America, America

Shot by Haskell Wexler in a stark black-and-white deliberately designed to lend the film the feel of documentary, Kazan's epic was based on his own novel, and inspired by the journey his uncle made from a Turkish peasant village, via Istanbul, to New York. For once in his career, the director employed little-known actors, with a welcome loss of theatricality; indeed, the entire movie benefits from its authenticity, geographical, historical and emotional, and may be seen as one of the peaks of Kazan's career. Certainly, it is one of the finest movies to deal with the plight of those thousands of immigrants who travelled in steerage to Ellis Island at the turn of the century.