Kazan is a director who gets powerful performances from his actors…. Where he has had strong scripts also, as in Streetcar Named Desire, the under-rated East of Eden, or On the Waterfront, his particular kind of talent has come through extraordinarily well; these are films which will last, though none of them is a really great work. Even Kazan's worst films are by no means the filmed plays turned out by lesser men coming from television or the stage; in fact, in avoiding that danger, Kazan tends to fall into a decoratively "cinematic" style in which strong effects are a little too obviously worked for, rather than allowed to rise out of the material, out of the structure of the work itself. In a nutshell, Kazan is a "pushy" director; his best films have been those in which he had a good story and good actors to push against.

In America, America he had total free rein; it is a personal film in every sense of the word. And hence I am forced to the unwilling conclusion that Kazan is not a director who gains by producing, writing, and directing, at least not on material so close to him…. Kazan here seems to have needed the harsh discipline of the check-and-balance system of filming. This method does not allow idiosyncratic masterpieces, and on this count the Hollywood producer certainly deserves the villainous character he has acquired; but at least it prevents excesses. And most of the troubles with America, America are excesses.

In a work which swings erratically from epic drama to psychological analysis, Kazan asks an excessive sympathy for his young hero with the "Anatolian smile"—Stavros is a stupid, gullible, vacantly ambitious, incompetently cynical youth, whose irrepressible smile turns out to be a mask rather than a redeeming naive virtue. (Good luck ultimately saves Stavros, but his own incorrigible schmuckery causes almost all his troubles.) (pp. 55-6)

We are asked to take an excessive interest in this hardly epic tale, and with progressively less reason. The grail Stavros seeks perhaps qualifies as epical, being suitably vague and ambiguous: America is at first a haven from oppression, but Stavros soon thinks of it chiefly as a place where he will be cleansed of all the sins he has committed in order to get there. His ill-starred jousts and reluctant wooing of maidens might have made a comic epic. But Kazan is being serious: he has drawn us Stavros the idiot hero, apt for all manner of lunacy, while thinking he was making a sentimental gesture toward his ancestors.

Indeed, one comes uncomfortably close to feeling that the film's real, latent subject is precisely the failures and humiliations which Stavros so largely brings upon himself. Kazan gives these episodes full dramatic play, with his accustomed energy. It is, of course, not unknown for minority group members to have a kind of fixation on traits that cause them grief; and one may grant Kazan many mixed feelings about his real-life uncle Stavros and his lost innocence. But why, then, the persistence in a heroic tone?

With such uncertainties of conception at its heart, it is no wonder that the film wanders unsurely and lacks balance. Individual episodes are impressive, but have a way of countering each other. (p. 56)