uncle, in the film called Stavros (Stathis Giallelis), became the first member of Kazan's family to emigrate to the U.S. and later arranged for his mother and his sisters and brothers along with their families to follow him one by one. (Kazan himself came when he was four years old.) It is not the story of the immigrant experience in America, but of everything that led up to that experience. It is at the same time a classic bildungsroman, or story of the coming of age and education in life of a young man, and a chronicle of overcoming huge obstacles to achieve a dream.

The film begins in 1896, when Stavros, a teenager living in what is the eastern part of modern Turkey, and his family become caught up in the struggle of the Armenian and Greek minorities against the ruling Ottoman Turks. The first part of the film establishes the state of terror the family lives in as the Ottoman government takes reprisals against the rebellious minority populations, culminating in a harrowing sequence in which Stavros's Armenian friend sacrifices himself to save Armenian villagers from being burned alive by soldiers after taking refuge in a church. Finally, in desperation his father takes all the family's material assets and dispatches Stavros to Istanbul, where he is to set himself up in business with his uncle, a prosperous rug merchant, and send for the rest of the family after he is established. But nothing goes according to his father's plans. On the way the naive Stavros is robbed, falsely accused of crimes he didn't commit, and finally forced to kill a man to save himself from death. He arrives in Istanbul relieved to have made it to his destination, but exhausted, penniless, and in rags.

Unable to fulfill his duty to his family, Stavros is sustained by one thing: his dream of emigrating to America to start over. Yet time and again circumstances contrive to block him. Far from being a successful businessman, his uncle is a financial failure who can do nothing to help him except urge him to marry the plain daughter of the rich merchant across the road. Instead Stavros works as a laborer, realizing that it will take years to save enough money for his passage. First he is robbed by a prostitute, then brutally beaten by police in a raid on a revolutionary group he has fallen in with and left for dead. After he endures one setback after another, his fixity of purpose begins to border on obsession. Inured to moral scruples, he turns ruthless and exploitative in his willingness to do anything necessary to make his dream of reaching America real.

The gradual transformation of Stavros from gentle, simple boy to hardened and mistrustful man cannot have been an easy one for Kazan to write or for the inexperienced young actor Stathis Giallelis, whom Kazan personally chose and spent more than a year grooming for the role, to play. Yet both manage to bring it off, making us understand clearly how and why Stavros becomes what he does. Stavros is both a victim and a victimizer, and Kazan and Giallelis never let us lose sight of this essential conflict of identity churning within him. Stavros is at heart a decent man, but a decent man with a dream that requires him to do things decent people don't do easily. Still, he never entirely loses his awareness of the moral compromises he must make to attain his goal, somehow managing despite all that happens to him to hold onto his inner humanity. “I’ve always kept my honor safe inside me," he says at one point.

We see flashes of his humanity from time to time when this repressed part of his nature impels him to treat those even less fortunate than himself with kindness—the sweet-tempered girl he plans to marry for her money then desert, a love-starved woman older than himself, a fatally ill young man he supports in his hopeless dream of reaching America too. Stavros's bitterness at having his aspirations repeatedly thwarted, as great as that bitterness is, never quite consumes him altogether. We are always aware that if he does achieve his dream, there is every chance that spark of humanity he has been forced to damp down will flare up again and shine bright. "In America I believe I will be washed clean," he says.

It takes roughly two-thirds of the movie—and a frustrating series of defeats and reversals and the rare stroke of fortuitous good luck—before Stavros at last manages to secure a third-class ticket and board the ship that will take him to America. But just as he arrives in New York, calamity strikes again and it seems as if circumstances are propelling him toward inevitable disappointment, that he will be rejected by the immigration authorities and sent back to Turkey. Then just as suddenly Stavros's fortunes reverse yet again, when the unexpected repayment of his kindness to one of the other emigrants on board makes it possible for his dream to come true. In the end his success at creating a new life in America is the result of both years of unwavering determination and his refusal to give up the last vestiges of his humanity.

