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 important first step in detaching the self from a larger social context so that the idea of self can be redefined in narrower, safer terms. Splendor in the Grass, America, America, and The Arrangement merely develop the notion of personality initially presented in On the Waterfront…. Films like Viva Zapata! and On the Waterfront bear the mar...

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 the victim of his concerns when McCarthyism arose. Despite this ostensible continuity, however, fewer directors reveal sharper changes of emphasis in their careers than Kazan…. In the films of the forties the treatment of moral and social issues is unexceptional. Kazan here is working within well-established genres and a general eth...

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 or not, he has become the spokesman of certain contemporary attitudes; and from On the Waterfront to Baby Doll we have the complete circle, the picture of homo Americans as a victim of blindly destructive forces, painfully engaged in waging his battle of conscience. Baby Doll is only indirectly and by implication a social drama: its real subject...

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 exaggeration, Tennessee Williams' injection of the commedia dell' arte into the decaying corpus of the Deep South, and the unmotivated virtuosity of "method" acting give Baby Doll a dated, almost antique quality. This film is for Kazan what The Sun Shines Bright was for John Ford, Meet John Doe for Frank Capra … a styl...

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 that inflationary techniques are not essential to the seduction of mass audiences. All we need are good films…. On the Waterfront is a bad film. Unfortunately, bad films are important too. This one is important because of its special kind of badness, and because of the enormous degree of acceptance it has won…. The film, in fact, has...

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 of Eden, or On the Waterfront, his particular kind of talent has come through extraordinarily well; these are films which will last, though none of them is a really great work. Even Kazan's worst films are by no means the filmed plays turned out by lesser men coming from television or the stage; in fact, in avoiding that danger, Kazan ten...

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 problems from which spring the personal dramas. Of the occasional ventures into this area Elia Kazan's have been among the best—for instance, On the Waterfront, Panic in the Streets and A Face in the Crowd, films which grew out of "documentary" materials and drew the private story from a wider social context. And now wi...

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, part of the scheme of film-making almost everywhere; it happens, perhaps, most often in Hollywood—as most things do—and might as well be accepted…. Elia Kazan has been relatively lucky in this respect; his Hollywood assignments so far have nearly all been interesting, and his latest, Man on a Tightrope …, has, on th...

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 commercially orientated ethos of Hollywood in the 1930s. The spare and sensitive adaptation by Harold Pinter is respectful to the source material, the final and unfinished novel of Scott Fitzgerald—so respectful, indeed, as to eschew the profusion of indications left in the author's notes about the resolution of the story: t...

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 who runs his movie studio like a small grocery store…. [As] Fitzgerald sees him, Stahr has the heart and soul of an artist without the crazy weaknesses of artists. (p. 216) Harold Pinter is said to have spent a year and a half working on the script [for "The Last Tycoon"]—presumably in reverent noodling, since he h...

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 spectators' interest would be aroused by means other than changes of place and time, the cleverness of the dialogue, or the characters' comings and goings. Un Condamné à Mort s'est échappé (A Man Escaped), Lola Montès, Woman on the Beach, and Rear Window all achieve a considerable amount in this tricky ...

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 Brooklyn," by Betty Smith, has received pictorial embodiment to a remarkably harmonious degree…. If some of the ripe descriptive detail of the original is missing, that is due to the time limitations of the picture. The essential substance has been maintained and presented in a manner which carries tremendous emotional punch. For ...

[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 they have always liked, while persuading them that this time such appreciation is only possible from persons of courageous outlook and advanced social consciousness. Pinky is not really a "daring" film, except in so far as it admits that there is a colour question at all. It seems to me a fair film: it does not, I imagine, unreas...

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—and rightly so conveyed; for colour prejudice, whatever elements of reason it may embrace or conceal, is in essence an emotional force, and will be defeated only by a stronger emotional force. Pinky is an extremely moving piece of work; moving in its acting, its direction and its writing. It is a good film, in fact, not because it has...