This is an essay about a film that very nearly wasn’t made. This is an essay about a film that a certain studio head took one look at, and said no. No way. Not again. This is an essay about a film that also happens to be an adaptation of a book written by Theodore Dreiser that was based, in part, on true events concerning a 1906 murder that had taken place in upstate New York, a book that had already spawned one film version that utterly pales in comparison to this one, Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 Paramount release An American Tragedy, in addition to inspiring a play about the case written by one Patrick Kearney as well as an episode of the CBS radio show Our Miss Brooks entitled “Weekend at Crystal Lake.” More recently there has been an opera, penned by the famous American composer Tobias Picker with a beautiful libretto composed by the wonderfully talented Gene Scheer. Whew. Got all that? Good. Now forget it.
What you really need to know about the 1951 film A Place in the Sun, also released by Paramount and directed by the prodigiously talented George Stevens, is that it’s actually two films in one, one of the versions being an intentional meditation on class warfare and American society, the other existing only in the dreamlike relationship that exists between this highly intimate film and its audience, in the very particular spell that it casts. It has been well documented that Stevens knew what kind of film he wanted to make and what he wanted to say about the subject matter, which in itself might be considered somewhat remarkable for 1951, the director being this self aware of the material’s content, enough so to view the film as commentary first and melodrama second, and he did just about everything he could here, short of being ham-handed, to play up the aspects of the story that he most wanted to delve into. But because of his machinations, some of them conscious, some of them perhaps not so much, he also unwittingly made another film here, a dark and brilliant statement about the nature of American sexuality that just happened to be light years ahead of its time. The subtext here is almost greater than the main work itself, certainly richer and more rewarding to literary sensibilities, should you have any. For the record, it’s also what makes it one the best films that a major Hollywood studio has ever produced and had its subtext been perhaps more noticeable and more apparent to the average American moviegoer circa 1951, one wonders just how many of the risks that were taken in the making of this film, particularly in its casting, would have been repeated at all.
A caveat first. A Place in the Sun is a deeply and emotionally unsettling film, on more levels than one, whether you are already familiar with its myriad subtext or not. It is also ultimately a hugely satisfying film, but one that is decidedly unsettling first and this in a way that has little to do with the story itself and more to do with the environment in which it was produced. It is unsettling in the way that you think of poisoned Halloween candy for children as being unsettling. It is perhaps as unsettling and as cold and as brutal as razor blades in apples. So fair warning here. Another caveat. If you haven’t seen this film yet, do yourself a favor and go watch it now as this small deconstruction will surely spoil the ending for you if you haven’t, and dare I say the majority of the film as well. In fact, I almost implore you to go watch it. This is a film ripe for scholarly interpretation and healthy discussion and this writer could likely write for days on end about it if you’d let him. So go ahead. Go pour yourself a tall drink and then turn out the lights and then be quiet. Shut up about the things that have been bothering you all week, silence that inner chatter if you can, and sit back and enjoy. This is a film virtually made for that. Let it unfold about you and around you and let it envelop you in its dreamy suspense and suspension of disbelief. And then come on back here. It’s fine. We’ll wait.
Ready? Okay.
