America America, Elia Kazan's account of how his Uncle Isaac came
to America. It's a long movie--3
hours--and filmed in black and white, but the on-location filming in Greece,
Turkey, its unknown actors, and its filming in black and white, often with the
camera hand-held, make it seem as contemporary as any indie film of 2018.
Last night I finally got to see a movie my parents had
talked about 55 years ago when it first came out:
Starting in
Anatolia, Turkey in the 1890's, it chronicles the long, often blackly funny,
and very torturous journey of young Stavros Topoglouzou to his arrival as an
immigrant in the United States. The
Christian Greeks and Armenians lived a precarious life as minorities in Ottoman
Turkey, and when the Armenians in his village are slaughters by the Turks, his
middle class (by Anatolian standards) family decides to send him to Istanbul-was-Constantinople
with all of their accumulated worldly valuables to establish a family business with
a rug-dealing cousin there, and once established, to send for the rest of them.
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| Stavros on the road |
But Stavros
has other ideas: he doesn't want to stop in the Turkish capital, but once there,
to emigrate to America. And eventually,
he does. Meanwhile, though, he undergoes
some black-
When he gets to the big city, he finds that his cousin's carpet business
is failing, and that the latter was hoping that the Topogoulou's family
valuables would help him start over. In
Constantanople, one scheme after another to earn enough money to emigrate falls
awry. The rug store is unsalvageable,
Stavros's backbreaking efforts to earn funds for a steamship ticket topples in
one night to a prostitute, to whom he loses his virginity and his cash
stash. His cousin introduces him to a
very rich friend with four ugly daughters.
If he marries one of them (not so ugly after all), he will eventually
inherit a fortune. But for all of his
picaresque under-the-table past, he can't go through with it, having developed
a genuine affection for the girl, but feeling totally smothered by her way of
life and what he would have to buy into--and abandoning the American dream.
comedic tribulations, losing all the family goods on the road to a
Turkish con-man and a bunch of Gypsies.
Finally, he
begins an affair with an American middle-aged woman married to a successful
Armenian American but very repulsive businessman, who are making a visit back
to the old country. When they return to
the United States, she gets him a steerage ticket on the same ship so that they
can continue their liaison. Discovered
by her husband just before they dock in the promised land, he is thrown into
the brig for certain return to Turkey.
But there's
a subplot. Back in Anatolia he had met a
panhandling young Armenian named Hohannes Gardashian on his way to emigrate to
America on foot. Stavros gave him his
shoes. Later, they find each other again
in Constantanople. While Stavros is
playing the gigolo for a boat ticket, Hohannes is dying of Tuberculosis, and, in the
end, rather than being rejected at Ellis Island and shipped back himself, gives
Stavros his place and jumps overboard.
And so, Stavros gets to America under an assumed name that is
Americanized anyway, and later gets all of his brothers and sisters over too.
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| Stavros and Johannes (R) glimpse America |
There are
so many twists and turns in the plot that I can only suggest that you rent the
movie from Amazon and see it for yourself.
As the grandchild of immigrants with a similar, but far less
action-packed story, I found myself enthralled.
My ancestors too had been brought over one by one, but in a much more
orderly way. My dad, in fact, would have
probably been called a "dreamer," as he was born in Europe and
brought here when he was one year old.
The amazing
timeless feeling to this movie is all the more poignant given our
Commander-in-Chief's "Build the Wall" attitude and the plight of the
dreamers as I write this. All of us who
are not of Native American stock are immigrants, and the majority of us (except
for the more tragic forced "immigration" of African Americans) came
here because they were fleeing intolerable conditions elsewhere. Really, when you think about it, most
migrations are triggered from similar situations, and all over the world (think
of the Rohinga). There were always a few
bad apples in the batch, and even in the halcyon days of American immigration,
undesirables were screened and not let in, but almost all of us made it here
without resorting to a Life of Crime. If
you think about it, consider Australia, where immigration was initially made up
of dumped undesirables.
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| Elia Kazan on the set |
Elia Kazan
had a controversial career. He directed
so many classics: On the Waterfront, East of Eden, and A Streetcar Named Desire, to name just three, and received
countless awards for them. He also had a
tarnished reputation for his naming names during the infamous McCarthy
hearings. Like Roman Polanski, though,
as much as there are personal character disasters, when these
semi-autographical memoir film were made, for this writer, at least, the work
of art can stand on its own merits and messages.
I wish that
"America America" could be re-released on the big screen now because
of its timeless timeliness. It's so
relevant to our American world!
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You can rent America America on Amazon Prime. $2.99. It's worth it.
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