DVD Review: Elia Kazan’s America America on Warner Home Video

The film is a revealing work about the American dream because it envisions it as a painful and seemingly never-ending process.

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America AmericaThe immigrant experience in Elia Kazan’s America America is defined by an overwhelming fear of endless transmigration. It’s not so much a journey from one physical location to another but an act of self-imposed exile that becomes an endless series of selfish but necessary personal sacrifices. Based on his Greek uncle’s journey from Turkey to America, which he turned into a novel, Kazan’s film acknowledges that it’s not hope for a future beyond what his ancestor knew that motivated his flight; it was the terror of being trapped by the ineffable sameness of his suffocating and politically unstable home life. The fear of being a perpetual immigrant, of escaping the past simply for its own sake, is what makes the film such a harrowing vision of the American dream.

Filmed with a cast of largely nonprofessional actors, America America immediately strives to impress with the raw reality of its immigrant narrative. As refined as the film’s final hour is, the story isn’t supposed to be viewed holistically as a polished romance of a man finding his place away from the people he loves. Stavros Topouzoglou (Stathi Giallelis) begins his journey in his native Turkey in the late 1890s. At this time, he doesn’t want to leave for America to seek fame or fortune but to seek respite from the din that looks to swallow up his home. Stavros knows that he needs to leave after he learns how dangerous it is to be friends with an Armenian in such an intolerant society. The fact that he has to betray a friend hangs heavy on Stavros and gives him the motivation to scrabble desperately for a chance at freedom.

Stavros’s sense of fidelity is crucial to his journey, but it is a pretext after a point. He leaves his family behind and even shakes his elderly grandmother up to find hidden reserves of money. That character-defining monomania isn’t capricious according to Kazan, but rather a vital necessity, even if Stavros does promise to send his family money and eventually bring them all to America to live with him, a promise that the film’s negligible coda assures us that he keeps. While Stavros’s family gives him everything they can spare to help give him safe passage, his thoughts aren’t with them but an abstract concept of them just as they’re fixed on an abstraction of America itself (he’s never shown talking about what he realistically expects from America save that he knows he needs to get there to prove himself). His family is part of a new world that he can only create by rebuilding his past. “I have one idea for this world,” a sympathetic refugee bellows to no one in particular, “Destroy it! And start over again!”

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In his years-long journey, Stavros loses everything and is at one point even confused with a corpse. But he doesn’t really give up on going to America until he’s tamed by a suffocatingly comfortable domestic life in Constantinople with Thomna (Joanna Frank), a wealthy merchant’s (Paul Mann) daughter. For a period of time, Stavros wills himself to not talk about America, even if Thomna sees something secret and even a little sinister dominating his thoughts. In the end, Stavros comes perilously close to sacrificing his obsession for the sake of a character that’s perpetually right behind him, scrapping harder at every turn to get just as far as Stavros does. The road to that breaking point is long, arduous, and often just frustrating, as in Stavros’s first few encounters with thieves on the road. But thanks to Kazan’s dedication to that grueling process, you can’t help but be shattered by Giallelis when he murmurs, “You have to be—what I am—to understand.”

Image/Sound

The restored picture quality on this Warner Home Video DVD release is impressive: The black-and-white photography is crisp and immersive and there’s very little noticeable grain. The mono audio track is similarly well-balanced and doesn’t feature any distracting hissing or pops.

Extras

The only special feature here is an audio commentary track by film historian Foster Hirsch. Hirsch’s take on the film is thoughtful thanks to his knowledge of Elia Kazan’s films’ recurring themes and respective production histories, but his analysis of America America is rather dry. He presents Stavros’s father as another one of Kazan’s characteristically distant father figures, a figurehead Stavros simply cannot please. That reading is especially unconvincing, even if it’s understandable why Hirsch came to that conclusion using the contextual evidence that he does.

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Overall

America America is a revealing work about the American dream because it doesn’t envision it as a noble enterprise, but rather a painful and seemingly never-ending process.

Score: 
 Cast: Stathis Giallelis, Joanna Frank, Frank Wolff, Elena Karam, Estelle Hemsley, Harry Davis  Director: Elia Kazan  Screenwriter: Elia Kazan  Distributor: Warner Home Video  Running Time: 168 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1963  Release Date: February 8, 2011  Buy: Video

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Roger Ebert, and The Wrap. He is the author of The Northman: A Call to the Gods.

1 Comment

  1. Sorry to say that there are some errors here. At the beginning, Stavros’s dream of America is not shared by the parents who want to go to Constantinople where they think life would be safer for Greeks. In fact, the dream is transferred to Stavros by his Armenian friend Vartan who gets murdered during one massacre of the Hamidian period. Vartuhi is an Armenian prostitute, not the bride Stavros marries. Stavros never marries his Greek fiancée Thomna.

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