Reader’s Digest published Fulton Oursler’s article in its December 1945 edition which, in turn, became the basis for director Elia Kazan’s second of 19 feature-length motion pictures, Boomerang! (1947). An especially relevant and taut film it is, too. Steeped as it is in stark and sobering black and white naturalism, this is considered part of the jaded film noir genre. In its first half, it’s easy to see why. Boomerang! has an almost exclusively dark view of mankind as a petty, raging mob, a theme in Kazan’s movies.
The status quo reeks from every pore of nearly every man and woman in a mid-sized Connecticut city, where a priest is gunned down in public, execution style, in a shocking scene. The men who run the New England city are pestering cronies and second-handers. The women are also bad, depicted as a population of nattering females that add up to a herd of guttersnipes. This is a measured depiction, however, nested into daily outrages and outbursts that any one from every station in life might relate to given a certain context. Water cooler gossip and chatter, so prevalent in today’s mindless media, social and otherwise, spreads like a silent and deadly disease without question in this upper east coast town.
There are exceptions, though, in a few fallible men and one, lone woman. Kazan, working with screenwriter Richard Murphy (who worked with Kazan later on Panic in the Streets), delivers the flawed hero in leading man Dana Andrews. From the beginning, Andrews as the state’s attorney checks and thinks for himself. He’s a man of the people but he is foremost a man of reason. In a key scene, when he’s presented with a dilemma which threatens to destroy his highest value, he gains balance and guidance from principle. Not by merging with the herd, ceding to the mob, or yielding to pure, raw emotion. His inspiration comes from words in a book and it is followed by a scene, really one of her best in pictures, with Jane Wyatt (Jim Anderson’s wife on Father Knows Best) as his wife.
In quiet, intimate scenes between Wyatt and Andrews, Kazan embeds his signature of deep and, to a certain degree, intellectual loving couples — think of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Man on a Tightrope, On the Waterfront, even Wild River — uniting and acting on principle against some form of adversity, usually collectivist injustice. These are not the picture’s dominant scenes or themes. But, with Wyatt’s simple reply to her husband that she “didn’t intend it to”, their brief but indelible unity is early proof that strokes of romanticism move and fuel Kazan’s exceptional filmography.
Can collectives be wrong? This is the underlying question which introduces the Boomerang! theme that the collective must be challenged by the individual who stands alone against everyone and everything. This, of course, is the opposite theme of these collectivist times, which makes Boomerang! more urgent, meaningful and potent. With Lee J. Cobb (12 Angry Men) as a rational policeman, Karl Malden (On the Waterfront) as a detective and Arthur Kennedy (Too Late for Tears) as the accused murderer, Boomerang! dramatizes the highly charged prospect of jumping to the wrong conclusion over the murder of an innocent man. This entails examining injustice against society’s most vulnerable victims, in this case an Army veteran who is easy pickings, police brutality, the incalculable damage of cronyism and the crucial role of the free press.
Boomerang! shows what shapes the factors that cause an entire community to become a lynch mob — today’s mindless Me, Too movement comes to mind — and drives the individualist to doubt, question and “fight the whole town”. Loaded with tightly drawn lines, ideas and performances and laced with clues to beat the men of the status quo, who gang up and intimidate with what amount to loaded questions, Boomerang! nails its gritty noirishness, lampoons populism in its lowest forms and flips up a single, penetrating question: “Is one man’s life worth more than the community?”
Though too much of what backs up the answer happens offscreen, which becomes apparent in the film’s left-field courtroom climax, Boomerang! demonstrates with a sense of purpose and style that getting smacked back with the force of an accepted rotten idea stems from the false premise of the question itself.
At its roots, director Elia Kazan’s first motion picture, an adaptation of Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is a deceptively taut dramatization of an alcoholic’s family. This could be anywhere in the United States, really, and the essential plot and characters would ring as bitterly, poignantly true as they do here. Screened by this reviewer on the big screen for the first time in Hollywood at the 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival (more on the screening later; read about festival here), I had seen it in home theater years ago and knew that the conventional wisdom about Kazan’s 1945 debut is that it’s about an immigrant Irish family struggling to survive in New York City.
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But it’s not. Each of those aspects of the Nolan family is understated in the script; what matters is the action through the choices of each character, from father Johnny (played by James Dunn, a fallen star who apparently struggled with alcoholism) to his two kids and wife, played by Dorothy Maguire in one of her best roles. Peggy Ann Garner gives one of the greatest juvenile screen performances as Francie Nolan. Ted Donaldson, who introduced the screening, plays younger child Neeley, the film’s comic relief.
