A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)

Untimely review #5

As a moviegoer in 1945 you had your pick of movies based on books: you had Albert Lewin’s Picture of Dorian Gray, René Clair’s And Then There Were None, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce…or you could go see the adaptation of Betty Smith’s 1943 runaway hit A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by some Greek-American newbie from the world of theater named Elia Kazan. My knowledge of Brooklyn is about as scant as my knowledge of Kazan. I don’t live in Brooklyn, I have never lived in Brooklyn, I am unlikely to ever live in Brooklyn; the place may as well be Mars to me. Despite the ancestry connection with Kazan, I’ve never really dug into his biography or his filmography past the top-line classics (his Brando pictures have burned holes into certain sections of my memory) and A Face in the Crowd, which keeps getting picked for movie nights I attend, for I wonder what reason.