Un posto al sole

George Eastman takes up friendly offer from his uncle to go work in the highly prosperous Eastman bathing-suit factory. Formerly a bell hop at a hotel, and born out of a relatively poor, but religiously devout home, George is spellbound by how the upper crust live. As he starts to climb the social ladder he becomes besotted with his cousin's beautiful partner, Angela Vickers. While at the same time neglecting his girlfriend and mother of his unborn child, Alice Tripp. The outcome of George's confused emotions will have devastating effects on everyone involved...

A Place In The Sun is one of those revered, yet seemingly divisive classic pictures that I believe deserves every bit of praise heaped upon it. Based on the Theodore Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy {and the Patrick Kearney play}, it's a slow simmering piece that boasts technical greatness and a class division script that is intriguingly shrouded by a real life sad story. The book and subsequent film versions {Josef von Sternberg filmed an adaptation in 1931} are working from the real case of Chester Gillette and his girlfriend, Grace Brown. To expand further would result in major spoilers but it's a case that is readily available to anyone with internet access. Here with this adaptation, director George Stevens {sublime direction} has gathered all the things available to him and crafted a Gothic, almost dreamy, classic amongst classics. The source, and Sternberg's take on the novel may well be more stark and grimly oppressive, but this has such high cinema values it positively begs you to invest your very being with it.

The story behind the scenes is itself worthy of a movie, Stevens clashing constantly with Montgomery Clift {Eastman} and Shelley Winters {Tripp}, Clift because he would only take motivation from his personal coach, Mira Rostova, and Winters because Stevens had never wanted her cast in the first place! Then there is the Elizabeth Taylor {Angela Vickers} factor, blissfully unaware of Clift's burgeoning homosexuality, she reciprocated Clift's adoration of her by falling for him big time, the results, all captured by Stevens, are akin to being put under a spell that you simply can't turn away from. Montgomery Clift was one of the best actors of his generation, here in spite of a secretly confused emotional state, the sparks that ping off Taylor and himself are the kind that few lauded chemistry couples in movie history have ever gotten close too. Monty Clift is worth every penny or cent that is spent to watch him perform, here is yet another performance of emotional oomph to only confirm his standing as a true giant of American actors.

Academy Awards went to Best Director, Best Screenplay {Michael Wilson & Harry Brown}, Best Cinematography {William Mellor}, Best Costume Design {Edith Head}, Best Editing {William Hornbeck} and Best Score {Franx Waxman}, all of them deserved, with Waxman's score one of the true greats of 50s cinema, a character in itself and something to totally lose yourself in. Clift & Winters were both nominated in the Best actor/Actress categories respectively, and really in any other year they surely would have won, while the film itself was also nominated for Best Film. Ultimately it's the story itself that makes A Place In The Sun such a beguiling viewing, it's love divided by classes, no middle ground here, it's the rich and beautiful on one side, on the other is the plain and poor, the result is a majestic piece of cinema. 10/10

Time does extraordinary things with greatness. If nothing else it confirms it. "A Place in the Sun" is a remarkable example of that theory. I rushed to buy a DVD after watching a BBC documentary on ELizabeth Taylor to celebrate her 75th birthday! In "A Place on the Sun" an Elizabeth Taylor barely out of her teens is paired with Montgomery Clift. She had been raised at MGM and groomed for movie stardom from day one. He was a method actor, complex, introspective and their coupling produced something that I'm tempted to call, unrepeatable. The actors own personal stories, their friendship, mutual love and respect made it possible for their communion to be so transcendental. To make things even more perfect, the film seems a love letter from director George Stevens to his stars and vice versa. Look at the opening credits and tell me if you've ever seen a more startling introduction to a character/star. The story of doomed love and descend into darkness is, without question, one of the best ever made.

Bringing Theodore Dreiser's sprawling novel An American Tragedy to the screen must have been a daunting task, made harder by the constraints Paramount imposed on director George Stevens. The studio had lost big on a version made 20 years earlier, under Josef von Sternberg, and had little faith in a remake. So, hobbled by a tight budget, Stevens scaled back his ambitious plans but delivered, perhaps even to his own surprise, a superbly crafted and and powerfully sustained work of movie art.

He was lucky that Paramount, edgy about the story, gave him a cast that would guarantee not only good box office but solid performances as well. Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelly Winters take the principal roles, with, in the last third of the movie, extra oomph courtesy of Raymond Burr (in a role that may have nabbed him the Perry Mason franchise).

The jaws of the vise Clift finds himself squeezed into are class and sex. Barely educated, raised by stern members of a religious sect, he luckily (or not) happens to be the shirt-tail nephew of a prosperous entrepreneur who casually offers him work in his factory. Awkward and lonesome, Clift escapes the drudgery of his job by taking up with a mousy co-worker (Winters, toned way down from her platinum-bombshell image at the time). But his nose-to-the-grindstone ways attract the attention of his uncle, who rewards him with a promotion and an invitation up to the manor.

