America America (1963)

best movie i've ever seen.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

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.

"America, America" is a movie made with the soul. It is a hair-raising movie about the immigrant experience, made by artists temporarily outside the Hollywood cage. It is about the struggle to be human in a world that bites at you, and it is about naked desire. "America, America" is a film about a young man with ichor in his arteries, made by people with ichor in their arteries.Stavros is a young Greek from Anatolia, a youth with burning eyes, full of ethos as well. He yearns to live a life away from degradation (Greeks in Anatolia were a despised minority). This movie shows his peregrination to America, in three of the shortest hours I've ever lived. It shows a cycle of being broken and rebuilt over and again, the death of illusions, the obduracy of hope, and the rack of desire.Haskell Wexler deserves special mention as he quite frequently produced jaw-dropping shots in this movie. There is a scene in this movie where Stavros is sat next to an older woman, Sophia (sat together like panthers watching an ape play with jackals), and the electricity between them, established entirely visually, is a devastation.The editing from Dede Allen, is similarly special, and you can see that Kazan acknowledged all this creative talent as he reads out all the names of the major creative staff at the end over the credits. One particularly beautiful effect was a dissolve the last time we see Stavros' mother, where her face persist on the screen for a moment, almost as if she has become a ghost.You absolutely must see this movie.

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.

This is a great movie narrating the life journey of individuals who start their way from their original homeland escaping Turkish massacres and ethnic cleansing to New York, the place of the "poor and the tired" ...everything is great...scenes, narration, events, acting.This is a sensitive movie, with a good and impressive ending that tells a lot. In summary, it is the history of America of Immigrants, the shelter of persecuted from the viewpoint of victims of Turkish massacres in the beginning of the 20th century. Based on its content, I can say that it is the life history of all immigrants in USA.A good movie...worth 8/10!