Kazan's career is marked by a striking progression from films expressing a detached, liberal social consciousness towards more personal and emotional films. His career reveals a basic tension: an intellectual desire to deal with social issues as viewed in his less satisfying urban films which utilize a broad and contemporary canvas, versus his instinctual response to the past and to the unworldly inhabitants of cohesive ethnic communities or simple agrarian environments….

While his work would continue to be marked by a concern for social problems, Kazan's most interesting films—especially East of Eden (1955) and Wild River (1960), his richest works—combine a careful integration and balance between character development and social issues. These social concerns spring from the inner lives of the central figures themselves, rather than remaining the detached, objectified problems of crime and corruption that the heroes of Kazan's earlier films succeed in solving. (p. 9)

A child...