Of the many beautifully staged and photographed scenes in the movie, my favorite occurs right before the end, directly after the ship has docked and the immigrants have disembarked. Stavros has been herded along with his fellow passengers into the huge immigration hall at Ellis Island, but because the immigration officials have left for the day, the newcomers must spend their first night in America inside the hall. When light breaks the next morning, everyone is asleep and the hall almost completely silent. As the immigration officers start to arrive, the exhausted immigrants begin to wake and stir. Within moments the packed hall goes from complete inactivity to a frenzy of movement, while the dozy silence erupts into a cacophony, and we see and hear the hopeful excitement of these people as they prepare to begin their new lives in a new land.

America, America is Kazan's most personal film not only because it deals with his own family's history, but also because it is one of his most human and least dramatically stylized films. Kazan deals with issues of tremendous importance, issues like genocide, poverty, ethnic bigotry, class prejudice, and the injustices endured by immigrants in the U.S. But he makes the artistic decision to deal with these large issues on the human scale, as part of the context of the particular story he is telling. The powerful emotional reactions the movie elicits grow organically from the characters and their experiences, and that humanizing tendency is precisely what makes this film so accessible and so moving.

America, America is a great achievement even for the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden and unlike anything else in Kazan's filmography. It's clear that for Kazan, writing and directing this picture, which he has often called his favorite, were labors of love. It is in many ways the summit of his remarkable career in film.

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 2

The Sea of Grass (1947)
***
Director: Elia Kazan

The fourth movie Tracy and Hepburn made together is a Western, a nineteenth-century family saga that will remind many of Giant. As the film opens, Lutie Cameron (Hepburn), a young woman from St. Louis, is engaged to Jim Brewton (Tracy), the owner of a huge cattle ranch in New Mexico. When Jim sends a message saying he can't leave the ranch to come to St. Louis for the wedding, that they will have to be married in New Mexico, it's clear where his priorities lie. Once in New Mexico and married, Lutie finds herself in an environment she has trouble adjusting to. Jim is involved in a legal dispute with homesteaders, the kind of conflict that fuels so many Westerns, and is willing to go to any lengths to prevail, even acts of brutality. When his brutality harms a farming couple with whom Lutie has become friendly, forcing them to abandon their homestead, it becomes too much for her and she leaves Jim and her young daughter and goes to Denver.

In Denver the lonely and emotionally vulnerable Lutie runs into Brice Chamberlain (Melvyn Douglas), the lawyer who represents the homesteaders in court and is Jim's bitter enemy. After a one-night stand with Brice, Lutie returns home, contrite and pregnant, and gives birth to a son, Brock. When Jim accidentally finds out the truth about Brock and Lutie refuses to support him in his illegal range war with the homesteaders, he asks her to leave. She goes back to St. Louis and except for one brief visit doesn't return to the ranch until many years later, after her children are grown. Her daughter Sarah Beth (Phyllis Thaxter) has become a sensible young woman, but Brock (Robert Walker) has grown into a surly, impulsive young man with a hot temper. Out of concern for him she finally returns, only to find that he is a fugitive wanted for murder. Brock's tragic outcome proves to be the act that finally reunites the now middle-aged couple at the end of the film.

The Sea of Grass was the second movie directed by Elia Kazan, right before his social issues pictures of the late forties and A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. As such, it doesn't bear the stylistic stamp of his later, better-known films. (Kazan was not pleased with the film. "It's the only picture I've ever made that I'm ashamed of," he writes in his 1988 autobiography.) One thing it does have in common with his later work, though, is the quality of the acting, no surprise since Kazan was a former actor and in late 1947 would become a co-founder of the Actors Studio. Attention is often focused on Robert Walker's flavorful performance as the bad boy Brock, and his acting here is certainly an eye-opener, one of his few early performances that hint at the greatness he was to achieve later in his career as the loopy Bruno in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Still, Tracy and Hepburn hold their own against his more showy role.

