A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Elia Kazan (1945)
The closing line of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is, ‘Aw, cut the mush’, spoken by an adolescent boy, in response to his slightly older sister’s telling him he’s ‘sweet’. For most of the film, Elia Kazan’s first feature, the boy’s words might be the director’s motto. The screen adaptation of Betty Smith’s celebrated novel of 1943 is full of emotion but it nearly always feels authentic. The compression of a nearly five-hundred-page book into a picture of just over two hours[1] necessarily simplifies some aspects of Smith’s material but the result sacrifices little of the novel’s toughness – remarkably little for a Hollywood drama of the time.
The semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of the Nolan family and their lives in the Williamsburg tenement neighbourhood of Brooklyn in the early years of the twentieth century. The parents, Katie and Johnny, are New York-born, the children of immigrants to America, from Austria and Ireland respectively. Their two children – Frances (Francie) and Cornelius (Neeley) – are just a year apart in age. Working as a janitor as well as looking after home and family, Katie is conscientious to a fault. She needs to be: Johnny gets irregular work as a singing waiter but comes home more often drunk than with cash in hand. The central figure is Betty Smith’s alter ego Francie, who is clever and imaginative, fearful and lonely. She adores her charming, feckless father and the feeling is mutual. Relations are more strained with her mother, whom Francie respects more than she likes. Katie, often impatient with her daughter’s flights of fancy, gets on better with her more straightforward son.
Although Alfred Newman wrote a score for the film, the primary soundtrack is the popular tunes of the day (‘Oh! You Beautiful Doll’, ‘Funiculi Funicula’, and so on) heard playing from outside the Nolans’ home, in the Williamsburg streets and bars, on pianos and calliopes. (This gives the music a nostalgic flavour; its repetition gets over a sense of how it must have got on people’s nerves too.) Kazan subsequently bemoaned his film’s ‘patina of conventionalism – the costumes were all too clean’[2]. He was right but hard on himself, even so. In the outdoor sequences, he conveys, from the outset and without resorting to hollow boisterousness, the crowded rough and tumble of the neighbourhood. The family’s rooms, particularly in the early stages, aren’t cramped or shabby enough, even allowing for Katie’s implacable determination to keep them clean and tidy. This is less of an issue later, when the family relocates to smaller accommodation at a lower rent, a couple of floors up in the same building. Katie moves them there when she learns she’s pregnant again, news that she delays telling Johnny, as well as the children.
The adaptation, by Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, streamlines the narrative shrewdly. So as to maintain a focused storyline and momentum, the film sometimes makes consecutive events that occur further apart in the book. The style of the original facilitates this. Betty Smith hadn’t published a novel before this one. While clearly structured and always engaging, it is evidently disguised autobiography – a collection of memories, not all of them tied to happenings that advance the story. The screenwriters’ streamlining results in some unhelpful omissions – it isn’t evident from the film, for example, that Katie does a paid job as well as housework – but it also tightens things up.
The great strength of the screenplay is Slesinger and Davis’s dramatisation of the contest between facts and fantasies. (The contest foreshadows a line in a more famous Kazan film of a few years later: Blanche Dubois’s ‘I don’t want realism – I want magic!’ in A Streetcar Named Desire.) The gap between them isn’t unbridgeable. Francie, hungry for education, wants to move to a school in a better area of Brooklyn that she’s sure will provide it. In spite of Katie’s disapproval, Johnny writes a letter to the authorities, checking the spelling of longer words with Francie as he does so, in which he claims his daughter is now living with relatives close to the school she has her heart set on. The ruse works and Francie changes school.
On the last day before a Christmas holiday, Francie’s class teacher asks if any of the children would like to take home a pie left over from the school party. The other kids, resident in the relatively well-off vicinity of the school, don’t put up their hands. Francie can’t resist either doing so or, after the rest of the class have left, inventing and over-elaborating a story about a poor family she knows who will be grateful for the pie. The teacher, Miss McDonough, sees through the story even before Francie bursts into tears and confesses it’s a lie. Rather than admonishing her, Miss McDonough praises Francie’s English compositions and encourages her to tell the truth in life, fictionalise on paper, and combine the two things only to the extent of writing stories that draw on her own experience.
In one sense, this advice doesn’t resonate in the film as it does in the source material. Readers aware of the novel’s autobiographical dimension recognise the efficacy of what Miss McDonough says in the fact that they’re reading Betty Smith’s book. The teacher’s final words to Francie do have a different resonance, though:
‘It would be still better if you’d write about the things you really know about and then add to them with your imagination … Even stories shouldn’t be just, well, pipe dreams. Pipe-dreamers can be very lovable people but they don’t help anybody, not even themselves.’
