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 tends to fall into a decoratively "cinematic" style in which strong effects are a little too obviously worked for, rather than allowed to rise out of the material, out of the structure of the work itself. In a nutshell, Kazan is a "pushy" director; his best films have been those in which he had a good story and good actors to push...