One hardly associates Spencer Tracy or Katharine Hepburn with the Method, yet both excel under Kazan's direction. Tracy eschews the relaxed affability he made appear so effortless, instead tapping into the hardness of earlier roles like those in Man's Castle and Fury. His Jim Brewton is a man driven by ambition to create an empire and by ruthlessness to hold on to it at any cost. He is obstinate, domineering, and unforgiving, a man who demands unquestioning loyalty from Lutie and when he doesn't get it drives her out, then redirects his love for her to overindulgent affection for his children. Jim isn't exactly an unsympathetic character, but his flaws do make him a hard one to like completely.

Like Tracy, Hepburn also avoids what comes easily to her. In her straight dramatic performances, she often seemed self-conscious and overly earnest. Her brittle acting style—especially as she aged—was better suited to comedy or to seriocomic parts where she turned her screen image to her advantage by poking fun at it. Toning down her mannerisms, she convincingly portrays Lutie, who ages some twenty years during the picture, by skillfully balancing the character's strength and vulnerability. It's one of Hepburn's unsung performances and lingers in the memory long after the film is over. The range wars plot might be familiar and the personal relationships at times close to soap opera, but the acting can't be faulted. Of the Tracy-Hepburn films, this is the dark horse, the film most likely to rise in one's estimation on repeat viewing.


State of the Union (1948)
***^½
Director: Frank Capra

Tracy and Hepburn's next movie, State of the Union, was a political comedy-drama based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by the renowned Broadway writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Tracy plays Grant Matthews, a self-made millionaire industrialist, and Hepburn his estranged wife Mary. Matthews is having an affair with Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury), a newspaper publisher with a Lady Macbeth complex who wants to use her newspaper empire to promote him to run against Harry Truman as the Republican candidate in the 1948 presidential election. (At the time Truman was considered a sure loser. This is the election remembered for the photo of the triumphant Truman holding up a newspaper with the headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.") Matthews is a political amateur running as an anti-politician with an idealistic message of togetherness and cooperation. (Sound familiar?) As Jim Conover (Adolphe Menjou), the slick political adviser Kay hires to mastermind the campaign, puts it, Matthews has the "rare combination of sincerity and drive the common herd will go for."

When his handlers insist they need his wife and children to create the right image for the campaign, Matthews is persuaded to reconcile with Mary. At first she doesn't understand that the reconciliation is a publicity gimmick. After she does, she stays on board to make sure Grant remains true to his political ideals. Matthews soon finds himself in the middle of a complex tug-of-war. He is caught between his wife and his mistress, both of whom want to be the main influence in his campaign as well as in his personal life. He's also caught between staying true to his principles, as Mary urges him to do, and the pandering to special interests that Kay and his advisers tell him is necessary to get the nomination. Things reach a crisis as Grant appears to have sold out to assure his nomination and the film moves toward its climactic sequence, a national radio-television broadcast in which Grant will lay out the policy platform Kay and company have devised for him. When Grant finally sees the toll the betrayal of his principles has taken on a dismayed Mary, what will he do, and what will be the ultimate state of their own union? Integrity or compromise? Mary or Kay?

It's easy to see what drew Capra to this project. An exploitative press, political chicanery, the corrupting influence of money and power, a main character caught in the conflict between idealism and compromise—these are things found in so many of Capra's movies. The hero, Grant Matthews, is an ordinary man enmeshed in a process he doesn't fully comprehend and can't control; the villains are the pompous, the hypocritical, the humorless, the greedy, and the power-hungry. In Capra's hands this material may become another version of his well-worn populist hokum, but it's impossible to resist. Despite all the references to politicians of the time whom few modern viewers are likely recognize, many things in the movie haven't dated at all. References to subjects like tax rates, inflation, economic depression, the dire state of housing and medical care, defense readiness, globalism, and whispering campaigns still seem surprisingly relevant. And the film's cynical view of politics is right in tune with current attitudes.

