Viewing A Place in the Sun for the AFI Project

What's the AFI Project, you ask? For more information, or if you just enjoy my bemused ramblings, read here:http://pippin2010.filmaster.com/review/revisiting-psycho-for-the-afi-project/?preview

A Place in the Sun is on the following AFI lists:

The Original Top 100 (#92)
100 Years...100 Passions (#53)

A long time ago, in a head-space far away, I had this notion that I was going to voraciously read every "canonical" book/novel/great piece of literature ever produced throughout the world, including by American novelists and writers, though there are generally far fewer of so-called "great writers" from here in comparison, most likely due to the youth of this country. I digress. One book I tried to read, and, in fact, the last book I tried to read before I quit this goal in a fit of futility and discouragement was "An American Tragedy" by Theodore Dreiser. The reason I gave up on this project was because this book sapped all of my energy to go on. Seriously. In my mind, it is one of the most overblown pieces of writing--ever--painting the portrait of a largely melodramatic love story that, yes, tells the tragic tale of a man-boy who succumbs to the foolishness of his passions but also sort of smacks of self-important commentary about the pressure of expectations and the angst of youth in a largely verbose style. I know, I know...hello pot, meet kettle. You really would have to try to read this book, though, and at least I attempt to keep these reviews modestly entertaining. In the end, I admirably made it through the first 300 pages of this tome before I finally gave up in moderate disgust. This is a novel in which I could muster no appreciation, either in its sentiment or in the stylistic flourish and perspicacity of its author.

A Place in the Sun, much to my chagrin, is a page-to-screen adaptation of that novel. Thus, it already suffers from the bloated quality of its source. Add to that an earnest need on the part of director George Stevens to make the film more important than it is with hackneyed (even for its day) conventions and rangy performances, and what is left is a film that feels like what it has ultimately become: an old movie, good for a midnight or early morning showing, but not ultimately great (and the AFI did not re-rank it, instead placing GoodFellas at the #92 position).

In this film, George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) is the poor nephew of wealthy industrialist Charles Eastman. After they reunite at a hotel where George works as a bell-hop, his uncle offers him a job working in one of his factories, though he is still treated as the poor cousin, an outsider in his wealthy family's home. George, however, sees this offer as an opportunity to impress his uncle and takes the job without complaint. Yet, he defies workplace rules when he takes up with one of the other factory workers, Alice "Al" Tripp (Shelley Winters). Al is poorer than George and naive in believing that George's Eastman connections bring him no advantages. George, however, bears witness to such advantages and an elevation in his status, particularly when the connections introduce him to society "it" girl Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), with whom George quickly falls in love and which Angela reciprocates. Running around with Angela exposes George to the carefree lifestyle of the rich and wealthy, and George's company stock also begins to rise. The trouble is, Al becomes pregnant and wants George to marry her; however, he spends more and more time with Angela and virtually shuns Al, fearing what her circumstances might do to his newfound status. Al attempts to procure an abortion but unsuccessfully and becomes more incessant in her pleas that George marry her. George promises to do so but then betrays that promise by spending an unencumbered holiday with Angela and her family at Loon Lake. After hearing a legend about a couple who drowned in the Lake, their bodies never having been found, George considers a plan to remove Al from the picture once and for all, in the hopes that he can enjoy his new life with Angela and the Eastmans, even as Al discovers George's whereabouts through media coverage of his high society connections.

A Place in the Sun, as previously mentioned, displays a quality of self-aware striving for an ethereal cultural importance, an elevation than it fails to actually achieve, much less deserve. Director George Stevens seemed to be fishing for Oscars, which he eventually caught. The problem, here, is that while the film is ultimately executed moderately well, with few obvious flaws, it's not as relevant and, therefore, as timeless as, perhaps, initially hoped. This is due to its inherent melodrama and the subtle sexism displayed in the treatment of the male versus the female characters; the film is a product of its time to be sure (and the book was written some decades earlier), but this sense of inequality may have been the reason why I was so turned off by the novel to start.

The film, via Stevens' direction, relies too heavily on the slow-pacing of the source novel, such that any reason to care for any of the main characters is undercut by the lull of the films' various and meandering meditations on the circumstances of its principal characters. What I mean is that the film plods along, dwelling profusely upon the dichotomy of the worlds between which George finds himself walking a tightrope of ambition, desire, and the burden of responsibility. In that time, Stevens fills the bloated frames with an overuse of dramatic, head-only close-ups to ratchet up the romantic tensions, particularly between George and Angela, as well as various montage wipes and quick cuts to parlay any sort of emotional intensity from the situations being depicted, all the while offering no real reason, aside from the obvious explanations such as the flaws of human nature, the ridiculousness of class separation, and the imperfection of youth, to care for any of the main characters, with the possible exception of Angela. In fact, if it weren't for this exceptional cast, the film might have been entirely unwatchable due to its saccharine soap opera-like quality.

Clift's nuanced performance is the reason why George, as a character, is vaguely sympathetic at all. While there is limited back story about George's poor upbringing and his ambition to rise from the ashes of his lower socioeconomic stratus, however, there is little motivation shown for why he should become so unfeeling toward a woman he essentially woos as a way to bide his time. It's his portrayal of George, a young man who is not essentially a bad seed but succumbs to bad decisions, that makes the film even remotely engaging. His panic and desperation, as all of the consequences of his decisions and of carrying the burdens of responsibility and desire come raining down upon him, is palpable and clear, from his facial expressions and physicality to his deliberate, thoughtful line deliveries. Though George is, in essence, just another dumb kid, Clift makes him a dumb kid worth some small measure of pity, as he evokes the tragedy of his lacking upbringing and loss of innocence and the inevitable clash with the seedy side of ambition.

Taylor and Winters are also top-notch in their respective roles. Again, Angela is the most sympathetic character, as the unknowing, innocent bystander, as much a product of the morays of her class as George is of his. On the other hand, Winters makes naive Al sweetly pathetic, even as Stevens and, possibly, the novel's original author begs the audience to identify solely with George and, therefore, vilifies Al in the process, who comes across as whiny and unintelligent, though the results of her tryst with George are only half her fault. The inequities between the George and Al characters are ironic; George is the American Tragedy in question, though Al is a dowdy down-on-her-luck girl who is finally paid some attention by a seemingly nice, handsome man only to meet her own tragic demise, literally and figuratively, in the end.

All in all, A Place in the Sun wasn't horrible; it was merely a slavish adaptation to a source novel that ultimately hampered its painfully obvious and earnest reach for cultural relevance in the end, in my opinion. The supporting cast was fine, the score and other production elements were passingly average, even while the performances of the principal stars were exceptional. It was merely a story that oozed melodrama from every bit of celluloid, just as it did from every page of the book, and it was this quality that director Stevens apparently aimed to amplify rather than finding solid emotional focus on the three characters at its center, particularly the two women, or by doing a better job of relating the George character to the viewing audience. Of course, I'm probably biased here; I didn't like the book, so how could it be possible to like the movie, even with the attractive Hollywood types at the top of its cast list. After careful consideration, though, I feel the film warrants a 7 for being shaky but entertaining, and I feel that's a generous rating. I wasn't particularly entertained, but the film, in its construction is not mediocre. It's simply another product of another time, reaching for a universality that it did not quite attain. As such, it does not pass the test, and I'm glad that the film was not re-ranked on the Revised list. My heart did not pitter-patter for this romance, given the Passions list ranking, either, but that's nether here nor there, as, in the words of LeVar Burton on Reading Rainbow, you don't have to take my word for it.