It takes some time for Kazan's movie to find its level and it could do with some judicious pruning, (it lasts about three hours). The faults are mostly at the beginning, (it's worth sticking with it), and the scenes of peasant oppression and revolt don't ring true. The casting of American players doesn't help or maybe Kanzan was just too close to his material. It is, after all, the story of his own family and how they came to America. He not only directs but wrote it as well and it's a subject deeply felt, and which he doesn't view objectively.
It picks up when the hero, Stavros, (an unconvincing Stathis Giallelis), gets to Constantinople and falls in with a rich merchant and his family and is promised in marriage to the merchant's daughter. It isn't that these scenes feel any 'truer' than the earlier scenes of poverty, (this is a culture that is alien to us and Kazan lays on the religious symbolism a mite too heavily), but dramatically they are very well structured and observed and the performances of both Paul Mann as the merchant and Linda Marsh as his daughter are outstanding. The rest of the acting is very uneven and Giallelis is certainly no James Dean, (his career was short-lived).
In the film's final third we follow Stavros to America and the ship-board scenes are brilliantly done. Haskell Wexler photographs them with a documentary-like realism, (his cinematography throughout is superb), and Kazan reins in the film's penchant for melodrama, (only a sacrificial act of kindness strains credulity). There are several splendid sequences spread across the film and ultimately one is inclined to forgive Kazan for the occasions where it falls flat. It isn't, of course, in any way 'commercial', which is some kind of virtue in itself. It panders to no-one but Kazan. Perhaps that makes it some kind of folly but if it is, then it's a grandiose one.
It picks up when the hero, Stavros, (an unconvincing Stathis Giallelis), gets to Constantinople and falls in with a rich merchant and his family and is promised in marriage to the merchant's daughter. It isn't that these scenes feel any 'truer' than the earlier scenes of poverty, (this is a culture that is alien to us and Kazan lays on the religious symbolism a mite too heavily), but dramatically they are very well structured and observed and the performances of both Paul Mann as the merchant and Linda Marsh as his daughter are outstanding. The rest of the acting is very uneven and Giallelis is certainly no James Dean, (his career was short-lived).
In the film's final third we follow Stavros to America and the ship-board scenes are brilliantly done. Haskell Wexler photographs them with a documentary-like realism, (his cinematography throughout is superb), and Kazan reins in the film's penchant for melodrama, (only a sacrificial act of kindness strains credulity). There are several splendid sequences spread across the film and ultimately one is inclined to forgive Kazan for the occasions where it falls flat. It isn't, of course, in any way 'commercial', which is some kind of virtue in itself. It panders to no-one but Kazan. Perhaps that makes it some kind of folly but if it is, then it's a grandiose one.