A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Drama | Music
An Arkansas drifter becomes an overnight media sensation. As he becomes drunk with fame and power, will he ever be exposed as the fraud he has become?
Starring: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Percy Waram
Director: Elia Kazan
The Arrangement (1969)
Drama
Advertising executive Eddie Anderson has success in business, comfort in marriage…and a gnawing despair he can't escape. So one morning he turns his sports car into the path of an 18-wheeler on the freeway — and toward a tumultuous future.
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Faye Dunaway, Deborah Kerr, Richard Boone, Hume Cronyn, Harold Gould
Director: Elia Kazan
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)
Drama
In Brooklyn circa 1900, the Nolans manage to enjoy life on pennies despite great poverty and Papa's alcoholism. We come to know these people well through big and little troubles: Aunt Sissy's scandalous succession of "husbands"; the removal of the one tree visible from their tenement; and young Francie's desire to transfer to a better school…if irresponsible Papa can get his act together.
Starring: Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, James Dunn, Lloyd Nolan, James Gleason, Ted Donaldson
Director: Elia Kazan
Panic in the Streets (1950)
Crime | Film-Noir | Thriller
A doctor and a policeman in New Orleans have only 48 hours to locate a killer infected with pneumonic plague.
Starring: Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Barbara Bel Geddes, Paul Douglas, Zero Mostel, Dan Riss
Director: Elia Kazan
Wild River (1960)
Drama | Romance
Social drama set in rural Alabama in the 1930s, directed by Elia Kazan. Montgomery Clift stars as Chuck Glover, an agent sent by the Tennessee Valley Authority to oversee the building of a dam on the Tennessee River. He encounters opposition from the local people, including an elderly woman, Ella Garth (Jo van Fleet) who refuses to budge from her land, and various factions who object to his providing paid employment for local black labourers. Lee Remick co-stars as Ella Garth's granddaughter Carol, who gradually falls in love with the sensitive and liberal-minded Glover.
Starring: Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet, Frank Overton, Malcolm Atterbury
Director: Elia Kazan
Man on a Tightrope (1953)
Drama
Czech circus owner-Clown and his entire troupe employ a daring stratagem in order to escape en masse from behind the iron curtain.
Starring: Fredric March, Terry Moore, Gloria Grahame, Cameron Mitchell, Adolphe Menjou, Robert Beatty
Director: Elia Kazan
Pinky (1949)
Drama
Pinky, a light skinned black woman, returns to her grandmother's house in the South after graduating from a Northern nursing school. Pinky tells her grandmother that she has been "passing" for white while at school in the North. In addition, Pinky has fallen in love with a young white doctor, Dr. Thomas Adams, who knows nothing about her black heritage. Pinky says that she will return to the North, but Granny Johnson convinces her to stay and treat an ailing white woman, Miss Em. Meanwhile, Dr. Canady, a black physician from another part of the state, visits Pinky and asks her to train some African American students, but she declines. Pinky nurses Miss Em but is resentful because she seems to feel that she is doing the same thing her grandmother did. Pinky and Miss Em slowly develop a mutual respect for one another. Mrs. Em leaves Pinky her property when she dies, but relatives of the deceased woman contest the new will in court. To raise money for the court fees, Pinky washes clothes by hand with her grandmother. The court rules in Pinky's favor and she keeps the land. Tom wants her to resume her life as a white woman and to marry him, but she refuses. Pinky decides to use the house and land for Miss Em's Clinic and Nursery School.
Starring: Jeanne Crain, Ethel Barrymore, William Lundigan, Ethel Waters, Griff Barnett, Evelyn Varden
Director: Elia Kazan
Boomerang! (1947)
Comedy | Crime | Drama | Film-Noir
The true story of a prosecutor's fight to prove the innocence of a man accused of a notorious murder.
Starring: Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur Kennedy, Sam Levene, Taylor Holmes
Director: Elia Kazan
Baby Doll (1956)
Drama
Times are tough for cotton-miller Archie (Karl Malden) but at least he has his child-bride (Carroll Baker), who'll soon be his wife in title and truth. The one-year agreement keeping them under the same roof – yet never in the same bed – is about to end. But a game with a sly business rival (Eli Wallach) is about to begin. In Baby Doll, as in A Streetcar Named Desire, director Elia Kazan and writer Tennessee Williams broke new ground – earning condemnation by the then-powerful Legion of Decency. They earned laurels too: four Academy Award nominations, Golden Globe Awards for Baker and Kazan and a British Academy Award for Wallach. Watch this funny, steamy classic that, as Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide proclaims, "still sizzles."
