America, America

Elia Kazan put a capsule review of his screenplay in a terse scrap of dialogue. Stavros Topouzoglou, trying to explain his feverish yearning for America, tells his fiancee, "You have to be what I am to understand." To understand the movie intimately you must be Elia Kazan or one of his relatives. America, America is a gigantic home movie, constructed from family stories about migration to the Promised Land. Kazan himself was born in Turkey, and he fervently wants his film to remind us "that we are all immigrants and that we all came here looking for something." The pity is that he does not begin to make explicit what that something is. As a scenerio writer, Kazan fails to communicate the dreamlike lure America holds for the foreign-born. Facts come through with splendid candor, but the feelings lie mute in family legend.

Stavros has a fezfull of motives for leaving his home. His people, the Greeks, live in terror and humiliation under despotic Turkish rule. When his weak-kneed father decides to move the family to Constantinople, where there is less danger, Stavros has already resolved to quit Turkey and travel to the United States. As the eldest son, he is sent on ahead to invest the household treasures in the capital. And the hardships begin. The boy kills a shiftless Turk who has robbed him, loses a second cache in a brothel, and nearly dies in a raided meeting of revolutionaries. Of course Stavros is undaunted. He mutters continually, "I have a plan."

As long as Stravros keeps his plan honest, the motivation behind it can be left in the shadows. Up to this point, family responsibilities and a desire for freedom apparently suffice to explain the boys' ambitions. But finally Stavros realizes that to reach America he has no choice but to defile himself. He does not hesitate. Angling for a dowry to buy a steamship ticket, Stavros consents to marry the daughter of a wealthy rug merchant, whose bourgeois contentment repels him. But he has begun to concoct American-sounding rationalizations for his new tactics: "You have to look out for yourself in this world. You can't afford to be human." Soon Stavros abandons his prospective bride, a gentle girl whom he warns, "For your own happiness, don't trust me." Then, in a finishing kick of debased Algerism, he earns his passage to America as a gigolo and enters the country illegally with a group of indentured shoeshine boys. He has alienated all sympathy when, upon landing in New York harbor, he kisses the dock; one almost wishes that he would get a sliver in his lip.

Stavros declares that he keeps his honor safe inside himself: "I believe that in America, I will be washed clean." But his obsessive hankering after America goes unjustified. The film even suggests that Stavros' monomania is sheer materialism. On the ship he throws away his fez, pledging to buy himself a straw boater in the new land. Was it then greed that drew him to the United States? Even his concern for his family does not balance the absence of higher motives.

If the lack of inspiring visions in America America is due to a relentless realism--and certainly many immigrants did emphasize the cash value of the golden door-- then Kazan is guilty of inconsistency. Although setting and dialogue are entirely unaffected, the events of Stavros' journey are hardly typical. In the end, he owes his equivocal success to his good looks, even though there are less contingent and less glamorous means of escaping Turkey. And occasionally a trite episode mars the credibility of the story. A fellow immigrant whom Stavros aids early in the picture, for instance, inevitably pops up to repay the favor later on.

Kazan's direction helps to compensate for the weakness of his screenplay. Excellent, restrained acting and careful regard for authentic detail give America, America almost documentary qualities. Some of the film's best moments are rather static scenes of village life in Anatolia, the wharfs in Constantinople, and manners in Greek households. There are fine bits of protest, too, like a glimpse of a busy American sea captain nonchalantly ignoring an aged stevedore who has collapsed under his burden. During the voyage, the faces of crew members reveal their contempt for the immigrants. The brunt of the social criticism loses its bite, however, when put beside a hero whose noblest image of America seems to be a towering dollar sign.