During
World War II, the American film director George Stevens joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps and
headed a film unit from 1943 to 1946, under General Eisenhower. His unit shot
footage documenting D-Day—including the only Allied European Front color film
of the war—the liberation of Paris and the meeting of American and Soviet
forces at the Elbe River, as well as horrific scenes from the Duben labor camp
and the Dachau concentration camp. Stevens also helped prepare the Duben and
Dachau footage and other material for presentation during the Nuremberg Trials.
Consequently, Stevens’ films underwent something of a sea change on his return from Europe. Between 1951 and 1956 h e produced his “American Trilogy,” three films that are more sober and, as several critics have suggested, thought-provoking than the pre-war work. “A Place in the Sun” (which, writes Donald Richie, expresses the ‘attitude of the mature artist’), “Shane” (a film that Edward Countryman and Evonne von Heussen-Countryman note ‘considers violence where there is no law, both in terms of what a shooting does and as a historical problem in America’s development’), and “Giant” (the epic that, as critic Richard Schickel noted recently, caused many think differently about America’s racial problems) solidified Stevens’ international reputation as a director of quality American drama. His final films, which include “The Diary of Anne Frank,” certainly influenced by his experiences at Dachau, and “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” the epic re-telling of the life of Jesus, were a fitting end to a career during which he earned two Academy Awards for Best Director, and numerous other nominations and awards.
George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey . About George Stevens. By Paul Cronin.
A Place in
the Sun ( 1951) was his second post-war
picture, and it was without a doubt his darkest picture up to that point. It
marked a departure from his pre-war work with Laurel and Hardy, the silly Alice
Adams (1935), the adventurous Gunga Din (1939) and the romantic comedy Woman of
the Year (1942). Yet with this darker side came his first of six nominations
for Best Picture, and his first win for Best Director. He felt so strongly
about every single frame that when NBC and Paramount cut the film up with
commercials for TV, Stevens took both corporations to court.
A Place in
the Sun is the fine romance it is because of this idea of fate, and it is
Stevens who twists that idea to the dark side. It was a side of Stevens
audiences hadn’t seen before, developed after seeing the horrors of war as head
of the U.S. Signal Corps Special Motion Picture Unit. His deputy from that
unit, Ivan Moffat, was brought along as an associate producer on A Place in the
Sun, and it was actually Moffat who came up with the title. You can see the
war’s influence on the water-skiing scene, where Stevens used recordings of
German Stuka dive bombers to replace the sound of the speedboat engine. He wanted
to make it more ominous.
A Place in
the Sun (1951) by Jason Fraley . FilmSpectrum , September 24, 2012.
The film
is based on the novel An American
Tragedy from 1925 by Theodore Dreiser (1871
–1945)
Dreiser based
the book on a notorious criminal case. On July 11, 1906, resort owners found an
overturned boat and the body of Grace Brown at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack
Mountains of Upstate New York. Chester Gillette was put on trial, and convicted
of killing Brown, though he claimed that her death was a suicide. Gillette was
executed by electric chair on March 30, 1908.
The murder trial drew
international attention when Brown's love letters to Gillette were read in
court. Dreiser saved newspaper clippings about the case for several years
before writing his novel, during which he studied the case closely. He based
Clyde Griffiths on Chester Gillette, deliberately giving him the same initials.
A strikingly similar murder took place
in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1934, when Robert Edwards clubbed Freda
McKechnie, one of his two lovers, and placed her body in a lake. The cases were
so similar that the press at the time dubbed the Edwards/McKechnie murder
"The American Tragedy". Edwards was eventually found guilty, and also
executed by electric chair.
The novel is a
tragedy in the strict sense, Clyde's destruction being the consequence of his
innate weaknesses: moral and physical cowardice, lack of scruple and
self-discipline, muddled intellect, and unfocused ambition; additionally, the
effect of his ingratiating (Dreiser uses the word "soft") social
manner places temptation in his way which he cannot resist.
In 1931 Josef
von Sternberg made a film version of the novel. The film was produced and
distributed by Paramount Pictures. Dreiser strongly disapproved the film.
