AMERICA AMERICA (1963)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Elia Kazan

SCREENWRITER: Elia Kazan

FILM STARS: Stathis Giallelis, Frank Wolff, Harry Davis, Elena Karam, Estelle Hemsley, Gregory Rozakis, Lou Antonio, Salem Ludwig, John Marley

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Elia Kazan

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Fontana

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1964

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1963 (though apparently based on an unpublished work by Kazan called “Hamal” from 1961)

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Adventure, Drama

WORDS: A short book about director Elia Kazan’s Greek uncle, Joe Kazan, and his struggle to escape the Turks in Anatolia and voyage to America becomes a three hour film, both epic and personal. The book reads like a synopsis of the film, and that is nothing against Kazan who proved he could write long novels (The Arrangement). It seems it may have been a screenplay. In Richard Schickel’s book on Kazan, “Elia Kazan: A Biography” he says “It was not a “novelization” of a screenplay, nor was it simply a published screenplay. It was rawer, more immediate than that” (Harper, 2005, P391). But Kazan himself says in his interview book with Michel Ciment, “Kazan on Kazan”, “I had a lot of notes, but I wrote the screenplay in one burst, over four months, a few pages a day. I think it was 1961. Hamal was the first name of the screenplay, the second The Anatolian Smile (the film’s title in England – typical), and the third America America” (Secker & Warburg, 1973, p146). Kazan took family stories about his uncle, his parents and family friends and wrote a book about migration that, as Kazan says in the book “An American Journey”, appealed to all migrants, especially from the continent. The film is a beautiful marriage of John Ford and Italian neo-realism. A poetic reality which is rough and documentary like around the edges.

Incidentally, and not part of of the film, after Uncle Joe made it to America he saved enough money to bring his extended family over … including Elia’s family.

LINKS

TRAILER

Kazan