Saturday | August 15, 2009 7:00 pm

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Screening on Film

Directed by Elia Kazan.
With Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, James Dunn.
US, 1945, 35mm, black & white, 128 min.
Print source: 20th Century Fox

Kazan's Group Theater years were formative to his first Fox assignment, a sensitive adaptation of Betty Smith's best-selling memoir about her difficult childhood in an early 1900s Brooklyn Irish ghetto. Kazan's dynamic sculpting of crisp studio sets—aided by legendary cinematographer Leon Shamroy—into almost abstract dramatic stages heightens the dreamlike, wide-eyed qualities of Smith's melancholic ode to temps perdu. Kazan's transformative direction of the young Peggy Ann Garner and veteran character actor James Dunn extracted Oscar winning performances that vaulted each to a career high and gave a depth of feeling and power to this exceptionally tender and honest portrait of the vulnerabilities and resolve of the working poor.