Dreiser was
disgusted by the screenplay (written by Samuel Hoffenstein) that he
unsuccessfully sued Paramount, claiming his novel had been “traduced” into a
cheap, melodramatic potboiler.
Sternberg’s
An American Tragedy (1931) is more faithful to both the letter and the spirit
of the novel than George Stevens’s better known A Place in the Sun (1951), and
its take on the story is radically different, writes Imogen Sara Smith in her
article ‘The “tragedy of desire” in An
American Tragedy and A Place in the Sun’ , The Moviegoer, March 8, 2017.
Sternberg’s
film got mixed reviews and flopped resoundingly at the box office.
In the
late 1940s, when George Stevens began badgering Paramount to let him adapt the
property, the studio executives stonewalled. Eventually the director followed
Dreiser’s lead and sued the studio, which relented partly because he convinced
them that casting Montgomery Clift in the lead would make the film appeal to
young audiences. Stevens, who made his name in the thirties directing light
comedies and women’s pictures, fastened on this story after he returned from
leading a U.S. Army film unit throughout World War II. Deeply affected by the
atrocities he had witnessed, including the liberation of Dachau, Stevens sought
a substantial project that would capture his postwar mood. An American Tragedy
offered a vehicle for the kind of scathing anatomy of American materialism and
moral flimsiness that film noir was then dishing out. Curiously, however,
Stevens began turning the dark material into something else: a love story.
His take
was starkly Manichean, and he stubbornly resisted objections from cast members
and others that he was unbalancing the plot by creating the strongest possible
contrast between the story’s two women. Where Sternberg cast a cold eye on
Clyde Griffiths, Stevens loaded the dice in favor of the antihero he renamed
George Eastman, making him a victim rather than a fumbling, would-be villain.
Ultimately, the director’s emotional connection to the romance and the
impassioned filmmaking it inspired give A Place in the Sun its power, outweighing
the sometimes heavy-handed and over-determined storytelling.
Stevens
turns Dreiser’s collar factory, which symbolizes bourgeois respectability (any
office-clerk can put on a starched collar and elevate his class standing), into
a manufacturer of bathing suits. Cheesecake pictures hanging everywhere in the
workplace underline the sex appeal of money—a clever visual device that nails
the way, in the novel, Clyde always conflates youth, beauty, wealth, and class.
But Dreiser complicates this equation by making Roberta, the poor factory girl,
very pretty and physically attractive to Clyde, at least at first; the greater
appeal of Sondra resides in her chic, tantalizing air of unattainable status.
(Significantly, Clyde sleeps with Roberta but never contemplates pre-marital
sex with Sondra.) Stevens, however, felt that the girl for whom George Eastman
would kill had to be someone anyone in the audience would feel was worth
killing for. The seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor fit the bill. Costumed by
Edith Head in strapless gowns that accentuate her flowering bosom and
vanishingly small waist, and all but caressed by an infatuated camera, Taylor
is ravishing beyond belief. More importantly, her character, renamed Angela
Vickers, is not the vain, frivolous, baby-talking tease of the book. She is,
for all her dewiness, forthright and kind, instantly drawn to an outsider. And
Clift’s George, with his dangling cigarette and pool-table prowess, is much
cooler than Clyde Griffiths was ever meant to be, signaling a rebel mystique
beneath the character’s dog-like eagerness to belong. As they sway in a trance
on a deserted dance floor, or cavort beside a sparkling mountain lake, or as
she cradles him in a convertible at night, they easily embody Hollywood’s ideal
of young love.
Not
content with giving George every reason to drown Alice, Stevens goes even
further and largely absolves him of guilt. Out on the lake, in an eerie
twilight shivered by the cry of loons, Alice makes a dreary, soul-crushing
speech about how George will eventually settle down and be content with “the
little things” instead of yearning for what he can’t have. Upset by his angry
reaction, she stands up and overturns the boat—and the camera then cuts to a
distant view of the tiny splash disappearing in the tranquil, inky water.
