‘A Place in the Sun’ at 75 - Standing the Test of Time
In an 2005 interview, George Stevens Jr. shared the following story about the night he and his famous father were driving home from the Academy Awards after the elder Stevens had just won Best Director for A Place in the Sun:
“One of the things I’ve admired about my father’s work, something I used as founder of the American Film Institute, is the idea of the test of time. Driving home from the Academy Awards, the year he won for ‘A Place in the Sun,’ I was young and I was quite excited. He might have thought I was a little too excited. He looked over at me and said, ‘You know, we’ll have a better idea of what kind of a film this is in about 25 years.’”
75 years have now passed, and the verdict, three times over, has been unambiguous.
A Place in the Sun premiered 75 years ago today on August 14, 1951, and A. H. Weiler, reviewing it for The New York Times, said of the film:
“‘A Place in the Sun’ is a distinguished work, a tribute, above all, to its producer-director and an effort now placed among the ranks of the finest films to have come from Hollywood in several years.”
This is praise that reads, from this distance, less like a rave than an understatement of what Stevens had actually accomplished. This was the first entry in what would come to be known as Stevens’s American Trilogy, three films drawn from three great American novels – this one from Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy, later to be followed by the films Shane in 1953 and Giant in 1956 – each one an attempt to distill something essential about the particular cruelty behind the promise of the American dream. All three would be nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, among others. A Place in the Sun notably won for both direction and screenplay, and in 1991 the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, a formal acknowledgment of what audiences had understood at a gut level for four decades already: that this was a film built to outlast its moment.
Weiler’s contemporary review understood something important about what Stevens and screenwriters Michael Wilson and Harry Brown had accomplished in translating Dreiser’s dense, sociologically ambitious novel into a two-hour drama. They moved the story to the then-present day of 1951 and concentrated everything on the specific, devastating psychology of a young man who wants more than his life was built to give him and discovers, too late, that wanting is often treated as its own kind of crime.
Montgomery Clift’s performance in A Place in the Sun is one of the great performances of American cinema precisely because Clift refuses to make the character simple. Clift plays George as a young man whose crime is not premeditated malice but a catastrophic failure of courage at the precise moment courage was required – a man who, as he tells the court in the film’s devastating climax, wanted to save the woman he had gotten pregnant and simply could not bring himself to do it. “I’m guilty of a lot of things,” he tells Angela Vickers near the film’s end, “of most of what they say I am.” It is one of the most shattering line readings in American film, an admission of moral culpability that stops carefully short of naming the specific crime, because George himself does not fully know where the boundary between wishing someone dead and killing them actually lies.
Elizabeth Taylor, playing the wealthy, radiant Angela who represents everything George’s upbringing told him he could never have, gives the finest performance of her young career, rendering Angela’s passion for George as genuine rather than decorative. And Shelley Winters, as Alice Tripp, whose death sets the entire tragedy in motion, gives the film its aching moral center. Winters never allows Alice to become merely an obstacle in George’s path toward Angela. She is a woman clinging to a love she believes can be rekindled, and her drowning – one of the most ambiguous and haunting sequences in classical Hollywood cinema, deliberately unclear about whether George’s inaction constituted murder – is staged by Stevens with a moral seriousness that refuses easy judgment even as it refuses to look away.
Biographer Neil Sinyard’s description of the American Trilogy captures precisely why these films have endured:
“[…] deeply American stories, infused with a unique sense of landscape and character that make up the personality of the country […] At the core of each one is an outsider striving for assimilation and the promise that the country offers and whose aspirations become tantalizing close to fulfilment, but whose ultimate dream of success and happiness will elude his grasp.”
That structure – the American dream glimpsed and then withheld, not through simple bad luck but through the specific moral compromises that pursuing the dream requires – has proven to be one of the most durable templates in American storytelling, and its fingerprints are still visible as much later as 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption and in countless other stories.
Stevens would eventually go on, after completing his American Trilogy, to direct The Diary of Anne Frank in 1959 – a film informed, biographers have noted, by his own experience filming the liberation of Dachau as a combat cameraman during World War II, an experience that permanently altered the moral seriousness he brought to every subsequent project, including A Place in the Sun. He died in 1975 at 70 years old, having built a body of work that spans from the effervescent comedies of his early career to some of the most morally rigorous dramas Hollywood has ever produced.
His son’s memory of that car ride home from the Academy Awards has become, in retrospect, something like a thesis statement for how to evaluate any work of art: not by its immediate reception, however glowing, but by whether it still has something to say decades after the applause has faded. 75 years later to the day, A Place in the Sun has passed that test with flying colors.