A Film Canon

This beautiful adaptation of Bessie Smith's autobiography strikes the perfect balance between sentimentality and realism, as evinced in the central performance of Peggy Ann Garner - the strongest of any American child to date - which manages to transform the Hollywood portrayal of children as miniature adults into one of childhood imagining adulthood and, more distantly, how it will reflect and describe itself from that vantage point. More generally, Kazan ensures that the conflict between idealistic eccentricity - in the form of Bessie's father (James Dunn) - and practical normality - her mother (Dorothy McGuire) - remains an irreducible one. Hence the irony surrounding the central injunction - to use imagination to productive, realistic ends - given that this very injunction is itself the result of a purely imaginative gesture on Bessie and her father's part; namely, their construction of an entirely fictional universe to satisfy her (unexpectedly fulfillable) fantasy of attending a prestigious school. In the same way, Kazan nuances his portrayal of the tenements so as to remove them from any straightforward pre-war nostalgia, poetically elaborating such gritty realities as the birth of a child, and the movement from one increasingly restricted room to another, as well as ensuring that all symbolic co-ordinates - especially the fairly transparent tree of the title - are relegated to a more documentary imperative, much of which feels derived from photographic evidence of the period. The result is a profound, elusive melancholy, whose anatomy ranks among Smith's proposed reads, and which is finally offered as the defining second-generation immigrant experience.