America, America

America, America lasts almost three hours and gained Elia Kazan three Oscar nominations in 1963 for Best Picture, Direction and Original Screenplay. Its only win, though, was for Best Art Direction (in the Black & White category, separate from colour until 1966) for Gene Callahan, who worked on five of Kazan's movies. The B&W artistry glows throughout the auteur's portrait of his uncle's life in early 20th-Century Turkey and Greece.

The movie, in effect a docudrama, is an accepted classic, and an historical document depicting a typical immigrant's experience in his homeland and the USA. Kazan himself was an Istanbul-born Greek, and the 1963 movie saga earned him the last of his four Golden Globes for direction; in the year's Oscar race, however, Tony Richardson's Tom Jones triumphed.

Kazan's central character, on screen almost all the time, is Stavros, the eldest son of a Greek businessman keeping a servile profile in Anatolia during the Turkish Empire. Sent to what was then Constantinople to establish a new base for the family, he is cheated out of his family possessions and learns to suppress his "Anatolian Smile" (the film's secondary title) while maintaining his childhood dream of escaping to the land of opportunity.

After long searches throughout Europe, Kazan picked Stathis Giallelis, an unknown Athens film industry wannabe, for the lead role. Although he made no other significant screen appearance afterwards (a total of only eight), he's been immortalised by this film, having been expertly coached by the experienced stage and movie director who'd already honed the skills of Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift.

Surprisingly, for a movie that's only 57 years old, it unreels creakily, marred by old-fashioned sentimentality, the supporting cast's ham acting for cliche-ridden characters, its over-frequent bursts of melodramatic mood music and focused glances, and its mostly poor and non-sync dubbing by very ham and very American voices. In the end, the movie feels much older, decades older, than other, earlier, award-winning Kazan films. It looks wonderful, with richly-detailed settings and costumes, and Oscar-nominated B&W cinematography (by Haskell Wexler, working on his first big-budget feature).

Maybe the material was too close to his family's heart for Kazan to have the necessary perspective and self-critical awareness. He ended up making a self-aggrandising spectacle with an earnestness that was Soviet-style and a misanthropy provoked by the class- and race-conscious people who destroyed a young man's smile. Ironically, Kazan personally had a much easier migration to American fame and fortune (and eventual repudiation by many in Hollywood and Broadway for his self-preserving betrayal of former Communist colleagues).

It's possible to guess why Martin Scorsese, a New Yorker of Italian origin, admired this film from his inspirational idol, a New Yorker of Greek origin. They are atypical Hollywood success stories, akin to but very distinct from the movie industry's Eastern European emigres.