A Place in the Sun (1951)
It's worth killing your pregnant girlfriend for a shot with Elizabeth Taylor.
It’s an impressive piece of art that makes you empathize with someone who murders their pregnant girlfriend. A Place in the Sun accomplishes this feat simply by showing one close-up after another of Elizabeth Taylor’s face, each one suggesting that a life with her is worth anything, anything at all. Taylor, playing beautiful socialite Angela Vickers, represents access to the American dream. Pregnant girlfriend Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), meanwhile, wants George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) to run away with her, give up his Horatio Alger aspirations, and—shudder—be poor.
As the love story between Angela and George heats up and Alice becomes more of an impediment to George’s desires, the movie drives inexorably towards a conclusion that feels foregone even if you didn’t know the movie was based on a novel called “An American Tragedy.” After hearing a suggestive radio broadcast about a recent spate of drownings, George takes Alice out on a rickety canoe and makes a bunch of spooky faces at her, mustering his courage to do the unthinkable. Then Alice [checks notes] falls out of the canoe and drowns by accident?
It’s an odd choice, especially because the real murder “An American Tragedy” was based on was, y’know, a murder.1 In the film, though, it appears that George has a change of heart at the last moment; maybe he’s redeemable! In fact, his walk to the electric chair could almost be considered sad, right up until you remember that, hey, wait a second, this guy plotted to kill his pregnant girlfriend. That shouldn’t be allowed, Elizabeth Taylor or no Elizabeth Taylor.
Rating: 8/10, would murder Shelley Winters to be with Elizabeth Taylor.
Cast and Crew
Montgomery Clift: there he is, walking down a highway with his thumb out, clad in a leather jacket and dripping with restrained masculinity. Hot damn.2
Clift is the first Method actor we’re seeing in this column. His acting style—and, really, the whole gist of the Method—is to plumb the emotional depths of the character. Clift accomplishes this mostly by speaking really, really quietly. Somehow, this works! By 1951 Clift had already brought his mumbling to Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948) and to Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (also 1948). Zinnemann and Clift will reunite in a 1953 classic that’ll net Clift another well-deserved Oscar nomination.
Shelley Winters, who plays the villain [sic] in A Place in the Sun, had a career that stretched from the ‘40s to the ‘90s and included Oscar wins for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965). She was hugely famous in her day, though I’m guessing that was more due to her string of romantic escapades3, her gossipy memoirs (plural), and her general blonde bombshell-ness. Marilyn Monroe was even her roommate! But man, it certainly says something about Elizabeth Taylor if you’re willing to murder Shelley Winters to be with her.
George Stevens, who directs A Place in the Sun and wins the Best Director Oscar for it, had one of the quietest legendary careers ever. Six nominations for Best Director and two wins gets you one MENTION on Jeopardy?4 Dang. Let’s continue the string of indignities for Mr. Stevens and punt our discussion of him to the next time he wins an Oscar.
Edith Head…well, she’s nothing short of the greatest costume designer in movie history.5 She has the most Oscar nominations of any woman ever, full stop, and has won eight statues, including for this film. Her strapless dress for Elizabeth Taylor single handedly reshaped the prom dress market. We’ll see Head again and again and again.
The Trivia
Theodore Drieser is best known for his novels “Sister Carrie” (1900) and “An American Tragedy” (1925, the basis of this film). “Sister Carrie” is about a small-town girl who runs off to the big city, becomes a mistress to a bunch of big-city men, then becomes an actress. Like “An American Tragedy,” it has a bummer ending.6 Drieser was nominated for the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature but was passed over for Sinclair Lewis; this makes Lewis the answer to the trivia question, “who was the first American to win a Literature Nobel.” (We’ll see Sinclair Lewis’ work in this column soon enough.) Drieser’s brother is Paul Dresser7, who wrote “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” the state song of Indiana.
While joking about whipping, Angela refers to her beau as “Simon Legree.” Legree is the antagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” He’s one of the most evil and irredeemable characters in literature, mostly because he’s an allegory for the cruelty of the slave trade. I typically like nuance in my villains, but I guess I can let it slide in my “represents slavery” allegories.
We’re not going to see Shelley Winters on film again in this column, so let’s take the chance to talk about the story behind her film The Diary of Anne Frank. Miep Gies is the real-life Dutch woman who hid the Franks and the van Pels from the Nazis. For this, she received the Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations medal, which, for my money, is on the shortlist for the very best awards one can win.
Odds and Ends
Clift’s character’s name is George Eastman, though he presumably has no relation to the George Eastman who began Eastman Kodak and brought roll film to the masses…Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005) is pretty clearly a spiritual successor to A Place in the Sun, though Woody Allen’s protagonist is way better at killing than George Eastman…ELIZABETH TAYLOR MARRIAGE COUNT: by 1951 she’s already divorced Conrad Hilton Jr. but hasn’t yet picked up #2; we’ll see what kind of damage she can do between now and 1956.
In the actual 1906 murder, Chester Gillette whacked victim Grace Brown with either an oar or a tennis racket before pushing her out of the canoe. That’s murder!
I usually think movies with a coup de foudre are unrealistic, but in this case it’s easy to see why Angela is immediately stricken with George.
With the likes of William Holden, Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster, Errol Flynn, and Marlon Brando, oh my!
Jeopardy has mentioned the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” character George “Kingfish” Stevens far more than director George Stevens.
Though yeah, you may know her best as the inspiration for Edna Mode in The Incredibles.
“Sister Carrie” was adapted in 1952 into the film Carrie with Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones. Edith Head did the costumes and, as she did 34 other times, scored an Oscar nod for her work.
Yeah, “Dresser”—Paul changed his name.