The action takes place in Brooklyn at the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution is transforming lives and radically improving the culture. This is evident in the character Francie (Garner), who desperately wants to become a writer, and her Aunt Sissy (Joan Blondell at her best, reminding me of a saucier Scarlett Johansson), who has an opportunity to aspire to the middle class life in the nation that arguably created the middle class. Everyone from the barkeeper to the policeman (Lloyd Nolan shining in the role) is on the upward trajectory.
Not the Nolan family, however, who are held back by waiter Johnny’s drunkenness, negligence and inability to provide for his poor wife and kids. His strengths are known in time but he’s made dreams his master, to paraphrase Kipling’s poem, and he’s unable to cash in on capitalism. Amid gay tunes, frolicking children and a trolley car salute, Johnny’s cheerful disposition comes at the expense of his burdened and embittered wife, Katie (Maguire) who must be the mind and body of the family, depriving her of dreams, goals and soul. Maguire’s tired eyes and downward vocal tones mark the decline in a characterization that calls across the ages to all those betrayed by their loved ones and themselves through drink, dysfunction and moral evasion.
This leaves Neeley and Francie with a harsh mother who’s a chronic reality check and killjoy—”Mama said” is the kids’ sad profession of faith—though they make their own way in the exciting new world, roaming the five and dime, playing with worldly Aunt Sissy and bantering with one another in competition and in code, the language of all children of alcoholics walking on eggshells trying to navigate the secrets, the anger and the shame. Kazan navigates, too, keeping steady command of this powerful movie with a constant focus on the characters, not a showcase of the world they inhabit, at Christmastime, in classroom and Manhattan’s distant yet distinctly accessible skyline, a quiet character in its way representing the film’s physical, spiritual, industrial and American ideal. Agonizing scenes of hardship and suffering and all, there is an abiding worship for the new world in every frame.
Brilliantly rendered details move the plot toward its tragic and bittersweet titular theme that progress is possible at any stage in life, even when life seems impossible—closeups of the child in a moment of realization, a gesture with rosewater, shadows on the wall—such as a song played on a piano and sung from the soul or a rooftop compact between cohorts. The snow and hard rain that build to the climax gently but insistently slow to rhythmic drops symbolizing a child’s answered prayers. When the child’s compositions are delivered to the mother as Katie gives birth literally and figuratively—to a conscience; a new awareness of herself, motherhood and joy—the family is made good and whole, with one final, crucial reward to come.
The result in Elia Kazan’s black and white A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is both wrenching and liberating, which makes this movie unforgettable.
TCM writer Jeremy Arnold interviewed Ted Donaldson (who played Neeley) before the TCM Classic Film Festival 2016 world premiere of the restored print, which was, in fact, pristine to my eyes. Donaldson said he’d grown up in Brooklyn and that he recalls Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront) convening the cast around a giant, viking-style table and instructing everyone that this movie is a small story about people’s desires, tensions, ambitions and problems and how they try to solve them—and that, if A Tree Grows in Brooklyn isn’t about that, it isn’t about anything. He made the audience laugh when he talked about Blondell’s “ebullient sexuality” and admitted his boyhood crush on the actress, who let him sit on her lap. Later, Donaldson said, she gave him an autographed picture of herself with the inscription: “With love from Joan…I’m waiting for you.”
At its roots, director Elia Kazan’s first motion picture, an adaptation of Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is a deceptively taut dramatization of an alcoholic’s family. This could be anywhere in the United States, really, and the essential plot and characters would ring as bitterly, poignantly true as they do here. Screened by this reviewer on the big screen for the first time in Hollywood at the 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival (more on the screening later; read about festival here), I had seen it in home theater years ago and knew that the conventional wisdom about Kazan’s 1945 debut is that it’s about an immigrant Irish family struggling to survive in New York City.
Click to Buy
But it’s not. Each of those aspects of the Nolan family is understated in the script; what matters is the action through the choices of each character, from father Johnny (played by James Dunn, a fallen star who apparently struggled with alcoholism) to his two kids and wife, played by Dorothy Maguire in one of her best roles. Peggy Ann Garner gives one of the greatest juvenile screen performances as Francie Nolan. Ted Donaldson, who introduced the screening, plays younger child Neeley, the film’s comic relief.
The action takes place in Brooklyn at the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution is transforming lives and radically improving the culture. This is evident in the character Francie (Garner), who desperately wants to become a writer, and her Aunt Sissy (Joan Blondell at her best, reminding me of a saucier Scarlett Johansson), who has an opportunity to aspire to the middle class life in the nation that arguably created the middle class. Everyone from the barkeeper to the policeman (Lloyd Nolan shining in the role) is on the upward trajectory.
