Film review

  • Pinky

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1949)

    The actor and director Burt Caesar introduced this BFI screening of Pinky.  It was early Sunday evening and Caesar started by promising the NFT3 audience we weren’t in for a sermon.  He spoke with such knowledgeable, sonorous solemnity that the intro did have a morally improving flavour about it, though some humour too.  Caesar’s pause before his closing ‘thank you’ was actorishly timed but this is nitpicking.  Given what BFI introductions are sometimes like, you could only be grateful for such a thoroughly expert curtain-raiser.

    Burt Caesar kept his word in not giving away plot details but he made clear enough the main themes of Pinky.  That led him to comment on the film’s most enduringly controversial aspect.  The title character, Patricia ‘Pinky’ Johnson, a young woman of colour so light-skinned that she has passed for white, is played by a white actress, Jeanne Crain.  Caesar suggested, with maybe a touch of irony, that Crain’s casting was defensible on the grounds that plenty of officially white people have non-white blood somewhere in their ancestry.   He was making the point that race is largely a false construct, and fair enough.  It’s nevertheless hard to watch Pinky without deploring the choice of lead, which pandered to public prejudices of the time.  White audiences could rest assured that Jeanne Crain, a big name, was feigning being a ‘tragic mulatto’ – no less than Jane Wyman had feigned being a deaf mute in Johnny Belinda the previous year.   (They’re just pretending – it’s what actors do …)

    Pinky, who has been training as a nurse in Boston, returns to her childhood home in the South – to the shack where she was raised by her grandmother Dicey (Ethel Waters), an illiterate laundress.  Able to deny her ethnicity without questions being asked in Boston, Pinky has done just that, and has fallen in love with a white doctor, Tom Adams (William Lundigan), who’s unaware of her race and background.  When she first arrives at Dicey’s, Pinky says she’s planning to stay only a few days.  Back in the place she started from, she doesn’t conceal her racial identity and is quickly reminded just how uncongenial that makes her native heath.  Attempting to reclaim money owed to her grandmother for laundry work, Pinky is harassed by racist law officers.  Two white men try to sexually assault her.  When an African-American medic (Kenny Washington) encourages her to stay in the area to train black student nurses, Pinky tells him she’ll soon be heading back north.  Her departure is delayed when she reluctantly agrees, at her grandmother’s urging, to provide care for Dicey’s ailing, elderly neighbour Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore).  Pinky dislikes this old woman:  she remembers that, as a child, she was shooed off the property.  As a consequence, Pinky has always seen Miss Em as typical of local bigotry but, as the two spend more time together, warms to her patient.  The feeling is mutual.

    There’s another reason to regret that Jeanne Crain is Pinky:  she isn’t very good.  It’s a not unfamiliar performance from someone who has made their name in lighter roles (Crain’s biggest success had been in the musical State Fair):  the actor betrays the weight of responsibility of playing a serious one – a responsibility that may have been felt more keenly in this case because of the race issues involved.  Crain is committed but limited.  She has a few good bits:  when Miss Em makes Pinky laugh;  more extendedly, when she inherits the old woman’s house and twenty acres of land and Pinky is increasingly determined to hold on to her inheritance, in spite of legal challenge from Miss Em’s family.  For the most part, though, Crain’s effects are too obviously prepared.  Her conspicuously unnatural movement makes Pinky odd-girl-out in the wrong way.

    Elia Kazan inherited the cast, crew and settings from John Ford, whose surprising involvement in the project ended abruptly, shortly after shooting began.  Kazan later expressed his dissatisfaction with Jeanne Crain (‘a sweet girl … but she was like a Sunday school teacher’[1]) and with 20th Century Fox’s refusal to let him shoot at least part of Pinky on location (‘Almost everything was shot in the studio … Naturally, there was no dirt, no sweat, no water, no anything’[2]).  The approach to Dicey’s shack certainly looks like a stage set.  In spite of Kazan’s lack of enthusiasm for the picture, he delivers some potent scenes – notably when Doc Joe (Griff Barnett), Miss Em’s physician and executor, informs Pinky and Dicey of the contents of Miss Em’s will.  Because black-and-white films are now so unusual, it may be easier for a twenty-first century audience to see Joseph MacDonald’s cinematography as expressive in relation to the racial themes.  Pinky’s white nurse’s uniform has particular impact.