Let us start with the casting of this thing. Montgomery Clift. Our poor tortured Monty. Our real American Hollywood tragedy, if we want to tell the truth about it. To begin with, you should know that he’s gay, if you don’t already. Like gay gay. And not only gay, but gay in a time that Monty most likely had to practically drag that closet around with him on his back everywhere that he went. And not just gay and having to hide it, but also he was troubled. The man had some serious demons. If he had burst onto the scene anytime in the last twenty years or so (and one hates to use that qualifier, the term “burst” being so far past cliché, though in Monty’s case, it’s deadly accurate) he likely would have been the biggest rock star on the planet, such is the power and the presence of his natural charisma. For girls and boys alike, Monty’s all mumbles and slouches and naked vulnerability, all wounded heart and embers and smoldering meaningful looks. Plus he’s ambiguous. He’s handsome yet pretty, sexy yet restrained, gorgeous yet rugged. He’s an incredibly pleasing person to look at, whether viewed as a sex object or not. Think a softer Brando here. For a better working description of his curious screen power, perhaps its best for you to think of the most beautiful and desirable person that you can possibly imagine and then imagine that this person can’t even tie their own shoelaces, let alone get along in this world without you. Sort of terrifying, no? This sort of manic desperation to him, his utter need of you masked as love. He can tie his own shoes, of course, but only if you were to just remain there with him while he does so. Imagine this person sitting there on the edge of your bed desperately needing your help, pleading with you to help them, that they love you, for Christ’s sake please, please don’t leave. You are his everything. The shoe problem has now been solved, but then what comes next? How will he ever get along without you? That, gentle reader, is the very nature and essence of watching Montgomery Clift act. A sort of radiating weakness emanating out from him, a sense of utter helplessness from which he is able to divine his true power. Marilyn Monroe had this too in a way, if you stop to think about it, this strange quality, this heady combination of distress and beauty and excess, as if imploring you to rescue her, so that she might be able to make all of your wildest dreams come true. It’s what makes The Misfits so sad to watch, after all. Brando and Dean had it too, of course, later, popularized in the Method school, but seemingly nowhere near to the degree that Monty seemed to possess it naturally, effortlessly really. As if he had had the better source material to work with in the first place, better, sadder memories, a more realized inner monologue. It’s what they call star power, kids, and what it’s really borne out of is isolation and loneliness and unhealthy ambition and above all, need. So don’t ever let anybody tell you any different. And it’s relatable, it’s beauty, but it’s unnatural, tortured beauty that has been transmuted and subsumed by the actor for years before being given to you, delivered expressly for your viewing pleasure. It’s true, ask around. It’s a deeply troubled person hiding out on a screen in a darkened theatre, as if this was the most natural place in the world for them to do so. And in a way, it is. We all already sort of know that, otherwise why else act? Monty might be the sexiest, most handsome boy in the entire school district, but even your kid sister could beat him up if she wanted to. So where else was he supposed to go? Plus Monty’s just got this natural charisma residing within him, existing in spades really, despite his shy and jerky nature, which is also part and parcel of what makes him so lovable. The big goofball. You can’t help but like him, that affable and easy lap dog nature of his, so ready to jump up in your lap, so ready to laconically and perpetually please you. It’s kind of nice really, at least on camera, at a comfortable distance. For the other thing about Montgomery Clift is that the guy just oozes the promise of disaster. You can literally see it coming from about a mile away. This is the type of fellow that bends down to pick up a coin on the platform while waiting for the train and then ends up falling down onto the tracks themselves below, directly into the path of the oncoming bullet. This is the type of guy who gets ejected out of fast cars and into the trunks of large stationary trees. This is the type of person who gets drunk and wakes up six days later on a beautiful beach somewhere completely naked and with no memory of anything past the first highball. This is the type of unlucky man who gets large anvils and pianos dropped on him from impossibly great heights. In short, he’s trouble prone and it’s written all over on his pretty face. By which I mean he’s a magnet for it, for these types of “accidents”, which is also part of his particular screen allure, part of his strange and peculiar charm. You just can’t stop watching him, no matter what movie he’s in, if only to see what’s going to happen next. Go ahead and try. I defy you. From his auspicious beginnings in The Search and Red River to his 12 minute penultimate performance in Judgment at Nuremberg, the man remains so compulsively watchable, you almost can’t help yourself. In his best roles, it’s as if there’s Monty first and the movie just sort of happened to wander up around him. On screen, the guy’s all coiled energy, buried in his spine somewhere, much like Brando, but unlike that actor, there’s also an incredibly delicate and tenuous element there, a sort of hysterical sensitivity, and this is due mostly, of course, to the very real fact of Monty himself being off-screen a living and breathing train wreck just waiting to happen at any given moment. And the sad part is that not only can you not help, even if you wanted to, but that also you, as voyeur, just can’t seem to take your eyes off it for the life of you, even when it begins to make your stomach roil. It makes you somehow complicit. The very phrase “train wreck” in fact, might as well have been coined for him. As well as the one that reads “not longed for this earth.” So that’s Monty. Our poor drunken angel. There should be a picture of him in the dictionary right next to the word doomed.