Not the Nolan family, however, who are held back by waiter Johnny’s drunkenness, negligence and inability to provide for his poor wife and kids. His strengths are known in time but he’s made dreams his master, to paraphrase Kipling’s poem, and he’s unable to cash in on capitalism. Amid gay tunes, frolicking children and a trolley car salute, Johnny’s cheerful disposition comes at the expense of his burdened and embittered wife, Katie (Maguire) who must be the mind and body of the family, depriving her of dreams, goals and soul. Maguire’s tired eyes and downward vocal tones mark the decline in a characterization that calls across the ages to all those betrayed by their loved ones and themselves through drink, dysfunction and moral evasion.
This leaves Neeley and Francie with a harsh mother who’s a chronic reality check and killjoy—”Mama said” is the kids’ sad profession of faith—though they make their own way in the exciting new world, roaming the five and dime, playing with worldly Aunt Sissy and bantering with one another in competition and in code, the language of all children of alcoholics walking on eggshells trying to navigate the secrets, the anger and the shame. Kazan (On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata!) navigates, too, keeping steady command of this powerful movie with a constant focus on the characters, not a showcase of the world they inhabit, at Christmastime, in classroom and Manhattan’s distant yet distinctly accessible skyline, a quiet character in its way representing the film’s physical, spiritual, industrial and American ideal. Agonizing scenes of hardship and suffering and all, there is an abiding worship for the new world in every frame.
Brilliantly rendered details move the plot toward its tragic and bittersweet titular theme that progress is possible at any stage in life, even when life seems impossible—closeups of the child in a moment of realization, a gesture with rosewater, shadows on the wall—such as a song played on a piano and sung from the soul or a rooftop compact between cohorts. The snow and hard rain that build to the climax gently but insistently slow to rhythmic drops symbolizing a child’s answered prayers. When the child’s compositions are delivered to the mother as Katie gives birth literally and figuratively—to a conscience; a new awareness of herself, motherhood and joy—the family is made good and whole, with one final, crucial reward to come.
The result in Elia Kazan’s black and white A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is both wrenching and liberating, which makes this movie unforgettable.
TCM writer Jeremy Arnold interviewed Ted Donaldson (who played Neeley) before the TCM Classic Film Festival 2016 world premiere of the restored print, which was, in fact, pristine to my eyes. Donaldson said he’d grown up in Brooklyn and that he recalls Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata!) convening the cast around a giant, viking-style table and instructing everyone that this movie is a small story about people’s desires, tensions, ambitions and problems and how they try to solve them—and that, if A Tree Grows in Brooklyn isn’t about that, it isn’t about anything. He made the audience laugh when he talked about Blondell’s “ebullient sexuality” and admitted his boyhood crush on the actress, who let him sit on her lap. Later, Donaldson said, she gave him an autographed picture of herself with the inscription: “With love from Joan…I’m waiting for you.”
Redemption through testimony—an individual rising against the mob to exercise free speech and speak out—is the theme of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), which deserves its reputation as a great motion picture. The movie, starring Academy Award-winning Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in her Oscar-winning motion picture debut, is comparable in moral heft to Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1962), throwing out radical ideas, questions and challenges for the audience that grant no quarter to half measures, pragmatism and grayness. Everyone should see this film, based on Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper articles, and take the test it offers in this wholly absorbing drama.
Beginning with Leonard Bernstein’s somber musical score, On the Waterfront starts with a particular turning point in the life of Terry Malloy (Brando) who has chosen to become “a bum”. Something stirs within this shell of a man, an embittered New Jersey dockworker, when an act of evil with which he is complicit is executed to its logical conclusion—an innocent man is murdered by a gang of criminals—and, as with the East German Communist in The Lives of Others (2006), the guilty seeks absolution.
This Catholic notion, delivered in a secular sense with Catholicism standing in for morality, is encouraged by a decent priest (Karl Malden), opposed by Terry’s brother (Rod Steiger) and assaulted by the mob boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). Terry’s drive for moral cleansing is ignited, navigated and judged by the woman with whom he falls in love (Saint), a strong and innocent type.
Her name is Edie and she represents the good. The real villain in On the Waterfront is the public, the collective, the others. They—look for Pat Hingle, Nehemiah Persoff, Fred Gwynne, also Martin Balsam as a federal policeman—are the silent killers that sanction the rule of the mob. As Terry falls for Edie and learns how to love himself, really, it’s waterfront subculture, society at large, that governs and accepts or denies Terry’s redemption. The moral dilemma he faces is whether to submit to injustice or speak up and stand against the others.
