Everyone wants his place in the sun, where everything is bright and warm, where beauty and comfort are taken for granted, and where everything always seems to fall into place.
Enter George Eastman (Montgomery Clift), a distant and poor relation of the well-to-do Eastman family, headed by the patriarch, Charles. George is given a job on the factory floor, where he meets the plain and unsophisticated Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters). While his relationship with Alice appears to be blooming, George is really falling in love with Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), a beautiful young socialite and a friend of the Eastman's.
When Alice tells George she is pregnant, his thoughts soon turn dark as he looks for some way to separate himself from Alice. With murder in his mind and guilt in his heart, George takes her on a little outing--on a rowboat on a secluded lake...
Class, ambition and desire
Director George Stevens' tragic story, "A Place in the Sun," is a gripping tale of class, ambition and desire. George wants desperately to get ahead, to distance himself from his impoverished background. But, lonely and restless, he is driven into the arms--and bed--of Alice. And while he appears to have some affection for her, it is never more than that. There is a telling moment in a scene when George is walking Alice home: the way he constantly grips and releases her shoulder is an act of hunger, not love.
A man of the cinema
Stevens knew how to use his camera to get his point across. When George first meets his rich relations Stevens composes his shot so that the Eastman's loom large in the foreground, dwarfing poor George when he enters in the background.
Real chemistry
Clift and Taylor burn a hole in the screen as the passion between George and Angela smolders and grows. Stevens conveys this with extreme and intense close-ups: his actors' faces fill the frame; their whispers, urgent and passionate. Their desire for one another is about to spill out of the frame.
The emotional register displayed in "A Place in the Sun" has been criticized for being over the top. However, the title of the novel the film is based on, "An American Tragedy" (by Theodore Dreiser), suggests big ideas are being addressed here. Namely, the invisible, yet insurmountable divide between the classes, and the wallop of passion that makes one feel the other side of that divide is actually attainable. A story with such grand themes should be equally grand in its emotional reach.
"A Place in the Sun" will screen at the historic Bay Theatre in Seal Beach on January 29th, 30th, and February 1st. CLICK HERE for show times.
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