Among the One-Hundred: A Place in the Sun
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| Each Time Watching, We Wish Monty Would Say Something To Sway the Jury His Way |
Was having just turned twelve for me a factor? Certainly. I knew what the
dissolve off that windowsill radio meant. More meaningful was Stevens crediting
me with sense enough to get his gesture. I was here sledding upon grown-up ice and had
Stevens to thank for the flattery. Did George Eastman let Alice drown, or could
he really not help what happened? I’m still not 100% sold either way. George in
his death cell comes closest to a confession, though mother Anne Revere and
priest Paul Frees prod along his recognition of fault. I maintain he could not
have saved Alice given the circumstance. Is that because Clift is so deeply
sympathetic in his performance? Stevens abets by avoiding detail after the boat tips over. It’s all a long shot in darkness, and we are made to guess.
The director assumes we want George and Angela to work out, though this time I
noticed how manipulative Angela actually is. She’s spoiled and entitled and no
man, including her father, would or could say no to her. She handles George
like a child. Of course he will marry her once she makes up her mind to that, and
no, he will not forego his vacation with her family at the lake. George for all
his lost-little-boy charm is soft and weak and just made to be ordered about by
not one, but two, girl bosses. Tell mama all, indeed. George is trapped, utterly
doomed, from the moment Alice lets him in her humble digs. This was 1951 and nobody
who expected to earn a living could go about siring a child out of wedlock. “We’re
in awful trouble,” Alice says, and she’s right. Do people say A Place in the
Sun is dated primarily for that? In 1966 when I first saw it, unwed parenthood
was still very much a crisis when/where it happened. There was more than one
girl in my high school class who “had” to get married, college too. Does any aspect
of this unwritten law still abide? One could say walk away, George, just walk
away, but to where? His Eastman name and family connections would not mean a
thing after disgrace like this. I understood such reality at age twelve, but how
would twelve-year-olds today react? Maybe this as much as anything keeps A
Place in the Sun off Fathom Event booking sheets. |
| Biggest Mistake of George's Life Happens Here, and All Males Watching Knew It |
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| Prospect of Marriage to Alice is Like Rehearsal of March to the Electric Chair for Hapless George |
Now for the anchor to weigh heaviest upon A Place in the Sun: Shelley
Winters as Alice Tripp. No … Shelley Winters is Alice Tripp, hers if anything too
good a performance. Men blanch particularly at the sight and sound of Alice,
because most men have had at least one Alice Tripp in their life, save those lucky
enough to meet “Miss Right” early on and stay with her. Alice is Pure Passive
Aggression and ultimate nightmare for all of a male species. Writers in
abundance say George should have taken her out in the boat lots sooner. Shelley
Winters herself took lumps for being Alice. Frank Sinatra couldn’t tolerate
Winters on Meet Danny Wilson, done the year after A Place in the Sun was
released. Had he been to see latter and formed Alice-animus? Marilyn Ann Moss
wrote how Winters wanted to soften the character, but Stevens said no. He preferred
Alice “dour” and an anchor, “maybe I loaded the dice” he admitted later. And
how you loaded the dice, GS. For Stevens, Alice was “the kind of a girl a man
could be all mixed up with in the dark and wonder how the hell he got into it
in the daylight.” His was obviously a voice of experience, one that millions of
men would and did identify with. Many would see A Place in the Sun once and
swear never again, the sight of Shelley Winters from there full-on anathema. Having
read how Alice was designed specifically so by Stevens makes the more effective
his intent and execution. He wants us to know what George gave up by bedding
down with Alice. Angela Vickers on a silver tray cannot rescue George from the
mess he has made for himself. We sympathize with him and wish for some sort of rescue,
but George is a lost soul. Total of third act is law’s net tightening about
him. No scene passes without a newspaper headline, radio reportage of the
investigation throbbing behind unrelated dialogue. That electric chair will seem like a
soothing message after what George has gone through. |
| Accusing Fingers Point to George ... Was He Guilty? ... We Are Left to Decide |
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| A 1959 Reissue Pairs Previous Paramount Hits |
George can’t believe Angela could love him, even as he had no problem
moving in on Alice and stealing her heart and virtue. This is Montgomery Clift
after all, and no woman will bar his way. Difference here is class, rank,
family, position. George had these but did not realize it. He was an Eastman
and would have been absorbed into the family to which he was initially a
stranger but would not have stayed so. Him being a family member confers privilege.
George’s uncle says he will pay whatever is needed to defend his nephew but
only if George is innocent. George would have been a prize ornament for the
family, especially married to a Vickers and thereby firming a business alliance,
an arrangement not unlike David Larrabee pledged to Elizabeth Tyson, plastics meet sugar. Class is everything where it comes to profitable courtship. George had
it made before he met Angela. For him to wonder how a goddess like her could
love a guy like him … well of course she could. George was the best prospect
she could have met. Did he know that and put on a humble act to disguise his
cunning? Could be, and might be obvious, except for Montgomery Clift playing it
so vulnerable. Let’s figure he’s awed after childhood and youth spent singing
at his mother’s Mission, George ill-equipped to cope with a rich life among
beautiful people. What guides viewer emotion is Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, definitions
of early fifties physical perfection, our reading skewed for being entranced by both. Theirs were engines to drive A Place in the Sun, visual
cues to certainty it would sell. George Stevens understood this and exploited
every possibility his two stars presented. Place had a downer tale to tell and
it needed you-are-there romance to make such meal edible. Swoon effect would
not be overcome by courtrooms, conviction, and Monty march to oblivion. Overlay
of him and Angela kissing makes his last mile manageable, at least for femme viewers who
might come back a second time (but not their dates … thanks for nothing,
Alice).
