A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ('45)

Plot Summary

A young girl tries to keep her idealism alive and rise above the hardships of her tenement life in the face of her family's grinding poverty in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. She adores her father, who, though a charming and loving man, drinks to excess and is an irresponsible dreamer.

Comments/Reviews

NOTE: If you do not wish to have certain elements of the plot revealed, please wait to read these until after you have seen the film!

I. [By Hermine Rich Isaacs (Theatre Arts, March 1945)]:

When one of Broadway's favorite sons answers the call to Hollywood, the hometown prophets watch his journey to Babylon with mixed emotions. On one had his work in pictures is expected to bear a mark of special distinction by virtue of his lofty origins. On the other, it will be just as well if he does not move too far along filmdom's easy road to fame, nor fall too deeply under the spell of California's balmy weather and mental lassitude. He may be earning a large part of his living in the west, but he should still pay taxes to the sovereign state of New York.

Elia Kazan's trip west this year to direct the movie version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn should satisfy all observers. He has made a film that is a sure success, and one that marks him as a director of considerable skill; he has found a challenge and an opportunity in pictures that will undoubtedly draw him back from time to time; and meanwhile he has returned to Broadway full of theatre hopes and plans, to pay at least his spiritual taxes in the east.

In the novel of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith has projected the story of Cinderella into the current day. Waving a wand of modern design, she has played light on shadow, converted a pallid corner of existence into a world of wonder and radiant hope. Instead of such old-fashioned props as fairy godmothers, pumpkin coaches and white mice standing in for liveried footmen, she has spun her wonders out of present and attainable instruments of magic: ingenuity and imagination, love and a heart full of song. Her modern Cinderella is Francie Nolan, child of the tenements. Francie, like her fairy-tale counterpart, embodies come of the hopes and fears of everyone; and, like Cinderella, she belongs with a fierce sense of ownership to the millions of readers who have shared her story.

For these reasons it was clear that the person who undertook to play Francie in the movies must be either very young or very brave. Peggy Ann Garner is very young, younger, in fact, that one imagined Francie in the original novel; and yet the miscalculation is undoubtedly the reader's, for this twelve-year-old actress of the wonderstruck eyes, the straight blond hair and the tip-tilted nose, whose ways of intensity are part child and part ageless, has become Francie Nolan as surely as Francie is both Cinderella and a little of you and me. For the role of her mother, Katie, Dorothy McGuire has cast off the skittish mannerisms of Claudia in favor of the curt and economical outlines of a hard-pressed tenement dweller. James Dunn plays the improvident and loveable father, Johnny; Joan Blondell is Aunt Sissy, the eternal bride of loose morals and warm heart; and young Ted Donaldson is Neeley, Francie's young brother, bitter rival and inseparable companion.

His cast assembled, Kazan proceeded to direct in a way more suggestive of theatre than motion-picture methods. He plotted out scenes and motivations with the players before rehearsals began; relationships were established between the actors and each other, the actors and the setting. It has been commonplace to say of theatre directors new to films that they can direct only actors, not pictures. If, however, a director has succeeded in guiding his players through the special and indigenous patterns of the motion-picture scene, he is a long way to the conquest of the new medium. A movie scene is characteristically large and constantly changing; its very changes provide a running commentary on the story and become a positive element in the dramatic structure. The changing scene is the visible result of the moving camera which, well used, is the chief story teller in films.

The scene in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the Nolan's tenement home and the teeming streets and shops of the neighborhood. From the moment that Francie and Neeley rush out on the family errands they are in contact with their environment. There is a sense that this story proceeds in the midst of a hundred such tales. Backstairs arguments are in progress, children are playing street-games, the junkman is busy with his daily rounds and a street vendor shouts his wares. While conversations go on in the Nolan family kitchen, a neighbor across the courtyard shakes out a mop or hangs wet cloth out to dry. There is music in the air, though the source is often off-screen: a hurdy-gurdy in the street below, a piano next door, a children's chorus singing Christmas carols outside a schoolroom door. Always the Nolans' story is seen in perspective against the bustling life of the community.

...To those who dread the complete surrender of films to the lush tones of Technicolor, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn should stand as a guarantee of the persistence of the black-and-white picture to the last days of recorded time. For as surely as animal pictures and Betty Grable demand Technicolor for their consumption, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn demands black-and-white. Color could add nothing to this story whose proper palette is the greys and shadows of tenement surroundings and the bright white invasion of the sun that shines, with as much determination as the tree grows, even in Brooklyn.

Betty Smith was five years older than her creation, Francie Nolan, who was born in 1901. Francie was the tree that grew in Brooklyn, the one that blossomed out of the pavements, whose strength was not recognized because the breed was so common. ''It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.'' A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, published in 1943, was an immediate best seller, and since then has become for its devoted readers a treasured rite of passage. A friend told me it was where she first learned at 12 about sex. Another reader was dismayed to realize that her mother had purloined incidents from Francie's childhood and made them her own, telling her daughter tales from the book as if she had lived them herself. The novelist Helen Schulman would read the book again and again, never finishing, each time starting from the beginning so that for her the book never ended.

Francie is the tree, and so is the book itself. It is, tested by time, one of the most cherished of American novels, recording in its powerful fashion the first years of this century in a breeding place of American genius, Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Greenpoint. In the novel's period these neighborhoods were mostly populated by a poverty-level mix of the two great waves of immigrants, the Irish and the Germans of the mid-19th century and the East European Jews and Italians who followed...