And so here, in A Place in the Sun, he’s cast opposite the extremely lovely and extremely talented young actress who would one day be crowned the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Miss Elizabeth Taylor. Liz is perfectly luminous here, glowingly creamy skinned and mostly blemish free by this point as she’s also all of about eighteen years old. One can’t help but wonder if she had ever even been properly kissed yet. It’s worth mentioning that at the time of filming Monty was already eleven years her senior, which in a way turns out to be another inspired piece of casting work done on this film, a happy accident, a happenstance that Monty’s almost thirty and Liz has never even missed a curfew yet. She radiates a sort of high spirited, manic virginity here, but if you look close, there’s also something quite a bit better brewing underneath, a breath of something wicked lingering, something lecherous really, a telltale whiff of some thing entirely more delicious and divine. Her body expresses something stronger and more alluring than even the most traditional notions of American screen purity and what you seem to notice is that it’s based in some sense of pure expectancy, a yearning perhaps, to express to the waiting camera and to all of us, her raw (and God given) beautiful, healthy, and utterly feminine sexuality. Taylor was a child actress and had struggled for some time to break into her first adult role and express what she must have known would be the start of the power of her budding and obvious sensuality, later realized most magnificently and pretty much obviously in the 1963 epic Cleopatra. With A Place in the Sun however, she had finally found the window into it, the wings by which she might be able to truly take flight as an actress, to soar above herself. Every time that she’s on screen here, her character leans forward just so, just ever so slightly, inviting you of course to do the same, inviting you towards her, beckoning you ever closer with her brilliant eyes, and the sense that one gets the most from these slight but unsubtle movements is the thought that the first man or woman who might get lucky enough to have her would naturally be a very, very lucky person indeed. This would be a real thing that I’m describing here, this projected sexuality of hers. It’s vibrant, it’s visible, and it’s a decidedly tangible thing. Think Madonna here, think of the jailbait Britney Spears, back when the two of them in their respective eras had first arrived on the scene. Take that whole Lolita aspect of their work and their performances and then multiply that energy by about a thousand or so and then encase it in a soft white cotton dress hung dry on the line, in a just perfectly ravishing debutante gown draped over virgin royalty and then you’re getting close to what Liz displays here. As the viewer, even as the casual one, you find yourself drawn ever closer to her, much like Monty’s character in the film is, desperately wanting what you know you’re completely not supposed to have. It’s more than titillating, to be sure, and it’s also entirely forbidden because of her youth and her inexperience, and yet it’s also smack dab in the middle of your face, at the very bridge of your nose, with nowhere at all for you to avert your eyes to, even if you wanted to. She takes up the entire screen constantly, every frame, every time that she’s in a scene, even with other people present somehow. It’s a mystery and it’s almost blinding in its hallowed beauty. And so then what are you supposed to do here, look away? It’s a complicated and magical performance, to make a long story short, and it’s almost Medusa like in its seduction and its delivery, perhaps even more when you consider the era in which it was filmed. The other thing about it is that you can also tell that Liz is at least somewhat conscious of what she’s doing to us physically, which makes it even all the more devastating to watch for some reason. But so the point then is that this is a highly physical performance by a young and ostensibly virgin actress that is so strangely precise, so controlled, and so rich with the promise of wanton acts on her part, yet it’s still so heavily restrained (which of course makes it all the more tantalizing), that by the end of the film, if not well before, do not be surprised if you yourself personally want to rip her clothes off. There. I’ve stated it for the record. Liz Taylor is hot here and I mean hot with a capital H. And young, a child really. And adored by the camera. And you sit there and you watch and you wonder just how much of this was planned and calculated by Stevens or else by some spook at the studio, or if any of it was at all or if it’s just Hollywood magic. For this is an incredibly sexual and bizarrely un-nuanced performance that just happens to toy with one of our biggest cultural pretensions about youth in relation to sexuality itself. Any desire that you might feel for Liz Taylor on screen here stems less from how incredibly attractive you find her in this film, and boy do you ever, and more for the reasons exactly why you feel this way. It’s a direct inversion and it goes well beyond jailbait. The more that you and Montgomery can’t have of her, the more that you want. She’s womanly perfection personified, both culturally as well as physically, and the ultimate objectified beauty of her time and quite possibly several others. She’s got you. And what really makes this bind so sad and so unrequited for the viewer, this forbidden lust and hunger that you are now voyeuristically engaged in, is that deep down you know on some level that what is making her seem so beautiful and appetizingly sexual to you, the true basis for it, resides and rises in direct proportion precisely to her youth and to how absolutely unavailable she would be to you in real life. And