Most viewers of the film will immediately realise, more than Francie does at the time, that these words refer to a man the teacher has never met. When Francie repeats to her father what Miss McDonough said about pipe dreamers, he instantly gets the message too. That same Christmas, Katie tells Johnny she’s expecting and that Francie will need to give up school and go out to work in order for the family to keep their heads above water. Johnny’s delighted at the prospect of another child but can’t cope with what this will mean for their firstborn. He goes out for a walk (Katie takes this as a euphemism for a drinking binge), from which he never returns. Searching in vain for work, he collapses and dies in a Manhattan hospital, from a combination of alcoholism and pneumonia.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn gives embroidery and living in the moment, as well as common sense and forethought, their due. Katie is scrupulous in keeping up insurance payments that will ensure any member of the family a decent funeral and burial. The mother of a sickly child in the same tenement building buys her nice clothes. When the child dies, Johnny is sentimental: ‘It was nice that her mama got her all them pretty dresses’. Katie is scathing: ‘Only now the poor thing will have to lie in potter’s field’. ‘But,’ Johnny insists, ‘she did have the dresses’. His own burial in a cemetery is thanks to Katie’s prudence. The large turnout at his funeral, including clients of the places where he waited and sang, is thanks to a personal charm that eludes and bewilders his widow.
The texture of Williamsburg society is almost inevitably thinner in an average-length feature film than it is on the page. The screen A Tree Grows in Brooklyn gives no sense of the political (Tammany Hall) or even the religious (Catholic) context of the Nolans’ lives. The carols on the soundtrack during the Christmas episode are pretty non-denominational. In the one scene in Francie’s first school, a decidedly unromantic class teacher beats out the rhythm of Keats’s ‘”Beauty is truth, truth beauty”’ lines as a kind of drill. The effect is nearly comical – nothing like that of Betty Smith’s description of how nasty the place and the people in it are, which gives such a charge to Francie’s anxiety to attend school elsewhere.
The characters aren’t thin, though. The Elia Kazan retrospective at BFI this month and next is subtitled ‘The Actors’ Director’: even in this first film you can see how he got this cachet. Kazan came to Hollywood in the 1940s with a major reputation established in the Group Theatre, a New York-based theatre collective, in the previous decade. The main performances in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn are admirable and interesting but the superb physical casting and consistently excellent playing of smaller parts are one of the film’s real distinctions: Ruth Nelson as Miss McDonough; James Gleason, as McGarrity, the saloon owner who, after Johnny’s death, offers Francie and Neeley part-time, after-school work in the kitchens there; B S Pully, as a Christmas tree vendor; Adeline De Walt Reynolds, as Mrs Waters, the elderly widow leaving the upstairs rooms the Nolans move into, and who bequeaths them the piano it’s too difficult to get downstairs. The actors concerned came from widely differing performing backgrounds. Nelson had worked with Kazan in Group Theatre. Gleason (one of the better things in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe) was long established in Hollywood in supporting roles. Pully’s background was on the Borscht Belt stand-up club circuit. Adeline De Walt Reynolds began her acting career in 1940, at the age of seventy-eight. Kazan orchestrates their playing wonderfully. As you watch these performances, you feel sure they’ll lodge in your memory.
Dorothy McGuire animates forcefully the unceasing struggle between Katie’s longings for a better life and sense of duty to ensure the one that she and her family have is as tolerable as possible. At times, McGuire’s reactions seem too quick and prepared. At other times, they’re startling and powerful – notably when Katie, trying to be kinder to Johnny after her mother (Ferike Boros) has warned ‘of the coldness growing in you’, listens to him chatter on with big ideas until her patience snaps and she yells, ‘Stop it! Stop talking!’ While McGuire may have concentrated too hard on capturing Katie’s rigour, the result is effective. The actress’s strenuous single-mindedness melds with her character’s.
James Dunn won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrait of Johnny. In his mid-forties at the time, Dunn is older and fleshier than the picture of Johnny I’d got from the book, and doesn’t have the impulsiveness that Betty Smith conveys. (In the film, his thinking up the lie that gets Francie into the better school seems too considered.) Yet Dunn’s performance is always strongly felt: as Kazan said, in retrospect, he has ‘the perspiration of anxiety about him’[3]. His middle-aged, solid presence makes Johnny’s futile dreams poignant in a different way. Dunn has a nice tenor voice. Johnny’s habitual singing of ‘Molly Malone’ on his return home is heard maybe once too often but his ‘Annie Laurie’ at Mrs Waters’s piano is touching.
