This movie is one of those memory plays, one where either a character or a director looks back nostalgically at an older age with fondness for how rough things were back then, but how full of life everything was. These were types of films were pretty popular back then, with the likes of How Green Was My Valley and such. Even today they have made a slight resurgence, with films like Belfast and Roma. Now, I’m a big fan of nostalgia, mainly in a sense of style or general aesthetic of a film. But for some reason memory plays don’t really do it for me.
This memory play is set in 1920s Brooklyn, where the kids were ruffians and money was hard to come by. Here we have a lower class family trying to make ends meet. The lead here is the daughter, Francie , played stoically by Peggy Ann Garner. She’s a young girl that’s reading her way, alphabetically, through the library. She longs for education, and loves to write. But being on the low end of the class pool, she’s more than likely destined for blue collar work. The father of the family is a drunk, a souse. He works as a singing waiter, a waiter that’s constantly on the look out for work. The matriarch of the family is a hard worker. She is the backbone of the family, a realist that knows how to stretch a penny. And there’s also a son, who is more of a background character that’s bottomless pit of a stomach is used as comedic relief.
Francie idolizes her father and despises her mother. Her drunkard of a pa, fills her head with dreams and fantasies that will 9 times out of 10 never come true. Now this is a very true to life trait of those that suffer with addiction. My brother often had this attitude, these flights of fancies. It’s not healthy. Not to them and not to the ones they are gaslighting. Yet somehow, maybe because this is from the daughter’s perspective or maybe because those were different times, the movie tries to depict the father as the flawed “good guy”. And this just rubbed me the wrong way. Especially since the mother is depicted as an antagonist for a portion of a film, one that is forced to go through a harsher character arch.
So ideologically I have issues with the movie. But that being said, the movie is well made. It was directed by Elia Kazan, who knows his way around a camera and knows how to get good performances out of his actors. So on a technical level the movie is good. And there’s a subplot dealing with the family’s wacky aunt that was enjoyable. And (SPOILER) I’m happy that the mother ends up with the cop. I kept rooting for her to leave the drunk and run away with the police officer in the first act of the movie.
Leave a comment