Elia Kazan (1963)

‘My name is Elia Kazan – a Greek by blood, a Turk by birth, and an American because of a journey my grandfather made.’

This journey – by a young Greek called Stavros Topouzoglou from a poor village in Turkish Anatolia to New York in the 1890s – is the subject and the story of America America:  Kazan adapted the screenplay from his own book.  Maybe it’s because that story is so personally crucial to Kazan – a story, as he says in the same introductory voiceover quoted above, that was told to him repeatedly as he was growing up – that he doesn’t feel the need to dramatise it in the way he would a piece of fiction or even the true story of someone less essential to him than his ancestor.  Recently restored by Warner Brothers and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, the film – shown as part of the London Film Festival – was introduced by Clyde Jeavons as Kazan’s least seen movie, and also as one of his best.   It’s hard to argue with the former description but impossible to agree with the latter.   Running nearly three hours, America America is way too long – perhaps the longest American film I’ve seen in which the lead actor is so inadequate to his task.  For the most part, the picture is weak in the very areas you expect to be strong in Kazan – psychological tension, character development, the telling dramatic detail – even though there are some superbly designed and staged passages, as might also be expected from the team of people helping Kazan behind the camera:  the cinematographer is Haskell Wexler, the editor Dede Allen, the production designer Gene Callahan, and the costumer Anna Hill Johnstone.

Kazan may have wanted Stathis Giallelis, the twenty-two-year-old unknown who plays Stavros, to be a little opaque – bringing his grandfather to life without interposing himself between the real Stavros and Kazan’s image of him.  But that’s not much good to the audience.  Giallelis doesn’t have the emotional transparency that a gifted non-professional can sometimes bring to the screen; he certainly lacks the interpretative skills a professional actor uses to build a portrait.  He’s just there.  No less problematic, at least in the early stages, is the discrepancy between the epic reality and expressiveness of the landscape (the unyielding terrain seems to reflect Stavros’s unpromising prospects) and the Hollywood-ised Europeans encountered by Stavros as he sets out on his journey – they have great faces but their acting is busy and caricatural.  Yet, from the start, the action, not least in crowd scenes, is finely orchestrated by Kazan and there’s a smooth transition from almost documentary sequences into the beginning of Stavros’s odyssey. Knowing next to nothing about the film, I’d expected it to be about the immigrant experience in America; although I was somehow disappointed that it wasn’t, the climactic scenes of the immigrants’ ship approaching the Statute of Liberty and Ellis Island are exciting (not least as an anticipation of the early sequences in The Godfather part II).

There is some good playing in smaller roles – from the likes of John Marley as a vagabond Stavros meets en route and Paul Mann, as a Constantinople merchant.   Stavros seems all set to marry the merchant’s daughter, Thomna.  The young man’s comfortable future is mapped out for him – the idea is represented by the fully decorated apartment which the prospective father-in-law buys for Thomna and her fiancé.  Stavros doesn’t really love Thomna and finds the defined security claustrophobic.  There’s an extraordinary, extended scene between the young couple where the tensions between them mesh with the opacity of Stathis Giallelis – the fact that he gives Linda Marsh, as Thomna, so little to play off seems to increase the scene’s pressure and makes it gripping.  It’s a powerful reminder of the kind of drama Elia Kazan is famous for.  Given what he achieved in his life in America, it’s not surprising that he regarded his grandfather with such reverence, even if watching the process of commemorating his heroism in America America is itself a test of stamina.

23 October 2011