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A Place in the Sun
Could you, like, die or something?
1951
Review: May 12, 2006
Director: George Stevens
Starring: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters
Not necessary.
THE SETUP:
As the old song says: “It’s sad to belong to someone else when the right one comes along.” But they didn’t mention murder…
DISCUSSION:
My boyfriend and I got sick at the same time, so I invited him to come over so we could be invalids together. He likes old movies, so there’s always one or two that he’s mentioned that sound interesting, so we ended up watching this, which was based on the novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. Only there was an earlier version with that title that flopped, so they wanted to think up a new title for this one. Anyway, so we settled in bed with our Chinese takeout and vodka-spiked hot tea and watched between fever chills and coughing outbursts.
We open with Montgomery Clift as George hitchhiking his way to California. He is a nephew of Mr. Eastman, head of a prominent family that has a bathing suit factory. George gets a job, though some in the family wonder whether he’s got it in him to be an “Eastman” of their caliber. He is told that the majority of the company’s employees are women, and the ONE thing he MUST NOT do is start having an affair with one of them.
So what is the ONE THING he does? Upon seeing employee Shelly Winters as Alice [quite slim back then] at the movies one night, they start dating, an affair that is portrayed as quite genuine and passionate. Yet George cannot stop obsessively staring when he sees rich debutante and friend of the Eastman’s, Elizabeth Taylor as Angela.
George is rising up the ladder at work, which brings him into social proximity of Angela, and they begin an affair. A lot of the strength of the movie is the complexity of Clift’s character. There’s something rebellious in him that makes him start a work affair seemingly THE SECOND they tell him not to. Then there’s something sweetly genuine in his affection for Alice, even as it seems as much directed as his passive aggression toward being the “lower-class underling” as at her. In this way, and as the movie plays out, it gently gestures toward questions of the morality of different social classes without ever turning into a lecture. There is also something very pure about his affection for Angela. Clift seems like a man who never thought that he could get a woman like Angela, so OF COURSE he’s going to grab her when given the opportunity, girlfriend or not. It is to the credit of Clift’s performance that all of this is totally understandable, and we can see why he would do what he does without hating him for it.
Anyway, so Alice is starting to become more of a burden than anything to him, and then we find out that she’s pregnant! George is heading toward a future with Angela, and he start’s to think about maybe killing Alice. She DID mention that she doesn’t know how to swim…
Things tend toward the tedious as we know what’s going to happen but have to wait for it to transpire [while fever-sleep is nibbling at one’s consciousness], but this is often an issue with old movies. Then one can marvel at how Alice, who earlier said that she is so scared of water she’s terrified to even step out on a dock, seems perfectly content to be in a tiny rowboat on a huge lake for like 6 hours, through sundown and into the dark… And I will warn you that when you think it’s going to wrap up in about 10 minutes, it’s actually going to wrap up in about 30 minutes…
Nevertheless, it ends in a way that surprised me, and that didn’t seem like a cop-out. The movie uses cross-fades very carefully throughout, and you’ll notice the use of animal sounds [birds and dogs… slang for women and men] to draw out the themes. Since the original novel [from 1931] was “An American Tragedy” I suspect that there is supposed to be something particularly American about George, and perhaps the two women represent two historical paths America could take… I don’t know, and it didn’t fully come across, if so. But a very satisfying watch with three very good performances.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Sure, if you’re looking for a good old movie, this one is rich in content and has good performances.
