IN the present style of 20th Century–Fox epics, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” deals obviously, lushly, safely, respectfully and theatrically with a tenement family named Nolan, who live poorly and indestructibly in Brooklyn during the twenties. It is one of those rare Hollywood films which earnestly endeavors to show the drabness and unhappiness in an American family and in a section of American society. The young mother of the Nolans (Dorothy McGuire) scrapes and goes sour on her life and her husband (James Dunn) trying to get their children (Peggy Ann Garner and Ted Donaldson) through school. Her husband is a drunkard who works off and on as a singing waiter and finally dies of pneumonia and alcoholism. The picture then gets back to Hollywood normal with everybody eating banana splits, the mother about to marry a Gibraltar-like policeman (Lloyd Nolan), the daughter starting on her first puppy love affair, the tree in the tenement court, which was cut down earlier in the film, starting to grow again and somebody announcing that they have certainly had a good time being poor. I appreciate the earlier part of the film for dealing seriously with an unhappy segment of American life, and for trying to find some conflict in the American family (the mother and father falling out, the daughter siding with the father), but I don’t like the movie.
The sets have the thin-walled quality of a studio-built Williamsburg and are jammed stagily with people, noise, confusion, quarrels and bric-a-brac, all obviously citified in the same way that Mrs. Nolan is made to be on the go too much. The sets don’t matter a great deal, because they are hardly used or seen. The main fact in all of the scenes is that you are supposed to look at the people’s faces and listen to what they say, and when they stop talking the scene changes. All of the poetry about the tree in the tenement court, its being cut down and then starting to grow again, is confined to looking at the people’s faces as they talk about it, and Francie’s rapturous tours of the dime store, the library, and her Sunday walks with her father into a fashionable neighborhood are only as involved with their environment as one street car is in passing another. The most destructive element in the film is its photography, which blankets the poverty in lovely shadows and pearly sentimentality; the least comfortable element is the embarrassing, stiff lower-class speech that sounds like the talk used in old melodramas of the South. I liked the choice of James Dunn as an alcoholic waiter and of Miss Garner as the girl, but Dorothy McGuire looks like a respectable Junior Miss, Joan Blondell is pure fantasy as the adulterous Aunt Cissy, and a good actor, Lloyd Nolan, is awful as the cop. The acting is a theatrical kind that is carefully elaborated and its effects made very round, definite and monolithic.
The movie shows a disarming lack of skill, imagination or daring in telling itself visually. Its material is mostly confined to showing how the life of poor people is dominated by the scrabble for money, and only in a scene of childbirth is there any real terror and hardness in the faces and gestures, any drabness in the photography and any complexity of thought and feeling. It seemed to me the only place where for a time the picture tries to show what the actual life of its people is like, though I liked a glimpse of Francie trying not to step on the lines of a sidewalk, the beauty Miss McGuire manages when she waits up for her husband, and a scene in which Dunn sings “Annie Laurie” and refuses to answer his wife. The life that the mother turns sour over is recorded in one bare instant showing her scrubbing the staircase; the rest of her movie time is spent telling her sister, husband, children, and, mother that she has to be hard to make ends meet, and being told by them that she shouldn’t be hard. The characters are narrowed into one or two traits, studied vaguely and unimaginatively expressed—Dunn as a happy, friendly, Saroyan figure, by the easy, unincisive device of having innumerable people say what he is and having him sing “Molly Malone” coming home from work. His trouble getting jobs happens off-screen, and his alcoholism is taken care of by a hurried moment one day when he comes home drunk, and is got through so quickly, pleasantly and neatly that the worrying that is done over it seems silly.
March 12, 1945