A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 338, 14 December 1945, Page 18

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN

(20th Century-Fox)

, PERHAPS the best way to '" catalogue this film is to liken it to This Happy Breed, with the proviso, however, that the breed in this case is

American and far from happy. It is also @ much more personal, self-contained chronicle than the British film was. National and international events are not used as the backcloth against which this story moves: the Brooklyn neighbourhood where the Nolan family lives is &@ world complete in itself, and what goes on outside that world of squalid tenements has no apparent bearing on the story. (I say "apparent" because slums don’t just create themselves.) The film also lacks some of the dramatic vigour of its English counterpart, largely because the quality of selection — the primary quality in all true art-is less marked. The director simply records, with almost documentary conscientiousmess, nearly everything that happens to

his little *theroine, Francie Nolan (Peggy Ann Garner) during her childhood, with the result that the dramatic highlights, though they are there have the effect of being subdued. © With these qualifications, however, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is worthy of being mentioned in the same breath, if perhaps not with quite the same enthusiasm, as This Happy Breed. It has, I think, equal poignancy as a human document, and almost certainly greater social honesty as a study of the effect of environment and poverty on character. The people in the Noel Coward picture were, after all, notably untouched by the economic struggle, whereas for those in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn the struggle is bitter and unceasing-par-ticularly in the case of Katie Nolan, the young wife and mother, who is so well portrayed by Dorothy McGuire. She is the really tragic figure in the story; not Francie the daughter, growing up amid drabness, nor Johnny Nolan the father, drinking himself downhill and dying sooner than he needs to. For Francie has the saving quality of imagination to paar a

brighten her life, as well as the ambition to overcome her handicaps (any "ittle girl who would tackle Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy because she was "reading right through the alphabet" and it was next on the list, would go far!) And Johnny, too, has imagination and humour and a certain kind of ambition; not enough-or possibly too much?-to keep him sober and in a steady job, but sufficient to keep him happy with his dreams. But it is Katie Nolan who must scrape and sweat to keep the home together, who clings desperately to the remnants of her respectability, and who carries hopelessness like a stone in her heart. I shall not soon forget James Dunn’s excellent, discerning performance as the lovable ne’er-do-well,* nor Peggy Ann Garner as the daughter, nor Joan Blondell as the good-hearted, easy-going aunt, nor Lloyd Nolan as the Irish policeman, nor several others in a well-chosen cast; but I think it is Dorothy McGuire as Katie whom I shall remember longest. For somehow she is symbolic of all those fundamentally decent, pleasant, but underprivileged people, fighting a losing battle against their environment, whose story is so painstakingly and often so movingly told in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. *In this film, James Dunn makes what is generally called a "‘triumphant comeback.’’ He will be recalled as a romantic star of about 10 years ago, his best performance probably beiug with Sally Eilers in Bad Girl. — —