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Elia Kazan.
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Elia Kazan (born 1909) is known as the preeminent director of works by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Kazan emerged as the leading exponent of psychological realism via his film and stage produ...
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Critical Essay by Bosley Crowther
The warm and compassionate story of a slum-pent family in Brooklyn's Williamsburg which was told with such rich and genuine feeling in "A Tree Grows in ...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Sarris
Baby Doll is a complex of mannerisms, some of which come perilously close to self-parody. Elia Kazan's uneasy blend of surface realism and theatrical exaggeratio...
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Critical Essay by FranÇois Truffaut
All great filmmakers aspire to be free from the constraints of drama; they dream of making a film without progression, without psychology, in which the spect...
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Critical Essay by Henry Goodman
Considering the abundance of good story material for the screen contained in the social issues of the day, surprisingly few American films have tackled the public probl...
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Critical Essay by Ernest Callenbach
Kazan is a director who gets powerful performances from his actors…. Where he has had strong scripts also, as in Streetcar Named Desire, the under-rated East...
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Critical Essay by C. A. Lejeune
[Pinky] is an adroit attempt to beat a highly controversial subject in a discreetly uncontroversial way; to flatter the public by giving them the types and situations t...
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Critical Essay by Jim Kitses
Questions of personal conscience, individual freedom and social responsibility have often supplied Kazan with his material; in this sense Kazan can be said to have become ...
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Critical Essay by Peter Biskind
On the Waterfront is one of the earliest and most effective attempts to suppress politics with morality and private values that the fifties produced. It takes an import...
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Critical Essay by Pauline Kael
Monroe Stahr, the young hero of Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, is meant to represent the last of a breed; he's an individualistic artist-businessman w...
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Critical Essay by Louis Marcorelles
As Elia Kazan acquires a measure of financial as well as artistic independence, the importance of the place he holds in the American cinema increases. Intentionally...
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Critical Essay by Gordon Gow
Gentle by comparison with the thrusting mainstream of current cinema, Elia Kazan's film of The Last Tycoon evokes a romanticism which persists and glows against the...
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Critical Essay by Dilys Powell
Pinky belongs to a group of American films with a new attitude to racial questions. (p. 107)
[It] is a film about principles; but principles conveyed by emotional means&...
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Critical Essay by Karel Reisz
That even the most talented and successful directors are, with varying frequency, obliged to accept subjects in which they can have little real interest is, it seems, par...
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Critical Essay by Lindsay Anderson
It has been remarked that the success this year of three films like From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny and On the Waterfront is a hopeful sign, demonstrating th...
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Elia Kazan
Critical Essay by Bosley Crowther
