An important documentary on cinema and the ideals of how a radical push to something "New" in movies can make an impact on a person; if nothing else, it strikes me that this is rare as a white elk level mention by Scorsese of his older brother, who almost never comes up in conversation. It is in contexts that hit him as a teenager regarding the car scene in On the Waterfront and the repetance scene in East of Eden - and reading in between the thick-black lines it says to me things were... rough between them.
Anyway, Letter to Elia, which I've been meaning to see for years but has been unavailable outside of the giant Kazan box set with all of his films (a good box set by the way), is a quality tribute more than a documentary, and the (interesting) interview footage with Kazan himself you wish went on longer. Even as the director didn't make quite as many films as his contemporaries, you want to get deep into the thick of it with Face in the Crowd or Baby Doll (which he doesn't touch on at all, crazy), or oddly enough not much at all on his signature film (to me, even more than Waterfront), Streetcar.
But you're in class with Professor Marty and the value comes in the film scenes and how Scorsese analyzes just as he did with the Personal American Movies Journey doc and My Voyage to Italy and (to an extent) Val Lewton, and when that happens you sit up and pay attention regardless of how you feel about Kazan as a person (and Scorsese seems *kind* by calling what he did in HUAC as "self destructive" and leaving it at that). After all, Martin Scorsese talking about Cal trying and failing to give his dad the money in East of Eden is worth it alone!
Frankly, what Scorsese talks about in that specific case and right after - "thinking you've done something good and instead being told you've done something terrible without realizing it... most movies I'd seen didn't deal with private feelings like that... it felt like the people who made the movie knew me better than I knew myself... the brothers exhanging identities, it all became reall full life horror - no one's good, no one's bad, and I knew from experience it could happen like that," to an extent that's what I've felt at times with Scorsese's own films (or as he also puts it: you project onto a 'father's figure as him). So it was wonderful to see how the most personal has to hit you past the technique, as just... this is the voice.
So ok, not that comprehensive, but who cares when this acts as film history *and* in its way Film-as-Confession. Still don't love America America, though.
