A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)

Directed by Elia Kazan

What happens to you and your family if the head of the household is a pleasant fellow, well-liked by everybody, without a trace of guile or malice in him, and quite a lark to be around, but — irresponsible? Well, that depends. He may be fine, as long as you’re not married to him and you don’t need any money. But in our Film of the Week, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Johnny Nolan drinks too much, he’s a bit of a dreamer who doesn’t get around to the hard work of making things in reality, and his family suffers for it. Not that the children exactly know that they are suffering. They are poor, they do know that. We’ll see them get a leftover Christmas tree from the salesman on the street, who throws the remainders at people in a kind of challenge — if you can catch the tree, you can keep it. The two Nolan children, Francie and Neely, a thirteen year old girl and a twelve year old boy, do catch the tree and they lug it on up to their flat. And it’s then that Johnny Nolan, who’s been coughing a bit, makes a decision. His wife has shamed him enough, and he’s deserved most of it. He’s going to leave that flat and not come back until he has a job.

Elia Kazan, one of our favorite directors at Word and Song, made quite a few films with profound human feeling, but he did not do sentimentality, which is just an impostor for feeling. So I am not going to tell you what happens to Johnny, except to say that it averts the two main possibilities you may think of, either one of them sentimental in its way. What’s at the heart of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not the economics of the Nolan household, though we are never permitted to sidestep it. It’s the possibility of love among human beings such as we are. Katie Nolan (Dorothy McGuire) has to pinch pennies and worry all the time about the rent, and though she hasn’t had a child in twelve years, she learns she is going to have one now, and she can’t afford a doctor, much less a visit to the hospital.

Katie resents her husband Johnny (James Dunn, who won an Oscar for his performance) because everybody likes him, and yet somehow even in her exhaustion she loves him too. He’s a second-rate singer who gets odd jobs at weddings and parties and such, a happy-go-lucky fellow, who’s mostly happy and not very lucky. But the emotional center of the film is the girl, Francie — played by Peggy Ann Garner, who won a special award for her outstanding work; she is in our pantheon of great child actors, with Margaret O’Brien, Dean Stockwell, Brandon de Wilde, Jackie Cooper, and, of course, Mickey Rooney.

The thing about Francie is that she doesn’t belong in a tenement. Not that she thinks herself too good for it. She and her brother Neely are quite friendly with their Aunt Sissy (Joan Blondell), who skates on the edge of a wild and immoral life — on the edge of it, marrying rather too frequently, and she calls her current husband “Bill” after the name of her first husband, though his name is really Steve and he keeps telling her so. It’s that Francie reads books, which Neely doesn’t do. She wants to read all the books in the local library. And she is languishing at the public school in her neighborhood. But there is a very fine public school nearby. The rules say that she must live within a certain geographical area to go there. But Johnny arranges things so that he and Francie can play a bit of a trick on the principal, who may indeed perceive the trick — that is left ambiguous. But the rules are bent, in any case, and Francie has another world opened up for her.

What does the title mean, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? There is a lone, tall tree outside of the Nolans’ tenement window, and Johnny and Francie have long called it the Tree of Life. A strange moniker, that. Surely the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn — it used to be its own town, but was absorbed into Brooklyn, which used to be its own city, till it became a semi-autonomous borough of New York — was not the Garden of Eden. Williamsburg was densely populated, especially with immigrants, as Mr. and Mrs. Nolan are. We see plenty of that liveliness, bordering on chaos, in the film, and the Tree figures into that too, because housewives from this or that window on either side of the street use it to hang their clotheslines on, so that the whole scene is of a tall and put-upon tree interlaced with lines and shirts and pants and underclothes. Not everybody is good, but there are no real villains, and we do get some unassuming or ragtag embodiments of charity, and I mean the real deal, the theological virtue: from the owner of a saloon (James Gleason; who else?) and a lonely and sensible policeman (Lloyd Nolan).

Maybe it’s called “the Tree of Life” because of what Johnny says about it, when Francie sees it being pruned back, with whole limbs lopped off. She is afraid it will die. But Johnny tells her that a tree grows harder and stouter by being shaken. It will come back with all the greener life, he says. He doesn’t seem to apply the lesson to his own life, though he has slogged his way through the ups and downs of poverty. Yet we can see it in action in the lives of the others. And perhaps it is true of Johnny also; that’s something you will have to decide for yourselves, dear Readers! And we’re most interested in hearing what you have to say.

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