Now I'm keen to hear your thoughts on the Von Sternberg version.
ReplyDeleteI know it's a remake, hence a different title was needed, perhaps, but if ever a movie earned the title AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, this was it. The very end is the most haunting and poignant I've ever seen, or hope to see.
ReplyDeleteThinking how this would play with "Stella Dallas", a very different take on a similar misalliance. Or any modern-dress Cinderella, romcom or drama, where the humble heroine not only moves up but improves her husband.
ReplyDeleteDan Mercer compares both versions of AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (Part One):
ReplyDeleteJosef von Sternberg's "An American Tragedy" and George Steven's remake, "A Place in the Sun," have similar plots but are otherwise very different, especially thematically, which finds expression in the characters of the factory girl and the socialite. Von Sternberg followed the theme of Theodore Dreiser's novel more closely than did Stevens, in that the one chance of Clyde Griffiths, played by Phillips Holmes, to escape the poverty he grew up in is to join the upper class family of his wealthy uncle. His education and background would have otherwise prevented him from improving his station in life. "Bert" Alden, the factory girl played by Sylvia Sidney, and Sondra Finchley, the rich socialite played by Frances Dee, are both beautiful women. The dilemma Griffiths faces, then, is not posed by one of them being more attractive or alluring than the other, but solely by their social status. If he marries Bert, he will be forever precluded from becoming a member of his uncle's family in class as well as name. Sidney is perhaps darker and more ethnic than Dee, but this only exemplifies the difference in social status, when the upper class in America tended to be those of English or at least northern European descent. Had Sidney and Dee exchanged roles but played them the same as they had before, the decision facing Griffiths would have been no different.
In contrast, Stevens takes an entirely different approach to the theme, in that the status of a person in not inherent but attained. It reflects, in a way, a more bourgeoise perspective, since a class based upon birthright alone would have forever excluded them, while education, initiative, hard work, and other such qualities--or even luck and pluck--could, they hoped, elevate them from whatever their present status might be. Thus, such status would be more fluid than Dreiser thought it was.
Alice Tripp, the factory girl played in "A Place in the Sun" by Shelly Winters, is a coarse and grasping woman who is, as you say, more than a little repellant. Her poverty is found not so much in financial wealth as in such aspects of her character that would have allowed her to liberate herself from her present social position. In contrast, Angela Vickers, the rich socialite played by Elizabeth Taylor is not only beautiful looking, but refined, passionate, and giving. Had the roles been reversed, with Taylor the factory girl and Winters the socialite, but each playing the characters as they had before, the outcome of the film would have at least become much more complex if not entirely reversed. Taylor's Alice might have been a factory girl, but she was possessed of all the attributes that would have allowed her to become much more than that. Had Montgomery Clift's George Eastman married her, one could expect him, in turn, to have become much more himself--braver, more disciplined, more open and loving--and much more successful as well. Indeed, there would have been no barrier to him rising in the Eastman organization, given his marriage to such an attractive and supportive woman. Marrying the Alice created by Shelly Winters, on the other hand, would have been a kind of grave for his hopes and aspirations.
Part Two from Dan Mercer:
ReplyDeleteThe irony is that the values of the upper class and the bourgeoise were really very much the same, since the bourgeoise had adopted those of their betters and sought to become what they were. Among those values were service and the fulfillment of obligations. The desire and willingness, then, of the Griffiths or Eastman character to put aside his obligation and even to create the circumstances that would result in the death of the woman carrying his child, would have itself demonstrated that he was unworthy of what he sought.
Interestingly, Dreiser based his novel, "An American Tragedy," upon what was then a notorious criminal case, the murder of Grace Brown by her boyfriend, Chester Gillette. Gillette was a manager in his uncle's shirt collar factory who seduced Brown, a farm girl who was working there. When Brown became pregnant with Gillette's child, he first tried to put her off, before taking her into the back country, ostensibly to do the right thing by marrying her. While there, however, he took her out on to a lake in a rowboat, then swam back to shore sans the boat or Brown. Her drowned body was later found with marks indicating that she had been struck on the head with a heavy object. Gillette was arrested for her murder and told several different stories about what had happened on the lake, including one from the witness stand at his trial, in which he claimed that they had talked a bit before she simply stood up in the boat and jumped into the lake. The jury found this to be entirely unpersuasive. Gillette was found guilty of murder and later electrocuted. Among the evidence presented at the trial were letters from a socialite Gillette was flirting with, which substantiated his purported motive for the murder, and those from Grace Brown, trying to persuade him not to desert her. Brown's letters were those of a heartbroken woman and display a greater intelligence and literacy than one might have assumed. Dreiser adopted several of them for his novel.