Of all the Tracy-Hepburn movies, this one seems the least tailored to their familiar screen personalities. Indeed, neither was Capra's first choice. He wanted either Clark Gable or Gary Cooper for Grant, and Claudette Colbert was actually cast as Mary before a dispute over her contract (she insisted that she not be required to work past 5 p.m.) caused Hepburn to step in just two days before filming began. Yet Tracy and Hepburn do great work for Capra. Tracy's everyman quality is well suited to the self-made man motivated more by the desire to serve than by ambition, and he strikes me as more believable presidential timber than the macho Gable or the impassive Cooper. Hepburn's role is clearly secondary to Tracy's, and she seems content to defer to him for a change. Any of a number of actresses could have handled her part capably, but one thing Hepburn puts across more convincingly than another actress might have done is the enthusiastic idealism of Mary, a quality Hepburn was particularly adept at projecting. The cast is rounded out by Lansbury (22-years old playing 40), Menjou, Van Johnson as a wise-cracking reporter commenting from the sidelines, and in smaller parts familiar faces like Raymond Walburn, Margaret Hamilton, and Charles Lane.

TO BE CONTINUED

Viva Zapata! (1952)

***
Country: US
Director: Elia Kazan

Viva Zapata! has all the earmarks of a studio prestige project. Marlon Brando's first movie after he created such a sensation in A Streetcar Named Desire, it was directed by his Streetcar director, Elia Kazan, during the heyday of Kazan's career and personally produced by the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck. The screenplay was by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Steinbeck, who would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later. The film received five Oscar nominations (winning one—Anthony Quinn for best supporting actor), including one for best actor for Brando, who did win best actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and from the British Academy. Given the formidable talent involved and the praise the film has received (David Thomson calls it "impressive" and "original"), it's one that I've looked forward to seeing for many years and was finally able to when it premiered on TCM recently. (It won't be available on DVD until next month.) I have to say, though, that despite all the care obviously lavished on it, my reaction is that this is a work of mixed quality that does not fully live up to its reputation.

Marlon Brando as Zapata in his bizarre-looking makeup

Set during the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century, the film deals with the role in those events of Emiliano Zapata, an illiterate peasant who became one of the heroes of that revolution, the gravity of this subject another indication of the seriousness with which this project was approached by all involved. Brando is very good indeed in the title part (although I have to ask myself, "What were they thinking when they put him in that absurd makeup?"). He plays Zapata very quietly, almost meekly in one of his most subtle, least affected performances. This is a man in conflict, yet Brando conveys that conflict less as externalized turmoil than as internalized confusion. Zapata is no zealot, but an uncomplicated man who, because others admire the way he speaks his mind and acts on the strength of his convictions, is called upon to become a leader. He does reluctantly accept that role, allowing circumstances to direct him into a course of action he does not feel naturally suited for. But unlike nearly everyone else in the film, his ideals are not subverted by the power he finds himself wielding, and he eventually forgoes that power because he cannot accept the inevitable necessity to compromise his principles. In the end, though, he finds that the simple people he loves will not allow him to remain in retirement and that he must sacrifice his own desires, and eventually his life, to give the people what they need. Like so many of Steinbeck's heroes, he becomes a martyr. Brando, however, manages to avoid the sanctimony and self-righteousness that are the pitfalls of such a contrivance, stoically accepting that he must put aside his own welfare for the common good.

As you might expect in a movie directed by Kazan, who himself started as a stage and film actor and worked as a stage director in the 1940s, there are other good performances in the film as well. After more than fifteen years playing forgettable parts, Mexican-born Anthony Quinn, playing Zapata's brother Eufemio, finally found his niche, one from which he rarely strayed for the rest of his long career. Interestingly, he had replaced Brando as Stanley Kowalski when the stage version of Streetcar went on tour, and many years later was one of several actors considered for Don Corleone in The Godfather before Brando, who was Francis Ford Coppola's first choice but whose reputation for being difficult and demanding made Paramount executives nervous, was finally cast. Quinn excels in his later scenes when he abandons his revolutionary ideals to self-interest and becomes a disillusioned, hedonistic wreck. Jean Peters, a Fox starlet of the early 1950s who later married Howard Hughes, is surprisingly understated and believable as Zapata's wife, Josefa, and has quite good chemistry with Brando.