Francie is second-generation American. Her father, Johnny Nolan, has an Irish background, while that of her mother, Katie Rommely, is Austrian. Yet the streets, the food, the jobs, the morals, loose and strict (a mother and her illegitimate child are stoned), the apartments are common memories. And the veracity of the tale was remarked on by reviewers right away: it is in Smith's sharp memory for detail -- for the size and weight of tin cans, for the differences in butcher shops, for the shoes of the aged. Today, Williamsburg is a mostly Hispanic and Italian neighborhood. The tenements have been replaced with housing developments, but its main thoroughfares, if you look above the storefronts, are much the same as they were for Francie. The public and parochial schools, the churches, the library, the synagogues (some of them converted to other uses) are there still. A local library has a banner proclaiming Brooklyn's finest writers: Walt Whitman, Maurice Sendak, Marianne Moore, Richard Wright and Betty Smith. Siegel Street, where Smith tells us ''Jewtown'' began, now has an alternate name -- Via San Vicente Pallotti -- and nearby Graham Avenue (Smith described it as Ghetto Street, filled with pushcarts) is also known as Via Vespucci. Life, if not swell, is better there now -- neighboring Bedford Stuyvesant or Bushwick might tell another tale, one closer to that of Smith's novel.

When I was young I avoided the book, though I always liked the 1945 film adaptation, directed by Elia Kazan, its plot reworked intelligently by the novelist and screenwriter Tess Slesinger and her husband, Frank Davis, who sharpened the character of the mother and shortened the time frame. It was a girl's book, and I preferred the swashbuckling novels of Rafael Sabatini and books about collies or German shepherds. From them I moved on to Look Homeward, Angel and never returned to ''adolescent'' literature. I've come late to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and though its intense study of a mother-daughter relationship still categorizes it as a ''girl's book,'' I was wrong to hold out. But then again maybe the book has grown better since its first appearance. Some books do. Certainly, the novel has grand ambitions. It is nothing less than a portrait of the artist as a young girl, and Smith set out not only to record a young life but to show where a writer's ambition and will come from. It is a story of triumph over adversity. Francie, spat upon, ridiculed, molested, betrayed by her first love, trusts her imagination to save her. Of her education, Smith says, ''Brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district.'' The librarian, who ''hated children,'' notices nothing about the girl working her way down the shelves from A to Z. Just before her graduation, Francie's teacher advises her to burn her essays about her father and ''poverty, starvation and drunkenness'' and instead to write of ''the true nobility of man.'' A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is Francie's revenge. Yet the mean social existence she dramatizes is countered by Francie's family inheritance: Johnny Nolan's romantic spirit and Katie's refusal to be beaten. Francie's illiterate maternal grandmother instructs Katie in what will make for success in America: the children must know how to read and write, and they must believe in heaven so they will have something to hope for; every day read them one page of the Bible and Shakespeare, and put money in a tin can nailed to the floor so that one day you will own some property (the property turns out to be Johnny Nolan's cemetery plot).

The book is a social document with the power of Jacob Riis's photographs. It gives the detail that illuminates the past -- the coffee pot, the air shaft, the barber's cup, chalking strangers on Halloween. But it is the book's emotional life that has kept it in print. Though the recording angel, its center of consciousness, is Francie, the dramatic center is her mother, Katie, filled with ambivalences that will determine the lives of her children. The study of Katie is bold, deadly, without sentiment: a disenchanted mother who without hatred wishes the alcoholic husband dead (''He's worthless, worthless. And God forgive me for ever finding it out''), and who coolly plots her future once he is out of the way. The mother who acknowledges her preference for her son over her daughter -- she loves him more -- but who depends on her daughter's salary and who asks her forgiveness. It is the mother who says of the daughter: ''She does not love me the way the boy loves me. . . . She does not understand me.'' Smith's achievement is to make this woman's steely resolve, her fierce sense of reality, her struggle with her own character, not only comprehensible but admirable. The novel's famous set pieces are Katie's labor pains, the attempted rape of Francie, Francie's graduation flowers from her dead father, and Aunt Sissy, who works in a condom factory (a 1950 Broadway musical version made her the protagonist), faking pregnancy: she claimed the reason she wasn't ''showing'' in front was that the baby she was carrying was in the back.

The book's determination to fill in all the details, to get everyone and everything in, and to follow its heroine through adolescence, leaves it shaggy -- the movie does a firm editing job on its dutifulness. But Smith has a treasure lode and she knows it -- and in this one book she gives all of it away. The intensity of her recall provides the book with its graceless but sincere sentiment and style. Smith's three subsequent novels do not repeat the material or power of her first. Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948), set in the 20's, tells of a young marriage; its bold conclusion is the wife's realization that her husband is a repressed homosexual. Joy in the Morning (1963), now back in print, is a cheery campus marriage tale. And the more ambitious Maggie-Now (1958) is a study of the Irish in America. The books are plodding and intelligent, oddly melancholy, but they lack the neurotic impulses and driven recall of her first. Smith wrote that one book we each have in us, and hers remains the most telling Brooklyn novel, our best depiction of this city's poor at the turn of the century. It is the Dickensian novel of New York that we didn't think we had.

''Brooklyn,'' Francie tells her brother at the end of the novel. ''It's a magic city and it isn't real. . . . It's like -- yes -- a dream. . . . But it's like a dream of being poor and fighting.'' The civilization of Smith's Williamsburg exists in very few living memories -- it will be soon a century away. In that stretch of Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side, you still find Francie's streets and tenements. And when even these isolated signposts are gone, the spirit of the book, the lives and struggles it celebrates, will be with us, reminding us of who we were and who we still are.

GC Film Series - Spring 2001

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