This central conflict, dramatized throughout anti-Communist whistleblower Kazan’s pictures (Panic in the Streets, A Face in the Crowd, Gentleman’s Agreement, Man on a Tightrope, Viva Zapata!), is evident everywhere in On the Waterfront. Opposing ideas are peppered in anti-Communist whistleblower Budd Schulberg’s Oscar-winning screenplay: “Don’t say nothin’—keep quiet; you’ll live longer”—”You don’t ask no questions, you don’t answer no questions, unless you wanna wind up [dead]”—and, as Terry’s thug-tribalist brother puts it: “Don’t think about it—do it.”
On the Waterfront universalizes its narrowly defined setting with a physically brutal and exhaustive contest between reason and anti-reason. From an urge to “join the congregation” which in this case is a euphemism for submitting to rule by brute, tribal force to the priest’s pressing question “Who killed Joey?” as Brando’s Terry walks in, the mob’s blithely accepted ways and means come to fester in each part of the waterfront. The only consistent avenger besides Malden’s priest and Balsam’s lawman—who are both portrayed with deliberation as strictly limited in their effectiveness—is the initially murdered man’s sister, played by Saint, who is pivotal to grasping and granting Terry’s epic quest and request.
Saint’s Edie is intelligent, kind and able. Edie finds and sees the good in Terry—she is unafraid of the damaged and the dangerous—and she is like the deformed kitten she spares and adopts, willing to be different and stand out. When she first finds intimacy with the self-unmade boxer whom the audience later learns thinks he “coulda been a contender”, she welcomes him with total trust. Terry warns against Edie’s benevolence with the line that his philosophy of life is to do it to others before others do it to you. But Edie, a greedy young woman who insists that she wants “much, much, much more” than what’s offered by the Catholic Church, sees the man’s potential despite himself.
Kazan exploits their scenes beautifully, with pigeons fluttering and whistles blowing—and Malden’s Father Barry bracing Edie with the fact that life is hard and actions have impact—until Edie confronts with horror the truth of what’s been done and, finally, with blood spilling and death looming over the waterfront, Terry takes himself down to lift himself up, whatever consequences may come.
This is Terry’s story and Marlon Brando shines as the piece of meat torn between living for others and living for himself, if it’s not framed as such, using his feeble mind to move his muscle to really power up his mind for the first time—”It isn’t just brains. It’s how you use them”, someone says—inspired by an unconquered feminine idealist who dares to go against the conventions, notions and practices of the world in which she lives. When Edie tosses a drink back for the first time, to Terry it’s a dare to ditch his fake self and get right with himself.
Whether he does and what comes of it is what moves the movie’s action. On the Waterfront fully explores what it means to take, mold and re-shape one’s lesser self into a greater man (and what it means to love and have him). Elia Kazan, who by all accounts (including his own) lived by these themes, masterfully conveys and cashes in the everyday struggle to be one’s best—even if it means going up against the whole world—and coming out clean, honest and proud. Kazan’s On the Waterfront stands against the conformity that dominates mid-20th century America with a naturalistic snapshot of what one can do against the irrational. It is not as grand and operatic as audiences have been led to believe. On the Waterfront is small and intimate. Today, this great movie still inspires one to rise, fight and win.
The DVD
A 12-minute conversation with Kazan is excellent. The one-hour documentary is also informative, though best viewed after seeing the movie. Other extras are also included in this edition.
Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn, is another of his brilliantly conceived and executed character studies, a penetrating movie with an excellent script by John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath). I had the pleasure of seeing it for the first time in the venue for which it was created—the movie theater—at the 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival. The picture was introduced by the late Mr. Quinn’s widow, Katherine. More on this later.
This thoughtful picture begins in a dictatorship, when a small group of Mexican peasants comes pleading to el presidente in an annual publicity stunt. Every man is humbled before the officiously puffed-up thug. Except one man (Brando) who coolly refuses to go along with the herd. He speaks up. When he does, the others step aside.
But he is heard—what he says, which is about property rights and liberty, is less important than the fact that he dares to say it—and his act of defiance is noted. The head of state takes notice of his name. He is marked for persecution by the state. His name is Zapata. As Kazan does in so many of his post-Congressional testimony films, such as On the Waterfront (1954, also with Brando as the one against the many), America, America (1963) and the underappreciated Man on a Tightrope (1953), he depicts a lone man who takes on the world.
