As part of my mission to see every film ever nominated for best picture, I watched George Stevens’ A Place In The Sun this weekend.  A Place in the Sun was released in 1951.  It was a front-runner for best picture but in an upset, it lost to An American In Paris.  (Another best picture loser that year: A Streetcar Named Desire.)

Montgomery Clift plays George Eastman, a poor man with a religious fanatic mother and a wealthy uncle.  Looking to make his fortune (i.e., to find his “place in the sun), George gets a job working in his uncle’s factory and quickly starts a romance with one of his co-workers, the shy and insecure Alice (Shelley Winters).  However, even as he and Alice settle down to a life of dreary romantic bliss, George discovers that the Eastman name also allows him to mingle with (if never truly belong to) high society.  He meets the rich (and shallow) Angela Vickers (played by Elizabeth Taylor) and soon, he’s also romancing her.  Neither Angela or Alice is aware of the other’s existence and for a while, George has the best of both the  world he desires and the world in which he actually belongs.  Eventually, George decides that he wants to marry Angela and become a part of her world.  However, there’s a problem.  Alice is pregnant and demanding that George marry her or else.  The increasingly desperate George quickly decides that there’s only one way to get Alice out of his life…

A Place in the Sun was based very loosely on Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy.  While the movie remains (more or less) faithful to the novel’s plot, director Stevens jettisons most of Dreiser’s heavy-handed Marxism and instead concentrates on the more melodramatic elements of the story.  The end result is a glorious soap opera that is occasionally a bit tacky and heavy-handed but always watchable and entertaining.

Stevens is helped by the three lead performances.  As Angela, a stunningly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor manages to be both calculating and clueless,   seductive and innocent.  As her counterpart, Shelley Winters gives a really brave performance as Alice.  The film is structured that its impossible not to feel sorry for Alice.  The genius of Winters performance is that she (and director Stevens) allowed Alice to become a real, flawed human being as opposed to just a symbol of victimization.  However, the film is truly dominated by Montgomery Clift.  Clift is in just about every scene and his own rather fragile persona translates wonderfully in the role of George.  Was Montgomery Clift ever as handsome as he was in A Place In The Sun?  He gives a perfect performance as the type of guy that every girl has known, the guy that we fell in love with not because of who he was but who we thought he could be.  These are the guys who always end up breaking our hearts, they’re the ones who we still can’t help but think about years later, always wondering “why?”

Unlike a lot of older films, A Place in the Sun remains remarkably watchable and relevent today.  Perhaps its most famous scene involves a capsized rowboat and oh my God, that scene freaked me out so much.  Admittedly, a lot of that had to do with the fact that I have this morbid fear of drowning (and, like one of the characters in this film, I can’t swim) but director Stevens also does a great job building up the scene’s suspense.  He makes brilliant use of sound especially, in much the same way that Francis Ford Coppola would later use that roaring train in The Godfather.  Seriously, I watched that scene with my hands literally over my eyes, just taking an occasional peek until it was all over. 

One last note — there’s an actor in this film who plays a detective.  You’ll see him if you play the trailer at the top of the post.  His big line is “You’re under arrest.”  I have no idea who this actor was but he had one of the most authentic and memorable faces that I’ve ever seen in a movie, regardless of when the movie was made.  He had the type of presence that reminded me why I love character actors.