Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreams crash down and hard moral choices must be made, January 20, 2003
I haven't read Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" on which this 1951 film is based, but I can see how the word "tragedy" is used in its classic sense - that of a character who meets disaster because of a tragic flaw. So even though purists might see "A Place in the Sun" as a romanticized version of Dreiser's tale, I certainly found it serious enough for me.Directed by George Stevens, the film opens with Montgomery Cliff thumbing a ride. He's going to the town where his rich uncle owns a mill. He's awkward among his affluent relatives and happy to get a job, any job. And so even though he has to start at the bottom, packing bathing suits into boxes, he's aware of his future opportunities. Shelly Winters is cast as a factory girl he starts romancing. But then, his fortunes suddenly turn, he's invited to more and more upscale social events, and he falls in love with Elizabeth Taylor. The plot thickens as Shelly Winters announces her pregnancy and Montgomery Cliff finds himself trapped. The consequences are horrific as we watch his dreams all crash down around him. I was captured by the story right from the beginning in a screenplay that kept the tension mounting and never let up. I identified with Montgomery cliff and found myself sympathic to his plight. He plays a complex character and has a lot of moral choices to make. He sweats, he shakes, he cringes, his eyes fill with tears. Certainly, he was one of the finest actors of his time and his performance is magnificent. Elizabeth Taylor was just 17 years old then and sure was a beauty. As she explains in an interview as part of the special features on the DVD, this was her first serious role. "Before that," she says jokingly, "all my leading men were either dogs or horses." She also tells us that Montgomery Cliff, with whom she maintained a long friendship with until his death at the age of 45, was her first movie kiss. "I had only just had my first 'real' off-screen kiss just two weeks before," she says. Shelly Winters talks about her role too. She wanted the role of the factory girl badly. However, at the time, she was typecast as a glamour queen. And so she dressed in an extremely plain way when she went for her screen test. She sat demurely in the office and George Stevens didn't even recognize her. I loved this film. It had everything. Romance. High drama. Great acting. Moral choices. And I also loved the "behind the scenes" special feature that was on the DVD. "A Place in the Sun" might have been made more than 50 years ago, but the theme is universal and as valid today as the day it was written. I therefore give it my highest recommendation. It's simply wonderful.
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34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Essential, September 27, 2005
Theodore Drieser was among America's earliest realistic authors, and his massive 1925 AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, loosely based on real events, was a best-selling shocker filled with premarital sex, abortion issues, and social failures. The novel was filmed in 1931--and Drieser was so outraged that he successfully sued Paramount to force reshoots and a new edit. The result did not please Drieser, Paramount, or the movie-going public, and when censorship began to rear its head both the novel and movie were quietly shelved.
By the late 1940s, however, censorship began to relax, and A PLACE IN THE SUN was among the first films to take advantage of the fact. Unlike the 1931 film, producers did not attempt to film the whole of the novel; they instead focused on the second half. The result was singularly powerful.
George Eastman (Montgomery Cliff) is the poor relation of a wealthy family--and when seeks aid from them he is given a menial job in the factory, where he becomes intimate with factory worker Alice (Shelly Winters.) But when George is suddenly promoted he begins to enter the world of his dreams--and it includes glamorous socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor.) And now only the commonplace and unexpectedly pregnant Alice stands between him and all that he has ever desired.
The script veers toward excess more than once, but director George Stevens and his extraordinary cast carry the film to unexpectedly powerful effect. Previously known as a sex-bomb, Shelly Winters fought hard for the role of Alice and with it gives the first in the series of truly brilliant performances for which she would become so well known. Elizabeth Taylor was one of the leading beauties of the screen, and her acting chops had been in clear evidence for some time before A PLACE IN THE SUN went before the cameras, but it here that she first truly showed what she could do with serious drama; she is flawless. And then there is Montgomery Cliff.
Although Marlon Brando and James Dean made "Method Acting" a household term, Cliff was very much of the same school, and he broke new ground in film several years before either Brando or Dean made the screen. And A PLACE IN THE SUN shows Cliff at his finest, offering a truly amazing, powerful performance as the highly-driven but morally weak George Eastman, stumbling over ever trip-wire society can place in his path. It is a truly devastating performance, gut-wrenchingly painful in honesty, offered without a trace of artifice in evidence.
As the film progresses the moral issues evolve in several very unexpected ways, most particularly as they reference degrees of guilt, premeditation, and at what point intent becomes the same as fact. In the process A PLACE IN THE SUN develops a highly disconcerting "there but for the grace of God go I" quality. I think this particularly true for those among us who can look back upon what might best be called "youthful indiscretions;" we are left to wonder what choices we might have faced if things had been only very slightly different in our lives.
The DVD print is not remastered, but it is pristine, and it comes with a slight but interesting bonus package that includes interviews with the surviving stars. Strongly recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One Young Man's Tragedy, July 31, 2003
Coincidentally, I saw this film within a week after I read Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby for the first of several times. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I had so many dreams, fantasies, ambitions, etc. and thus, years later, immediately identified with George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) as well as with Jay Gatsby, so different in many ways but both hungering for acceptance and respectability, thereby to enhance their self-image. George Stevens' brilliant direction was rewarded with an Academy Award. Working with a screenplay based on Theodore Dreiser's bloated novel An American Tragedy, Stevens elicited from both Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (Angela Vickers) perhaps their finest performances on film. Both are ideally cast as star cross'd lovers, so near and yet so far from what both so passionately desire. Members of the supporting cast are outstanding, notably Shelley Winters (Alice Tripp), Anne Revere (Hannah Eastman), Sheppard Strudwick (Anthony Vickers), and Raymond Burr (Frank Marlowe). Young Eastman is torn between accepting essentially a blue-collar life (with some prospect for a white collar eventually) and doing whatever is necessary to join the society of affluence in which his beloved Angela is so comfortable.
All decisions have consequences and some decisions have tragic consequences. George's decision to gratify himself sexually with Alice one rainy evening creates a complication for which he is ill-prepared. Eventually, he is held accountable for her death (even if viewed as an accident) because, at that point, he cannot endure a life with her nor a life without Angela. George may not deliberately eliminate Alice from his life but he certainly has no interest whatsoever in having any further contact with her. He is convicted of intent. This film received six Academy Awards: including director Stevens, costume designer Edith Head, and composer Franz Waxman, although An American in Paris was selected as best film in what must have been a close vote. The other nominees were Decision before Dawn, Quo Vadis, and A Streetcar Named Desire.
When I recently saw this film again, I was reminded of one of Fitzgerald's short stories, "Winter Dreams," in which a young man very much like George Eastman yearns to improve his station in life. For so many young men and women, the American Dream can become the American Tragedy. For whatever reasons, they are destroyed...or so brutalized that their lives become a nightmare from which they can never awaken.
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