Viva Zapata! is centrally about what happens to him when he does. But, in a deeper sense, and Elia Kazan is an ingenious filmmaker in social commentary, this seminal film is about what happens to the world when a man acts against the predominant ideals on principle. And, though it is set and contained in the southern part of North America, this is really and purely a movie about the United States of America, though it is universal, too.
Initially, the swaggering Mexican freethinker, who attracts a woman of means (Jean Peters, excellent in the role), declines to be “the conscience of the world”. He simply fights, he says, accompanied by his trusted brother (Anthony Quinn in a breakthrough performance), for justice. The government is robbing and stealing land from individuals—with Steinbeck, the collective is emphasized over the individual—and anyone can see that this is wrong, he reasons. Brando’s Zapata wants to be worldly, civilized and part of society; he is not a misanthrope or some tortured cynic or anarchist. He actively courts Peters’ feisty maiden, though he does it on his terms. When he sees an act of reprehensible injustice, he is moved to act and he does.
When he does, something happens: the many follow the one—the one who thinks for himself—though, in a powerful scene, they do so not as a mob. They follow one by one; young, old, man, woman, child. The people, too, want to be free.
Emiliano Zapata’s rise to Mexico’s presidency is less involving than its meaning and consequent impact. In black and white, with a distinctive cinematographic approach that matches the history of the period, his illiteracy and, more crucially, his desire to grow and learn, are dramatized in plain pictures, dialogue and action. His tradeoffs, betrayals and alliances shift and converge with subtle character traits and men’s choices shaping the plot. His slovenly brother (Quinn), his comrades, his woman (Peters) and, tellingly, his partner, Madero (Harold Gordon), who blankly insists that everything is “going to be alright” the way today’s ignorant and evasive intellectuals do, represent each type of person. Kazan draws each into the slowly swirling storm of revolution, making Viva Zapata! utterly absorbing.
The title means something, too. This is a man who is strong not merely in body. He is muscled and fit and arrogant in everything he does, that’s true. But it is earned and he is searching, always striving to be his best. His rational mind is his best asset and the movie is seeded with this theme—that the man of the mind is man at his best—in particular with a reference to the difference between the jug and the vase, so watch what happens to both. “Liberty is not [just] a word,” he says at the height of his power, if not his influence. He means it.
The world’s changes happen slowly, over time, and he senses this, too. When Zapata faces his own fallibility, at the risk of death, the revolutionary must make an agonizing choice between blood and tradition and his highest ideals. The choice Zapata makes is the choice each man faces, especially now, with every freethinker endangered by men of faith and force. With depth and reason, the timeless example of what makes a man strong—as against what makes people seek to be led by a strong man—is depicted in indelible scenes on a white horse, which symbolizes lost innocence and a beloved hero. “How do you kill an idea?” Someone asks, echoing Victor Hugo.
Viva Zapata! by Elia Kazan dramatizes an answer that calls upon man’s greatest revolutions—American, Industrial—and dares to ask for more…
In the most fascinating interview at the Classic Film Festival, Mrs. Anthony Quinn, Katherine Quinn, who founded the arts educational Anthony Quinn Foundation, spoke about her late husband, who won Oscars, including one for his role in Viva Zapata!, and studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright. Though the exchange was too short, Mrs. Quinn recalled that he hated talking about the craft of acting because he was a man of action who held his approach to his work as an internal, private affair. She also said that, while he liked working with Kazan, and with director David Lean (who directed Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia), he didn’t care for modern directors, whom he regarded as “traffic cops” because they didn’t really direct the actor. My favorite part of the discussion was Katherine Quinn’s response when it was pointed out that Anthony Quinn was “the first Mexican-American…” etc. to win an Oscar. She courteously cut in and explained that her husband rejected the importance of that non-essential fact; he simply, she said, wanted to be his best as an actor. He was and, in Viva Zapata!, it shows.
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There are exceptions, though, in a few fallible men and one, lone woman. Kazan, working with screenwriter Richard Murphy (who worked with Kazan later on Panic in the Streets), delivers the flawed hero in leading man Dana Andrews. From the beginning, Andrews as the state’s attorney checks and thinks for himself. He’s a man of the people but he is foremost a man of reason. In a key scene, when he’s presented with a dilemma which threatens to destroy his highest value, he gains balance and guidance from principle. Not by merging with the herd, ceding to the mob, or yielding to pure, raw emotion. His inspiration comes from words in a book and it is followed by a scene, really one of her best in pictures, with Jane Wyatt (Jim Anderson’s wife on Father Knows Best) as his wife.
