A tree grows in Brooklyn

USA 1945

Dir: Elia Kazan

129 mins

Cast: Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, James Dunn; based on the Betty Smith novel A tree grows in Brooklyn

Rating: G

The earthy quality of Brooklyn tenement squalor, about which Betty Smith wrote so eloquently in the bestseller novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, has been given a literal translation to the screen by 20th-Fox to become an experiment in audience restraint. This is the story of the poverty-ridden Nolan family.

Tree recalls an absorbing period of a colorful tribe, of a Brooklyn neighborhood that was tough in its growing-up, where kids fought, where on Saturday nights fathers and husbands, loped uncertainly from the corner quenchery.

Some of this might have acquired the tinge of travesty in hands less skilled than those of Smith – or director Elia Kazan – but never does the serio-comic intrude on a false note; never does this story become maudlin.

To Dorothy McGuire went the prize part of Katie Nolan. It is a role that she makes distinctive by underplaying. James Dunn plays excellently. Peggy Ann Garner is the teenaged Francie, and the young actress performs capitally.

Where Tree is frequently slow, it is offset by the story’s significance and pointed up notably by the direction of Elia Kazan.

1945 Academy award: Best Supp. Actor (James Dunn).

Nomination: Best Screenplay

Variety

For his directorial debut Elia Kazan (A Face in the Crowd/America, America/Pinky) helms what he considers to be a “sentimental fairytale,” as stated in his autobiography. But fortunately it’s better than that. It’s based on the best-seller by Betty Smith. The episodic film tells the true story of an impoverished struggling Irish family in the colorful Williamsburg area of Brooklyn in the early 1900s. It’s a grim tearjerker told with great love and tenderness, that never gets overwhelmed by its sentimentality and seems cinematic despite the director’s previous background in theater. ...

Dennis Schwartz: Ozus’ World Movie Reviews