How Close Attention Do We Ever Pay?

George Stevens Goes To The Movies

Directors knew that what happened after shooting wrapped and prints gone out was not a thing they could control. Maybe George Stevens felt that reality hardest for taking his films most serious, this all a more after the war where each project wrung life’s blood from him. Stevens' control went far as reels put on delivery trucks, but no further. From there, he and all directors were at the mercy of showmen, and projectionists they hired. Most theatres, and certainly television, was where movies went to die. Stevens did Quixotic bid to save A Place in the Sun from network shears when the Paramount feature tube-debuted on 3/12/66. His was a Pyrrhic win, but done on principal, like many a vain gesture. What Stevens saw coming can be glimpsed in A Place in the Sun where Montgomery Clift and Shelly Winters share balcony view of a movie that fights losing battle with distractions inherent in the ritual of crowding with strangers to watch. The scene is comical on one hand, sad on the other. These folks are more for connecting with each other than w/ shadows on a screen. Clift glimpses Winters in the dark and slides over, her his focus from there on, a fresh sailor in an opposite seat dealt out of the contest.

Stevens’ camera pulls back from the couple to reveal the mass, several of whom react to a kiss scene from a feature we don’t see. Boys do the finger-in-mouth pop understood to have been part of theatre-going ritual at the time. Was lovemaking on screens always so ridiculed? There seemed always a joker in full deck of filled auditoria in those days. Has viewing courtesy improved since? I doubt it. They just have other things to jeer at now. Stevens confirms a balcony as make-out site, one couple twisted round each other and breaking their clinch only when house lights come on. Clift and Winters are but slightly embarrassed to sit behind the pair, for it’s moviegoing fact of life. Stevens knew and was resigned to A Place in the Sun put before audiences like this. What good was his mightiest effort where these were eventual consumers, yet Stevens gave of his best, even if viewership too often went heedless.

Not that Stevens disdained his audience. He spoke to regard at least for behaved viewers in an interview conducted by Robert Hughes in 1967: “This is what a theatre does so well. People gathered in a large group, finding a little something about themselves. When an audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves. They were there for discovery, not entertainment. They say film is a narcotic, an escape. But when film was done right, it asked real questions: Who am I? What am I? Why do I do this? Real theatre and film is therapy for the audience.” Stevens wanted his crowd to pay attention. Nothing less would do. Days serving light souffle were over for him. A Place in the Sun is a demanding film, enough so to be bent by critical revision since 1951. Maltin’s guide gives it but three stars: “seems outdated” … “downright absurd,” thanks in part to Raymond Burr’s “fiery” performance as a prosecuting D.A.

But Stevens knew his first-run mob well, and catered to it. Ultra close-up love scenes between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor sent otherwise downer Sun into profit. Teens flocked for embraces more intense than films of their limited experience. Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer, writing The Movies, asked Stevens about this in 1956, A Place in the Sun among the authors' survey of then-recent features. Seems those “huge close-ups … ‘sent’ youth … who knew not the days of Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman,” to which Stevens simply responded, “They’ll fall for anything.” Had the director, by then in his late forties, gone deeper cynical? Or maybe those finger pops still rang in his ears, a tinnitus-like hazard of watching films with the great unwashed. And what about Banky and Colman? They were “remembered not” in 1956, and less so over sixty years since. Far as I know, there is only one of their co-starring vehicles in circulation, The Winning of Barbara Worth, itself untypical of the team’s romance-centered output. Images below, from The Night of Love, speak clearer to what inspired Stevens. Everything old, he knew, could be made new again.

Stevens would have loved TCM. They never interrupt his movies, or anyone’s, with advertising. Latter, plus concern over cuts, was the bone of contention with NBC. Never mind concentrating at a theatre … here was presentation with all things stacked against it (ads, dissolves lopped off, assorted mayhem). TCM does a best they can with reality they’ve got, which is home-watching with lights on, people and pets in and out of the room, breaks to get eats and then void what you’ve eaten. Words Stevens spoke in his '67 interview seem almost poignant now: "(A Place in the Sun) was designed with a form similar to a symphony, with its moods and interludes, and alternate changes of pace … With all that at work, audiences had a real chance to accept the film’s meaning, for its meaning to creep into their hearts.” Might A Place in the Sun properly creep before a modern-day theatre audience, provided they come without “devices” to distract them more completely than even NBC did in 1966? Maybe Fathom Events should offer A Place in the Sun and let us find out. It’s no secret that many films register powerfully and unexpectedly when projected on a large screen before a filled house. Considering that George Stevens designed his film for just an environment, could A Place in the Sun still work the magic he instilled in 1951?