Starring: Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock
Director: Elia Kazan
East of Eden (1955)
Drama | Romance
Film adaptation of Steinbeck's classic about a 1917 California farm family and the two brothers who struggle to maintain their strict, Bible-toting father's favor.
Starring: James Dean, Raymond Massey, Julie Harris, Burl Ives, Albert Dekker, Jo Van Fleet
Director: Elia Kazan
Splendor in the Grass (1961)
Drama | Romance
Deanie (Natalie Wood in an Oscar-nominated performance that marked a career turning point toward complex adult roles) is a teenager eager to do what's right in her 1920s Kansas town. But the emotions she shares with boyfriend Bud (Warren Beatty's screen debut) are too strong. Soon the conflict between respectable behavior and human desire will push Bud to physical collapse. And Deanie to madness. Director Elia Kazan encouraged Pulitzer Prize winner William Inge (BUS STOP, PICNIC) to turn a true story he heard during his Midwest youth into an Academy Award-winning script. The result, SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, remains as poetic, penetrating and powerful today as it was two generations ago.
Starring: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle
Director: Elia Kazan
America, America (1963)
Drama
Elia Kazan, ethnic Greek but Turkish by birth, tells the story of the struggles of his uncle – in this account named Stavros Topouzoglou – in emigrating to America. In the 1890's, the young, kind-hearted but naive Stavros lived in Anatolia, where the Greek and Armenian minorities were repressed by the majority Turks, this repression which often led to violence. Even Stavros being friends with an Armenian was frowned upon. As such, Stavros dreamed of a better life – specifically in America – where, as a result, he could make his parents proud by his grand accomplishments. Instead, his parents, with most of their money, sent Stavros to Constantinople to help fund the carpet shop owned by his first cousin once removed. What Stavros encountered on his journey, made on foot with a small donkey, made him question life in Anatolia even further. Once in Constantinople, his resolve to earn the 110 Turkish pound third class fare to the United States became stronger than ever. But try after try,…
Starring: Stathis Giallelis, Frank Wolff, Harry Davis, Elena Karam, Estelle Hemsley, Gregory Rozakis
Director: Elia Kazan
On the Waterfront (1954)
Crime | Drama
Elia Kazan's compelling social drama was the winner of eight Academy Awards and marks one of Marlon Brando's finest screen performances. Brando is Terry Malloy, a handsome but inarticulate longshoreman, who gets involved in a labor scandal when a fellow dock worker is murdered. He knows that the victim was killed by the oppressive labor union for squealing to a commission investigating misdoings. Terry intends to keep his mouth shut and his job safe. But when Edie (Eva Marie-Saint), the dead man's beautiful sister, comes to town, he must choose between his allegiance to a corrupt union and his loyalty to Edie.
Starring: Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, Pat Henning
Director: Elia Kazan
Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
Drama | Romance
Philip Green is a highly respected writer who is recruited by a national magazine to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism in America. He's not too keen on the series, mostly because he's not sure how to tackle the subject. Then it dawns on him: if he was to pretend to all and sundry that he was Jewish, he could then experience the degree of racism and prejudice that exists and write his story from that perspective. It takes little time for him to experience bigotry. He soon learns the liberal-minded firm he works for doesn't hire Jews and that his own secretary changed her name and kept the fact that she is Jewish a secret from everyone. Green soon finds that he won't be invited to certain parties, that he cannot stay in so-called 'restricted' hotels and that his own son is called names in the street. His anger at the way he is treated also affects his relationship with Kathy Lacy…
Starring: Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield, Celeste Holm, Anne Revere, Albert Dekker
Director: Elia Kazan
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Drama | Romance
Looking for a benchmark in movie acting? Breakthrough performances don't come much more electrifying than Marlon Brando's animalistic turn as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley and his wife, Stella (as in Brando's oft-mimicked line, "Hey, Stellaaaaaa!"), are the earthy couple in New Orleans's French Quarter whose lives are upended by the arrival of Stella's sister, Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh). Blanche, a disturbed, lyrical, faded Southern belle, is immediately drawn into a battle of wills with Stanley, beautifully captured in the differing styles of the two actors. This extraordinarily fine adaptation won acting Oscars for Leigh, Kim Hunter (as Stella), and Karl Malden (as Blanche's clueless suitor), but not for Brando.
Starring: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
Director: Elia Kazan
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