Review: A Place in the Sun (1951)

A Place in the Sun

Rating

Director

George Stevens

Screenplay

Michael Wilson, Harry Brown (Novel: Theodore Dreiser; Play: Patrick Kearney)

Length

2h 02m

Starring

Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, Anne Revere, Keefe Brasselle, Fred Clark, Raymond Burr, Herbert Heyes, Shepperd Strudwick, Frieda Inescort, Kathryn Givney, Walter Sande, Ted de Corsia, John Ridgely, Lois Chartrand, Paul Frees

MPAA Rating

Passed (National Board of Review)

Review

The heart is a fickle beast. It wants many things but cannot have them all A Place in the Sun explores love, passion, and shame in the pursuit of differing objectives.

George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) is a poor man with a rich friend whose family business affords him a chance to make something of himself. There, he meets the meek Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters) and falls in love with her. Although their relationship must remain a secret because of company guidelines, another mitigating factor enters his life when he’s introduced to the attractive and sophisticated Angela Vickers (Elizbaeth Taylor). His indiscretions with Alice threaten to upend his carefully cultivated and passionate romance with Angela until a plan takes shape that will free him up to be with the real woman he loves.

A Place in the Sun features strong performances, terrific direction, compelling writing, and beautiful cinematography. The film was made by the immensely talented George Stevens who handled melodrama with a forthright and earnest depiction of love and loss. Unlike contemporary Douglas Sirk, Stevens keeps his characters relatable and avoids pulling overwrought performances out of his actors.

He’s aided significantly in this by screenwriters Michael Wilson and Harry Brown, the former of which was on the verge of being blacklisted by Hollywood for his refusal to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Wilson and Brown were allowed to claim a richly deserved Oscar for their screenplay but Wilson would soon be out of work and forced to surreptitiously sell scripts without his own name on them. The HUAC’s long-lasting damage to cinema is familiar to many but for someone to go from the huge success of A Place in the Sun to unemployable is one of many tragedies of the era.

What Wilson and Brown provide to Stevens is an impressive script that allows stars Clift, Winters, and Taylor to deliver strong performances with Winters yielding a career-best as the initially-timid Alice. Winters gives the plain factory worker whose love for Clift’s George is deeply felt and expressed, her desperate gambit for acceptance exposing her own selfishness and leading her towards certain danger. Clift plays the affable lead with charm and skill making him the kind of sympathetic figure whose actions are disappointing but often overlooked. It’s a character that could have come off as grasping and conniving but in Clift’s hands is convincing as a man faced with an impossible choice. His heart leads him down the wrong path and that forms the foundation of this tragedy. While Clift and Winters clearly outshine Taylor, she doesn’t make Angela loathsome. She is not the villain of the piece and she gets that across effectively. This early performance helped cement her status as one of Hollywood’s most celebrated actors.

A Place in the Sun has long had a place in my heart as one of the great films of the 20th century. It’s an engaging, passionate, compelling drama that never lets the audience off easily. It allows them to feel deeply for each of the characters and the tragedy into which each of their choices have led them. A deft masterwork.