Word: topouzoglou
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...small, squalid mind of Stavros Topouzoglou there seems not a scintilla of that diamantine nobility ascribed,to the Grecian soul. As his employer, an Armenian, says, "A fellow like you, here, has to be an anarchist, a boxer or a gangster." In fact, all Stavros ever wants to be is rich. Much has happened to him since he landed in New York in America America, published in 1962. The immigrant is now 32, the year is 1909, and Anatolian-born Stavros, or Joe Arness, as his American friends call him, has finally saved up enough money to bring his whole...
Protagonist of all this dubious effort is a middle-aged account executive, Eddie Anderson, who was born Evangelos Topouzoglou. A would-be Tolstoy reduced to pushing Zephyr cigarettes for an advertising agency, Eddie also moonlights as Edward Arness, writer of hatchet jobs for slick magazines. Anderson-Topouzoglou-Arness is trapped in a Los Angeles "Spanish Renaissance ranch house" with a patient wife, a confused teen-age daughter, a supply of Picassos, tabs from the liquor store, and his mate's meddling analyst. "Asleep in the dell of respectability," he awakes with a whoop after making it with Gwen Hunt...
Elia Kazan put a capsule review of his screenplay in a terse scrap of dialogue. Stavros Topouzoglou, trying to explain his feverish yearning for America, tells his fiancee, "You have to be what I am to understand." To understand the movie intimately you must be Elia Kazan or one of his relatives. America, America is a gigantic home movie, constructed from family stories about migration to the Promised Land. Kazan himself was born in Turkey, and he fervently wants his film to remind us "that we are all immigrants and that we all came here looking for something." The pity...
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