There he meets Taylor and launches an obsession about her, reinforced by a neon sign visible from his window that blazes her surname through his restless nights (she's another child of an industrial fortune, raised in wealth and privilege). Somehow, she falls for him – and, need it be added, he for her – despite his coming from the wrong side of the tracks (she hasn't the faintest notion that for people like him, life may not be the blithe affair it is for her).

Only one inconvenient fact keeps Clift from taking his rightful place in the sun: He's left Winters pregnant. The two worlds he occupies are destined to collide, and crash they do when Winters phones him, in the midst of a Hawaiian-themed luau at Taylor's summer place on the lake, to issue her ultimatum: Marry her or she'll spill their sordid secret. He leaves abruptly to meet Winters, desperately trying to assemble the plan which will seal three fates.

Stevens sustains an overwhelming, ominous momentum, unbroken by even a hint of levity (not even a single bit player is allowed to lapse into shtik). Languorous dissolves and superimposed images heighten the sense of inevitability as each scene, each event glides seamlessly into the next.

Maybe he wasn't able to pile on the exhaustive social commentary that bulked up Dreiser's novel, but everywhere there's sharp detail that he adroitly leaves to be noticed. When Clift shows up hours late at his intimate birthday party in Winter's cramped room, with the tiny table pushed up against her marble washstand, the ice cream has warmed to lumpy syrup (a self-homage to a similar scene in Steven's Alice Adams?). With an island combo playing merrily on, Clift sports a lei and eats pineapple out of its shell when Winters calls to break the spell – and this South-Seas reverie is offered up not as Veblenesque excess, but merely as the way Taylor's crowd spend their days and evenings and nights in an endless round of heedless gaiety.

The apex of the film's crescendo is handled with tight, quiet assurance – the reckoning in a rowboat upon a deserted lake. Dusk gathers among the pines like fog, the loons call back and forth, and the rippling waves reflect a demented flash into Clift's eye as he wrestles with his conscience. Winters natters nervously about the dreary life they'll spend together while his head swims with luminous visions of Taylor. Then, destiny catches.... Romantic but unsentimental, serious but without pretension, gripping without stooping to the manipulative, A Place in the Sun ranks as a masterpiece of American cinema.

I can only say that George Stevens' version of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" is not what I envisioned when I read the book. Therefore, I came away disappointed at the screen treatment with Liz Taylor (beautiful but shallow), Montgomery Clift (beautiful but shallow) and poor Shelley Winters looking like a drab little wren. An air of artificiality hangs over every scene, every slow-moving scene, and only increases by the time the story arrives at the courtroom climax where an unrestrained Raymond Burr is allowed to chew the scenery.

This is NOT the great picture everyone always says it is. It's one of those films that dates badly. Evidently, fans of Liz Taylor and Monty Clift are starry-eyed about their favorite actors and refuse to see the weaknesses in the plodding story and the thinly sketched characters. Elizabeth Taylor had much better roles in her future career (Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, Giant) and Montgomery Clift would make an unforgettable Morris Townsend in The Heiress. Their acting here is as self-conscious as the arty camerawork that frames them in huge romantic close-ups.

The novel had much more depth and meaning than this watered down version of the story. Read it and you will wonder what all the fuss was about when "A Place in the Sun" was released. Vastly overrated and noteworthy only for the sincere performance of Shelley Winters and Franz Waxman's interesting background score.

The young and poor George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) leaves his religious mother and Chicago and arrives in California expecting to find a better job in the business of his wealthy uncle Charles Eastman (Herbert Heyes). His cousin Earl Eastman (Keefe Brasselle) advises him that there are many women in the factory and the basic rule is that he must not hang around with any of them.

George meets the worker of the assembly line Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters) in the movie theater and they date. Meanwhile, the outcast George is promoted and he meets the gorgeous Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor) in a party at his uncle's house. Angela introduces him to the local high society and they fall in love with each other. However, Alice is pregnant and she wants to get married with George. During a dinner party at Angela's lake house with parents, relatives and friends, Alice calls George from the bus station and gives thirty minutes to him to meet her; otherwise she will crash the party and tells what has happened. George is pressed by the situation that ends in a tragedy.

"A Place in the Sun" is an unforgettable masterpiece by George Stevens and one of the best love stories ever made, with the perfect development of characters and situations. I watched this film for the first time on 14 June 2001 on cable television and yesterday I saw it again on a Paramount DVD with Extras telling details about the difficulties that George Stevens faced to bring Theodore Dreiser's novel "An American Tragedy" to a motion picture and casting. He had to sue Paramount to carry out the signed contract and get the agreed budget. Another interesting point is Shelley Winters, who was a sex symbol at that time, telling how she got the role of Alice Tripp. Elizabeth Taylor also tells funny things about her relationship with Montgomery Cliff. My vote is ten.

Title (Brazil): "Um Lugar Ao Sol" ("A Place in the Sun")