Had a Great Experience With A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

What a movie! Elia Kazan is one of those directors where it seemed like he could never make a bad movie. My top four directors are solid (Kubrick, Welles, Spielberg, Tarkovsky) but after seing another great movie from him I could easily see him moving into the fifth spot. His camerawork is so elegantly simple and I love the camera movement.


The little girl in this gave one of the best child performances I've ever seen. She was also the child Jane Eyre in the 1943 version. Apparently her career didn't really pan out and she ended up doing TV guest spots as an adult, but this is a great performance.

It had several of the saddest scenes I've ever seen in a movie: the scene where the Dad tries to tell her he wants her to drop out of school, the whole childbirth scene, the scene where the girl holds the flowers her Dad saved to get her and cries, and so on. I nearly cried like 3 times and I never cry in movies. Even though she was a girl she reminded me so much of myself as a child so I related to everything.


It also has a lot of the subtly subversive stuff you see in so many Kazan movies: depicting the teachers as nasty shrews, the Aunt going on about how she only knows what's right from how she feels, cheating the school district to go to a different school, and other things in that vein.
He definitely had "authority issues".

This turned into a mini-review, but it was a great movie and left such an impression on me that I had a lot to say. The only thing I might complain about is that the ending focused a bit too much on the mother. It also started pretty slow but kept getting better and better as Kazan movies often do. I actually think I had seen the Christmas segment before but it's the first time I sat down to watch it all in one sitting. I would strongly recommend it and it's probably in my top 50 or so of all time.