A Place in the Sun (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

A Place in the Sun (1951) – G. Stevens

Montgomery Clift is like a deer in the headlights when he stumbles into Elizabeth Taylor and her snooty social circle.  You see, he’s from a poor and sheltered background and the luxuries of the idle rich are quite beyond him. At first, he resists, maintaining his working class mentality and wooing dowdy Shelley Winters.  But when Liz (I mean Angela) seeks him out and pursues him (which her parents think is a whim or acting out), he falls hard.  Unfortunately, there’s a problem – he’s gotten Shelley (I mean Alice) in the family way; he’s trapped and won’t be able to secure that place in the sun with Liz.  In this regard, the film might be considered a noir, particularly when Monty (I mean George) foments his plan, consciously or not, to get rid of Alice.  Knowing that the film is based on Dreisser’s An American Tragedy, it seems hard to not read it in terms of class differences – just those words “American” and “Tragedy” in the context of today’s reality make you feel that George/Monty is forever locked out of a world where his dreams can come true and that the American Dream is really a Tragedy because it invites desperation and disappointment.  George Stevens brings his competence and craft to the film (shot in black and white to avoid letting color brighten its story); glamour and charisma emanates from young Liz; and Monty’s method approach is absorbingly thick. I’m debating with myself whether a director with a darker touch who could flip this more firmly into a true film noir would have ruined its mysterious stunned quality or whether Stevens got it exactly right, showing us the fantasy world that only the 1% can attain without raising any doubts that it would be beautiful (for this must be what American Dreamers perceive).