moonspinner55 Review of A Place in the Sun

A Place in the Sun (1951)

Excruciatingly ironic...though Liz and Monty are still swoon-worthy

[6/10 · 21 March 2009]

Theodore Dreiser's novel "An American Tragedy" turned into a glossy, slick, surface-pretty though still effective melodrama about troubled young people. Montgomery Clift is the poor ex-bellhop who gets a job working in his rich uncle's factory; he has eyes for a smoky society beauty obviously out of his league, courting instead a plain-Jane working girl who ends up pregnant. The story has been pushed up from the 1930s to the film's modern era, leaving some portions of the plot seeming antiquated (when Shelley Winters goes to a doctor for help with her condition, he acts more like a minister than a medico). Director George Stevens painstakingly mounts this plot (in all its unfairness) with the surge of a romantic epic, turning Clift's character into an anti-hero (he's more like a coward, an extremely polite rebel--alternating his leather jacket with suits and ties). Elizabeth Taylor plays her country club princess with a mix of naughty spirit and maternal instinct (intriguing if not quite believable), while Winters goes from shy and subdued to vindictive in no time flat (does Stevens mean her to be the villain of the piece?). The theme of a have-not skirting the world of the haves is certainly brought off with pomp and style (and some steamy clinches), but the courtroom theatrics in the third act are laid on with a trowel. It might have played as a morality tale at one time, but today it looks more like an overheated soaper. Stevens stacks the deck against his protagonist with needling precision, right up until the jaw-droppingly 'tough' conclusion. **1/2 from ****