There is also much to admire in Kazan's direction. He stages key scenes with great imagination and visual force: the scene in which Zapata and others gradually surround a group of mounted soldiers leading a prisoner by a rope tied around his neck and liberate him; a drily funny scene in which Zapata meets Josefa's merchant-class family and indulges in a game of one-upmanship, cleverly trading platitudes with them to prove he is worthy of their daughter; and two separate assassination scenes, including the one that acts as the finale of the film, staged almost ritualistically. The film also contains several action sequences, such as the one in which Zapata and his men blow up an Army train to steal guns and ammunition, that show what a great director of action pictures or Westerns Kazan could have been had such subjects appealed to him. Although shot largely in Texas (it's unclear whether this was by choice or because of opposition by the Mexican government to filming in Mexico), Kazan and Fox house cinematographer Joe MacDonald give the film the authentic look of the sere landscape of northern Mexico. I do think, though, that the use of color, which Fox permitted for less artistically ambitious projects than this one, would have improved the film. The decision to film in black-and-white was likely by design, since at the time there was a prejudice that monochrome was more appropriate for serious films and color more suited to frivolous ones.

With such obvious strengths, why then am I so ambivalent towards the film as a whole? I think almost everything in the movie I can find to criticize stems from Steinbeck's muddled, unfocused screenplay. For one thing, the film labors under the curse of American movies of the 1950s—the desire to make a Statement. Yet for all its aspiration to significance, Viva Zapata! is remarkably vague about what it wants to say. Its overriding message seems to have something to do with the simplistic idea that power corrupts and the nebulous belief that the People are instinctively right and in the end will prevail over despotism, concepts expressed at regular intervals through didactic speechifying by the characters. The movie is noticeably short on specifics, however, and sidesteps difficult issues such as the role of the rule of law in a revolution or an examination of the moral limits of the use of force and violence to effect social and political change. Admittedly, it's likely the film avoids specifics partly because of the fearful climate of the early 1950s, when any sentiments that smacked of socialism or communism were not just suspect, but downright dangerous to anyone connected with the movie business. (Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and "named names" in April 1952, shortly after Viva Zapata! was released.)

Another failing of the movie is to make the enemies of Zapata and the revolution such ponderously clichéd villains. This is especially true of Fernando Aguirre, the character played by Joseph Wiseman. Aguirre starts out as a sympathetic character and supporter of Zapata but soon becomes a wily provocateur, a sort of Iago figure whose motivations are completely mystifying. Wiseman's performance becomes progressively more mannered, until he is finally just a step away from Dr. No. At the end Aguirre even switches sides and without any explanation becomes Zapata's enemy, Judas to Zapata's Christ-like martyr, another element that steers the film away from clear-headed analysis and too close to unsubtle parable for my liking, a tendency that I find often compromises Steinbeck's fiction. Nor is the film helped by Steinbeck's heavy-handed symbolism—for instance, in the final scene Zapata's white horse running free in the mountains after his death, an obvious symbol of his indomitable spirit as an inspiration to his adoring followers. At the same time, I don't feel entirely comfortable with the romanticized portrayal of the noble Mexican peasants in the film. There is something patronizing in the portrayal of their naïve, childlike simplicity, their passivity that requires strong men of action to lead them, and their almost superstitious faith in messianic figures like Zapata.

I would sum up watching Viva Zapata! as a less than totally satisfying experience, one of admiring its best parts while feeling there is something lacking in the movie as a whole. This is a film designed to be held together by its themes, and those themes are simply not conveyed clearly or compellingly enough to do the job. In the end, despite the presence of Brando, I found Viva Zapata! not far removed from the conventional studio biopics of the 1930s and 1940s.