In this biographical look at an uncle's journey to America that would eventuate in his own arrival in the new land, director Elia Kazan warmly and somewhat ineptly plods it out in America, America. Slowly paced, repetitive and morosely performed it flounders a great deal of the way as Kazan attempts but fails to turn lead Starvos Gaillias into the Greek Dean with an endless parade of long pauses in overlong scenes. The result is one slow mostly low key show.
Repressed by the Turks in their own country Starvros is chosen by the family Patriarch with the family fortune to get them out of their predicament and is sent off to Constantinople to invest in a rug business with a relative. Innocent that he is he is quickly exploited and exposed to the cruel world at large of unsavory characters and systems. Befriended and betrayed he is soon destitute but eventually works his way into a situation that upon marrying the owner's daughter will set him up for life. It's all very tempting but America remains the brass ring for him and things on the domestic front dissolve and he returns to pursuing that dream.
At three hours in length America, America's grinding rhythm never attains much of a pace. Gaillias in the lead is all stare little emotion and incapable of stretching never mind even approach the thespian talents of a Brando or a Dean. Kazan gets around this by having his other characters perform over the top to his flat demeanor in which he is supposed to convey introspection and intent to reject the Old World but it fails miserably as Gaillias performance is bordered somewhere between comatose and zombie. Save for John Marley, the vaunted director of actors shows little of it here.
Almost as distracting is the cinema verite style of Haskell Wexler's cinematography which seems terribly out of sync with Kazan's classic framing of powerhouse actors. Without either , America, America's sloppily meanders amid Kazan nostalgia and his inability to say cut to a project he was perhaps too close to craft with the artist's eye.
Repressed by the Turks in their own country Starvros is chosen by the family Patriarch with the family fortune to get them out of their predicament and is sent off to Constantinople to invest in a rug business with a relative. Innocent that he is he is quickly exploited and exposed to the cruel world at large of unsavory characters and systems. Befriended and betrayed he is soon destitute but eventually works his way into a situation that upon marrying the owner's daughter will set him up for life. It's all very tempting but America remains the brass ring for him and things on the domestic front dissolve and he returns to pursuing that dream.
At three hours in length America, America's grinding rhythm never attains much of a pace. Gaillias in the lead is all stare little emotion and incapable of stretching never mind even approach the thespian talents of a Brando or a Dean. Kazan gets around this by having his other characters perform over the top to his flat demeanor in which he is supposed to convey introspection and intent to reject the Old World but it fails miserably as Gaillias performance is bordered somewhere between comatose and zombie. Save for John Marley, the vaunted director of actors shows little of it here.
Almost as distracting is the cinema verite style of Haskell Wexler's cinematography which seems terribly out of sync with Kazan's classic framing of powerhouse actors. Without either , America, America's sloppily meanders amid Kazan nostalgia and his inability to say cut to a project he was perhaps too close to craft with the artist's eye.