Stevens even shot footage, later cut, of George desperately trying to save
Alice, as he insists he did in the courtroom—a stark contrast to the damning
scene in which Sternberg showed us Clyde deliberately swimming away from
Roberta. Further stacking the deck, Raymond Burr plays the D.A. who prosecutes
George as a snarling, sinister adversary whose courtroom hysterics seem
guaranteed to alienate a jury—and an audience. The film is full of such
alterations, from a scene in which George impresses Angela’s father with his
sincerity (thwarting the book’s implication that Clyde’s dream of marrying
Sondra is a self-deluded fantasy) to Angela’s invented visit to the condemned
George’s cell.
For the
role of the factory girl, here called Alice Tripp, Stevens first thought of
Cathy O’Donnell, whose soft, sweet innocence would have been perfect. Barbara
Bel Geddes wanted the part, but he felt she would have too much appeal. Clift
pushed for Betsy Blair, who would prove to be so touching as the “plain” girl
in Marty (1955). Shelley Winters, tired of being typecast as a blonde
bombshell, landed the part by deglamorizing herself to the point that Stevens
did not recognize her at an audition. She later rued the extent to which the
director insisted on making Alice dowdy, coarse, and unsympathetic. Clift
vehemently argued against this “downbeat, blubbery, irritating” performance,
which seemed intended to make everyone in the audience root for George to dump
Alice in the lake. But Stevens later said that what interested him most in the
film was “an imbalance of images which created drama,” meaning the unkind cuts
and dissolves that contrast the frumpy, whining Alice with the luscious,
bewitching Angela. There is something positively punitive in the director’s
treatment of Alice, whom he described as “the kind of girl a man could be all
mixed up with in the dark, and wonder how the hell he got into it in the
daylight.” That’s a pretty horrible thing to say, and he illustrates it by
frequently shooting George and Alice in near-total blackness or in oddly
obscured, distant setups that block our sympathy.
What then
is A Place in the Sun about, if it is not about a morally bankrupt youth
corrupted by the false glamour of the American dream? It’s about a greater,
older, and more universal dream, the dream of a perfect love. Stevens seems
intent, in the love scenes between Clift and Taylor, on outdoing anything yet
achieved in romantic cinema. At 2:00 a.m. on the night before shooting, the
director rewrote the key scene of their first kiss, transforming dialogue from
the book (when Clyde says, “If I could only tell you all,” he is wishing he
could confess to Sondra about Roberta) into a legendary exchange. “Forgive me,
but what the hell is this?” Taylor asked when she was handed the new script
pages; she felt the line “Tell mama, tell mama all,” was absurd, though she
spoke it with tender, mesmerizing conviction. As the dark, blurred masses of
Clift’s back, his hair, and her hair blot out parts of the frame, we don’t see
their kiss but experience it, lost in their ecstasy. Stevens edited the shots
so that their faces would seem to be dissolving into one another in a rhapsody
of black and white. When this kiss appears again superimposed over George as he
walks numbly to the electric chair, the film affirms that such love is worth
killing or dying for.
If A Place
in the Sun neglects An American Tragedy’s message of how people are shaped by
social and economic forces, it stays true to Dreiser’s even darker pronouncement
of the book’s meaning in his diary. “Life is made for the strong. There is no
mercy in it for the weak—none,” he wrote. “Such is the tragedy of desire.”
Clift’s George Eastman remains fatally passive and soft, full of yearning but
unable to face the consequences of his actions, his “fluid and unstable” nature
flowing like water that finds its own level.
Imogen Sara Smith, The Moviegoer , March 8, 2017
Michael
Wilson and Harry Brown’s screenplay, based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel An
American Tragedy (1925) and Patrick Kearney’s 1926 play of the same name,
understands George to be a far more ambivalent figure than the outwardly
devious protagonist created by Dreiser. He’s never just one thing, and Clift’s
agility within the grey areas of human behaviour takes us deep inside his
isolation and loneliness. Stevens composes shots that magnify George’s status
as an outsider, in an unsympathetic world he nevertheless desperately wants to
get inside. This psychology lets us understand George’s attraction to plain
Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters) – his co-worker in the packing room at the
Eastman swimsuit factory – but also his desire for glamorous Angela Vickers
(Elizabeth Taylor), and why it consumes him to the point of destruction.
