In his first film, Elia Kazan evokes the wistful hopes of childhood while maintaining “a bulldog hold on the work’s adult theme: the often crippling spiritual price that a mother must pay in choosing bread over dreams” (Andrew Sarris, Village Voice). Set in 1910 Brooklyn, the film depicts a young dreamer (Peggy Ann Garner) with a father (James Dunn) whose charms are blurred by drink and a mother (Dorothy McGuire) too accustomed to hardship, turning hard herself. Blondell brings warmth and intelligence to the role of Aunt Sissy, whose appetite for marriage—serial or simultaneous—has made her the family disgrace. Although she lamented that some of her scenes were cut from the film, Blondell loved the role, saying Kazan “let me have a moment or two of tenderness, of maturity, that nobody had ever given me before.” The New York Daily News called her performance “little short of wonderful.”

—Juliet Clark

• Written by Tess Slesinger, Frank Davis, based on the novel by Betty Smith. Photographed by Leon Shamroy. With Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, James Dunn, Peggy Ann Garner. (128 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Criterion Pictures/20th Century Fox)