PG | 2 h 8 min | Drama | 1945
Betty Smith’s partially autobiographical novel inspired Elia Kazan’s coming-of-age film that won three nominations and was awarded two Oscars. Like many of Frank Capra’s films, Kazan’s directorial debut about the needy Nolan family in 1912 downtown Brooklyn, New York, prioritizes the heart over the head.
Playful singer-daydreamer Johnny (James Dunn) waits tables. His diligent but dour wife, Katie (Dorothy McGuire), is a homemaker. So their children, Francie (13-year-old Peggy Ann Garner) and Neeley (12-year-old Ted Donaldson), can’t elude the shadow of want that haunts their home. Penury may have taken up permanent residence, but through the irrepressible Johnny, laughter finds a way in as an equally stubborn houseguest.
The dialogue-heavy screenplay captures the exhilaration of growing up with countless dreams, and the dread of growing old with many of them unrealized. The characters are layered, their arcs deliberate, their interiority believable. In their little universe of scarcity, no one’s a villain and nearly everyone’s a hero. So, it’s want that stands in as antagonist, needing no melodrama to tear families apart or reunite them.
Kazan asks piercing questions: Does a romanticizing of poverty numb its sting? Is love merely a responsibility fulfilled (working, earning, providing, protecting), visible in tasks we “do” willingly, if sullenly? Or does love demand more? Does it demand that we “be” cheerfully caring in thought too, in unspoken word, unseen gesture?
Kazan’s inquiring camera peers up at the Nolans’ rundown tenement, their crumbling balconies peering right back over desolate clotheslines. As you watch, a tree in the neighborhood and later a Christmas tree take on special meanings.
Garner and Dunn, in roles of a lifetime, play father-daughter soulmates. As bookworm Francie, swayed by breezy prose and poetry, Garner exudes an aching melancholy, yet Dunn as her father senses he must rise above it.
Attitude More Than Achievement
Francie knows that Johnny will move heaven and earth for his family, never mind that neither heaven nor earth so much as stir. To her, his chirpy effort matters more. Once, as she does when sharing something special with him, she whispers her quaint expression of inexplicable gratitude, “My cup runneth over!”Katie and her much-married sister, Sissy (Joan Blondell), are soulmates too, but only Sissy echoes Johnny’s gratitude for the tiniest of things. Sissy figures that life’s pointless if you can’t be grateful even for being born, being born to someone (a father, a mother), with someone (a brother, a sister), living for someone (a husband, a wife, a child). She believes that what you have or don’t have doesn’t matter; it’s miraculous enough to get to care and be cared for.
Katie, ever conscious of dispossession (not enough food, clothes, or savings, no role models for the children), can’t spot any miracles. Johnny and Sissy? They never tire of pointing at miracles: in the house, out of it, on their way upstairs, on their way down.
In Katie’s defense, Johnny’s drinking and gambling make it tougher to simply wink at his daydreaming. But she rarely stops to question if her overweening pessimism plays some part in pushing him away in the first place. Her children are naughty, but not naïve; they spy a connection and hint at it. Her mother’s more direct: “You have forgotten to think with your heart.”
Katie bears contempt for “foolish” wishes, whether Johnny’s or Francie’s, and sees even a new baby in the house as a bother rather than a blessing. But Johnny can’t wait for Francie to voice a wish for herself, and when she does (wanting to go to a better school), he trembles not with impatience at her indulgence but with fear at not being able to fulfill it.
The reality of deprivation stalks their every desire, warning that longing isn’t fulfillment. Yet to Johnny, longing is his birthright: If he’s denied abundance, he’ll imagine it and draw what joy he can from it. So he shares, even from the little he has. Katie struggles to be generous because she sees nothing but drudgery.
Francie insists that Katie tip the man who helps them move: “He worked awful hard, Mama.” Katie refuses. “We moved up to this flat to save money, and we’re not gonna start by throwing dimes away.”
If poverty of body or spirit is a kind of living hell, Kazan’s point isn’t that some people feel their hell more than their heaven; many of us do from time to time. Through his bittersweet film, he wonders why some don’t feel heaven at all.