When
George first crosses the threshold of his uncle Charles Eastman’s (Herbert
Heyes) palatial home, he’s like a tiny insect under a microscope. The lavish
rooms dwarf him; he doesn’t fit. Wide shots and a still, passive camera keep
George distant from his family; seated opposite, they scrutinise him with gazes
held longer than is comfortable. Clift inhabits this ambitious yet insecure
young man with every inch of his body, registering George’s discomfort by
twitching and shifting in his chair.
These long
shots emphasise George’s difference, but Stevens’ many close-ups on Clift’s
beautiful face bridge that space: it’s our portal into understanding George’s
plight. Clift’s face, even after the 1956 accident that left him with permanent
injuries, was a fascinating canvas. His luminous eyes are central to George’s
humanity. They are hopeful and optimistic when he first turns towards the
camera during the film’s opening credits, searing through the screen. They are
aflame with wonder and yearning as he falls deeper for Angela; but uncertain
and conflicted as he struggles with what to do about Alice. Because of them, we
are never alienated; we never really see him as a villain.
Despite
this astonishing, corporeal presence, Clift articulates something fundamental
in George’s character – that he’s formless and in the process of becoming.
Moreover, George is barely visible, awaiting approval by others to come (as it
were) to life. During that visit to his uncle’s house, George gets his first
real look at Angela. But her presence only magnifies his strangeness. The
Eastmans flock to her and enfold her, but Stevens pushes George to the back of
the frame. Angela doesn’t register George’s presence. It’s like he isn’t even
there. This emphasis on his lack of form is repeated. His uncle asks, “who?” in
relation to him more than once, suggesting George doesn’t leave a distinct
impression. Early in the film, Stevens presents him as a shadow dweller –
lurking outside the Eastman house, watching the guests arrive at a party he
wasn’t invited to. The gate opening and closing in front of him is a reminder
that he’s an outsider looking in. Several months later, when he’s finally
invited to one of those parties, people look right through him.
Stevens
wants us to perform our own forensic study of George’s character, juxtaposing
how he appears to be and behave differently when he’s with Alice or Angela.
George’s scenes with Alice are marked by a suffocating bleakness, dark from the
start. On their first proper date, after George daringly enters Alice’s room to
turn down the radio, Stevens excises most of the light from the frame. George
and Alice are dancing in the corner, but it’s so dark we can’t see them.
Similarly, when Alice reveals that she’s in “real trouble” on the night of
George’s birthday, George has his back to us in the corner of the frame – Alice
kneels beside his shrouded black form. Stevens doesn’t grant us access to
George’s experience through Clift’s eyes during these sequences with Alice,
amplifying the opacity of his connection with her.
By
contrast, when George is with Angela, Stevens bathes him in light. These sequences
are overwhelmingly sensual and intimate, Clift showing us just how
significantly he was remaking not only screen acting, but also definitions of
American masculinity. His men were the opposite of the strong, silent icons of
the previous generation; his men were not afraid to expose their vulnerability
to the point of emotional ruin. On Angela’s arm, in her arms, George is soft
and tender, takes shape and comes to life. The heightened romance of their love
scene on the balcony at the second Eastman party is shot tight and up close.
Angela, we are encouraged to believe, sees something in George no-one else can.
“Tell mama all,” she coos as they kiss, their faces enormous, blocking out
everything else and dissolving into one.
Inside the
outsider’s skin: Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951). By Joanna Di
Mattia. Senses of Cinema , March 2018.
More here
:
A Place in
the Sun (1951). AMC Filmsite
Hollywood’s
beautiful people : A Place in the Sun. BFI
Trailer of
the film. YouTube
Some scenes
from the film :
Boat deathscene
The End
Taylor and
Clift: Photos From the Set of 'A Place in the Sun'. By Ben Cosgrove.
Time
, October 15, 2014
On Montgomery Clift
Fallen
star : How Montgomery Clift
self-destructed
By John
Farr. Best movies by Farr. February 7, 2017.
Scandals
of Classic Hollywood: The Long Suicide of Montgomery Clift. By Anne Helen Petersen. VanityFair , September 23, 2014
Montgomery
Clift: better than Brando, more tragic than Dean. David Gritten salutes a new
BFI season of films starring Hollywood great Montgomery Clift.
TheTelegraph , February 3, 2013.
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