Elia Kazan

This collection of nearly three hundred letters gives us the life of Elia Kazan unfiltered, with all the passion, vitality, and raw honesty that made him such an important and formidable stage director (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman), film director (On the Waterfront, East of Eden), novelist, and memoirist.
Elia Kazan’s lifelong determination to be a “sincere, conscious, practicing artist” resounds...

Cal Trask is considered the "bad" son of taciturn Salinas Valley lettuce farmer Adam Trask. Although Cal always means well, he just can't stay out of trouble. Neither is Cal able to match the high esteem in which his father holds his "good" brother Aron. Only Aron's girl friend Abra and kindly old Doctor Sam seem to be able to see the essential goodness in the troublesome Cal. In an effort to win his father's love, Cal purchases a fresh lettuce crop...

Cotton-mill owner Archie Meighan, married to nineteen-year-old "Baby Doll", looks forward to the day his wife turns twenty and will finally allow him to sleep with her. But he has competition in the form of sly business competitor Silva Vacarro, who covets both Archie's cotton mill and his young and beautiful wife.

A light-skinned African American woman (Jeanne Crain) who's been passing for white at a northern nursing school returns to the South, where she's asked to care for an ailing white woman (Ethel Barrymore), who wants nothing to do with her. Pinky must negotiate tricky racial politics in life and love.

Deanie is a beautiful and sensitive teenager who would do whatever her mother and her 1928 Kansas hometown find proper. Her boyfriend, Bud, has intense desires for Deanie and the two are very much in love. But, sexual pressures in society creates a rift in their relationship. She restrains herself while Bud acts on them, but with another girl. Bud's actions drive Deanie to madness. She is committed into an institution while Bud reluctantly obeys his...

The story of a Czechoslovakian circus troop whose members are drafted into the military when the communists take over. But as they near the Bavarian border, they decide to make a break to escape to the West.

Rebel without a cause (1955): The adolescent son of a well-to-do family gets into trouble with other kids and the police. East of Eden (1955): A wayward Salinas Valley youth vies for the affection of his hardened father with his favored brother. Cat on a hot tin roof (1958): A drama of the problems of a wealthy but decadent family in the South. A streetcar named Desire (1951): Set in the steamy squalor of New Orleans, the story of a neurotic woman's...

Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty star as two teenaged lovers in 1928 Kansas whose internal conflicts over intimacy and sex--learned from overbearing parents--thwart their hopes for happiness in this heart-wrenching romantic drama.