The promiscuity of Katie’s sister Sissy obviously had to be muffled in a 1940s Hollywood production but the characterisation is, in Joan Blondell’s capable hands, supple and enjoyable. Sissy, who’s had a series of husbands, and of babies none of whom lives more than a few days, eventually settles down with a man who stays (John Alexander) and gives birth to a child that survives. It’s a pity the hurried resolution of the plot in the film’s last quarter hour or so, denies Blondell the chance to react to these happy events[4]. (Katie’s other sister Evy is cut entirely from the film.) From a realistic point of view, Ted Donaldson’s Neeley looks too well-fed but he matches up well with James Dunn. More important, Donaldson gets perfectly the boy’s rough-and-ready humour and pugnacity. His physicality makes Neeley a stronger presence than he is in the corresponding parts of the novel.
Ted Donaldson is also an excellent foil to Peggy Ann Garner’s Francie. (The age difference between the pair was pretty well the same as that between their characters. Garner, born in February 1932, was eighteen months older.) Both are physically credible as children of an Irish-Austrian immigrant family. One of the many merits of Garner’s interpretation is in showing what else Francie has inherited from each of her parents. This skinny, quirky child has a capacity for delight and an absolute seriousness, a vivid imagination and an iron will. The film manages to retain some good detail of Francie’s eccentric, determined orderliness. She has a particular attachment to alphabetical order. It governs her reading of all the books on the shelves of the small local library (she’s up to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy). On the day of her and Neeley’s graduation from junior high school, Katie and Sissy take them to an ice-cream parlour to celebrate. Francie reports that her pineapple soda isn’t as good as the chocolate one. She chose pineapple because ‘I’m up to the “P’s” – I’ll try raspberry next’.
Even so, the burden of realising Francie’s thoughts and feelings is largely on Peggy Ann Garner’s shoulders – and, especially, her face. She does a great job. (In 1946, she won the then annual Oscar awarded to the year’s outstanding juvenile. The award was officially for a body of work rather than a specific film but there’s no doubt that this performance won Garner the prize.) When the diffident, solicitous police officer McShane (Lloyd Nolan) delivers the news that Johnny has been found in a bad way and taken to hospital, Katie leaves quickly with McShane. As the two adults go out, Kazan, in a simply eloquent touch, has the front door close quickly on Francie’s face. That’s how suddenly she loses her father. It takes time for Francie to express her grief. Dry-eyed at the funeral, she goes to Johnny’s barber (Peter Cusanelli) and asks for her father’s shaving mug. She puts it with other precious things in a suitcase under her bed. Her distress breaks out when she’s alone. She’s addressing God but this is no straightforwardly naïve child’s prayer. Francie moves quickly from seeming to deny Johnny’s death to rethinking it:
‘Look. He can’t be dead. Can’t! They don’t understand. Maybe you could let me have a baby someday, and it could be a boy. So it could be just like him. It would have to be me. Nobody else loved him like I do. Maybe you could do that for me. And if you could he wouldn’t even die.’
Katie goes into labour and Francie looks after her mother until her aunt and grandmother arrive to take over. While they’re alone together, Katie tells Francie that if the baby’s a boy, he’ll be called Johnny; if a girl, she’ll be Annie Laurie, recalling the song that Johnny sang. When Francie eventually learns she has a sister, her lack of overt emotion seems surprising until you remember the prayer. Francie sees it as her role to bring a new Johnny into the world. Her quiet content that Katie hasn’t done so makes complete sense.
Except for the odd, nice touch like the alphabetical ice-cream soda flavours, the closing stages are the weakest part of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – hurried and, compared with what’s preceded them, standard-issue. Officer McShane has been carrying a torch for Katie. Now himself widowed, he proposes marriage, in a scene that’s awkward in the wrong way. Katie accepts, as do Francie and Neeley – as if there’s no time left to argue. The ice-cream parlour gathering is also where Francie agrees to go out on her first date with a boy. In the closing scene, she and Neeley look out over the back yard of the tenement block and see the titular tree there ‘growing again, just like Papa said’. (It’s an ailanthus aka ‘Tree of Heaven’.) Kazan doesn’t overdo the tree growth, though, and these eleventh-hour shortcomings aren’t enough to detract much from what’s gone before. This is a fine adaptation of Betty Smith’s novel and a highly auspicious debut by a rookie film-maker.
1 February 2020
[1] To be more precise: the novel comprises five main sections, of which the film covers the first three – approximately three-quarters of the five hundred pages.
[2] In an interview with Stuart Byron and Martin L Rubin, Movie (Winter 1971/72).
[3] ibid.
[4] How Sissy eventually attains motherhood, which she does twice, is a good deal more complicated in the book.