    Miss Em’s cousin Jeffers Wooley (Everett Glass) and, more volubly, his wife Melba (Evelyn Varden) contest the will that bequeaths Miss Em’s property to Pinky.  As racist as she’s rapacious, Melba pays an entertaining visit to the old lady earlier in the film.  When Pinky starts nursing her, Miss Em asks what she thinks of ‘my best brooch’; Pinky politely and correctly identifies it as ‘one of those rather clever imitations one can buy in the chain stores for a dollar’.  Melba judges the same brooch ‘priceless – a real antique’; it’s a nice joke that she inherits Miss Em’s jewellery.  The courtroom scenes are uneasy, dominated as they are by Dan Riss’s bizarrely unctuous interpretation of the plaintiffs’ lawyer[3].   Pinky is represented, though reluctantly, by the recently retired Judge Walker (Basil Ruysdael).  Their prospects of winning the case seem bleak when Doc Joe can’t make it to court to give evidence in Pinky’s support (he’s busy delivering a baby at the time).  The new judge (Raymond Greenleaf) confounds everyone, the film’s audience included, by ruling in her favour.  The strongest moment in court comes, though, in Walker’s sting-in-the-tail words to his client:  ‘Well, Pinky, you won.  You got the house and the land.  And you got justice.  But I doubt if any other interests of this community have been served’.

    Pinky benefits greatly from its two senior Ethels, whose performing styles are very different but equally effective.   Ethel Barrymore, decidedly theatrical, plays Miss Em with incisive wit:  she makes clear the old woman is a giant ego who scolds all-comers, regardless of their race or role.  Ethel Waters’s celebrated ‘force of nature’ presence (impressive but, I think, wrong for her character in Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding three years later) is enriching here.  Waters is especially affecting in suggesting Dicey’s mixed feelings about the provisions of the will.  She’s already grieving the loss of someone she considered a friend; she knows that Pinky’s inheritance is bound to complicate their lives.  (Miss Em leaves her entire wardrobe to Dicey, who’s particularly appreciative of the footwear:  ‘Sometimes I think she always get her shoes extra big ‘cause when they fit her just right, they pinch my bunion’.  Just as well the shoes fit:  it’s hard to see how someone of Ethel Waters’s size could find much use for Ethel Barrymore’s clothes.)

    Pinky takes to heart the precise wording of Miss Em’s bequest, ‘being an expression of my genuine regard for her and my confidence in the use to which she will put this property’.   Being taken to court to fight for it sharpens Pinky’s determination to justify her benefactor’s ‘confidence’ and to live as a woman of colour.  She’s already told Tom Adams, who has tracked Pinky down to Dicey’s shack, the truth of her ethnic identity.  Tom still wants to marry her but on the understanding that she’ll continue to conceal her colour from the rest of the world.  Pinky eventually tells him that ‘I can’t deny it – I can’t pretend to be anything else, and I don’t want to be anything else’, and Tom exits sharply.

    In the film’s final sequence, Pinky has turned her inheritance into ‘Miss Em’s Nursery and Clinic’, peopled by African-American staff and children.  Like the casting of Jeanne Crain, the ending is designed to appeal to white audiences (which Pinky certainly succeeded in doing:  it was 20th Century Fox’s top-grossing film of 1949) and is a cop out.   The screenplay, by Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols, is adapted from a novel, Quality, by Cid Ricketts Sumner.  In his excellent book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks (1973), the black film historian Donald Bogle explains and comments as follows:

    ‘In Quality … Pinky won her courtroom case, but the Ku Klux Klan burned down Miss Em’s house in retaliation.  That ending was far more honest than the optimistic everything’s-gonna-work-out-fine tone at the film’s end, when a group of cute ebony nurses are seen laughing in the converted hospital.’

    2 February 2020

    [1]  Quoted by Lorraine LoBianco, tcm.com

    [2]  ibid.

    [3]  I assumed this actor wouldn’t have been in the film if Elia Kazan had had a say in the casting.  It was a surprise to see Dan Riss, just a couple of days later, in Panic in the Streets, in which Kazan ‘handpicked everybody’.  Dan Riss overacts in that film, too.

  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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.

     

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