the reality is that you KNOW it, you big perv. This is one of the film’s great unintended effects. For who would really want to be the first here? Who would really want to walk that road, to be the one to illicitly violate here, to obtain the bounty and the first fruit of Elizabeth Taylor’s budding and yearning virginity? What are you, some sort of criminal, buddy? Some sort of carnal thrill seeker? This would be a dangerous road indeed, you can just see it opening up in front of you, this path, and in the context of the film, it remains an incredibly deadly psychological effect that does not miss its mark. In short, it works. AND it appears to be mostly unintentional from a directorial standpoint, I would have to guess, this part of it anyway. George Stevens was a very talented director, though not a rocket scientist by any means, and nor was he Hitchcock, in whose hands this subject matter might have been made more revealing and expounded upon, yet it also would have likely been more unrewarding in the end. Because, you know, Hitchcock was about as subtle as a pile of bricks. It’s more than obvious that Stevens could direct and direct well, especially from good source material (witness Giant, Shane, or in fact, his entire oeuvre for further evidence of this fact), but I’m not certain that I would consider him like an expert on the psyche or on Freudian psychology or the controversial, warring nature of American sexuality or anything like that. He’s making a film about class here. Or if it’s about sex at all, the thought of that surely had to have been second or third on his list. It was all just too far in the past still, one would have to guess, this notion of film as dark, ironic comment, or of film as secret treatise, film as psychological statement qua film. Plus the standing morals of the age certainly wouldn’t have allowed it, a film like that to be made, a film let’s say, expressly ABOUT Liz Taylor’s untouched vagina and what that might mean to the rest of us. So then how did she pull it off exactly? How was she able to set a million tongues a secretly wagging, clenched back between their teeth, of course, for fear of seeming uncouth and possibly animalistic in front of their dates or their sister or whoever? How was she able to achieve this effect exactly with what must have been little direction to speak of or perhaps none at all? How did Liz Taylor get to move around in a big 1951 Hollywood production almost like it was a stag film or something? Well, simple. The answer is that she wasn’t acting. That’s Liz up there, every bit, just as she was in real life and how she would have liked to have been seen. It’s pure mythmaking magic there, magic and then nothing more. Nothing else was even necessary for her character after that, to tell you the truth, after she had established who she physically was as a woman under that dress. She does a great job acting here, of course, but because of the way she found her way into it, the rest of it didn’t matter so much. It almost had to be a piece of cake, in a way.
But so then let’s pair her with Montgomery Clift in this picture. Just for laughs, you see. Let’s pair her with the irrepressible and very gay Montgomery Clift as her leading man. Liz and Monty. Monty and Liz. This is a chemistry that just shouldn’t work at all, if you stop to think about it. Nowadays they don’t seem to care so much, apparently, but back then, you at least wanted your audience to believe that such a relationship could really happen. But here, not so much. Not by conventional logic anyway. Liz and Monty together on the surface is a very strange thing. It’s perverse and it’s odd and it’s somewhat appalling even. The queer drunken angel and the virgin nymphomaniac. The broken down street hustler and his society princess. The tramp and the lady. The lady and the tramp, both roles so easily reversed between them. The tramp and his tramp. The tramp and HER tramp. There’s something sort of evilly mirthful going on here with this casting, somebody’s saying something (you hope) about celebrity and about our society and about myth that has nothing to do with the film itself. But what’s most striking about it is that there does sort of seem to be a dark logic to it, something sort of organically Meta going on here when you really stop to notice it and this might be one of the earliest true examples of that term used correctly that I can think of. It’s almost like an early form of stunt casting, except that no one else in the film seems to be in on the joke at all. Film history would eventually record their performance here together as one of the all-time great on-screen romances, but they have earned this dubious distinction for all of the wrong reasons. When the two of them are in a scene together, sure, the film crackles and pops with a sort of palpable electricity, there truly is a charge between the two of them, one that can’t be denied, and it’s a charge so powerful that you can almost taste it in your mouth, it’s like blood or like cherries, like a shiny piece of copper, a small lightning strike running straight through your teeth. But that doesn’t make it right! For what really gets one in the stomach here is this strange, sickly feeling that said static doesn’t have anything to do with the two of them or their relationship to one another as actual characters. The physical aspects of their love story don’t seem to reflect an adult sexuality towards one another in any sort of conventional or meaningful way, but instead focuses only on their desperate and youthful yearnings. It’s almost pre-Lynchian, in a way, what happens here, and it certainly borders on the hysterical. In the context of the film, the love between them could only be based on her remarkable unspoiled state, and on his tattered and shady background, one that could possibly be defined as criminal in the eyes of her circle. Their love story at heart is not about them, but about class and social structure and so it’s frightening, almost in the way that Romeo and Juliet is frightening, but even more so here, because between Liz and Monty there’s no real love, no actual compassion towards the other and to their journey here on the planet, but rather instead it lies only in the desire to complete one’s self, to make true the wild and hungry desire that resides in both of their needy little hearts. It’s not love but addiction. It’s childish and it’s selfish and it’s cruel and it’s for sure an objectifying love, one that in the end has little to do with tenderness for the other and everything to do instead with power and with control. And then not only is it objectifying, like if that wasn’t bad enough, but once this film gets going, the love becomes PURELY objectifying, love to satisfy the character’s own needs and insecurities and so by extension, it builds in its ability to maim, to kill, and to wound, to wreck havoc in the lives of not only the parties involved here, but also in the innocent lives of the people that surround them. And the film doesn’t even try to defend this, being that it’s supposed to be about class warfare anyway, but the problem is there’s just no amount of onscreen passion between the two of them that enables you to imagine them engaging in any sort of long lasting adult sexual activity with the other or to even engage in any sort of committed adult relationship, which I suppose is the point. Together they’re both too pretty, both too vain, both too troubled. As a couple they just cancel each other out completely in the end. They’re both too well-defined in what they obviously already are as human beings, even Liz is, and so put the two of them together in real life and you might just open a wormhole somewhere. You might just cause an explosion somewhere, a ripping of fabric, and this would not a benevolent or happy thing at all. Such is the power of movies, this in the end, is what they’re for, to pretend. Unless, of course, there is a darker agenda at work here. For you see, there IS the promise of sex here, that cannot be denied. There’s loads of it actually, the screen is practically dripping with sexual tension, but said sex is just not to going to be had between these two. For in essence, what Liz and Monty really represent here, what they really are in this movie are actually caricatures of something in our culture quite larger than themselves, he the troubled and downtrodden fag, the street hustler, and she the reviled virgin whore. They’re both American archetypes of repressed sexuality here, troubled outsiders and sexual outcasts from the greater tribe at large. They themselves, of course, are not repressed at all but the society that surrounds them most certainly is. Even from the beginning of the film, you secretly want the two of them to succeed together (which definitely also speaks to something somewhere about our true nature and about the nature of this film), but it’s not because you actually believe that they’re going to settle down and raise a family somewhere. They’re too doomed, right from the start. And so you root for their relationship to make it for some other reason, simply perhaps because it stirs something deep and consequential inside of you. Their love is just so breathtaking, so tinted with the promise of youth and its failures that perhaps you just can’t help yourself. It’s so over the top libidinous, so naively conceived and so dangerously erotic, so forbidden by class and social structure, that you can’t help but hope, even though you know deep down that it is hope against hope and to even stomach watching this thing you will have to swallow no small amount of your own disbelief. Again, this is perhaps merely a testament to the secret power of movies and to the unknowable power of personality. Alone there, in the dark, with Liz and with Monty. This may well be the most intimate movie ever made. It’s between you and them and then between you and them only, and never between the people watching this with you, if any. And as much as this movie is made, strangely, to be watched alone, I would have loved to have seen it in the theater just to gauge people’s reactions, to study the ick factor concerning it. Did people talk or laugh or nudge each other? Did they titter or look around uncomfortably? Did men fidget nervously in their seats? Did women check their cleavage and draw their sweaters tighter around them? Did they speak of what they felt afterwards over fries and milkshakes? I mean, what happened here? Or did they even notice any of this at all or is it merely through a postmodern lens now that any of this is even discussable? Because what this film is, what A Place in the Sun is really all about is sexual hysteria and through that lens, it plays like a firecracker, or like a holy vision of some kind. This is a film that presages the brilliance of a gutsy masterpiece like Bonnie and Clyde by fifteen years or so, except that there’s triple the unspoken sex and sexual energy and there’s not one piece of random violence. It’s sort of eerie really, the way it seems to turn this like unnamed Hollywood held convention about moviemaking right on its ear without meaning to. Liz and Monty (and it’s always Liz first here, mind you) are just both so beautiful, so attractively childlike, angelic almost, and in just so obviously a love affair that’s doomed right from the start that maybe you just can’t help BUT pull for them, no matter what the outcome. It’s sort of visceral, this effect. It’s quite literally in the gut somewhere. The chemistry that Liz and Monty have on the screen together is so natural yet so secretly perverse that in essence they seem to form a sort of cipher. They have a secret here and you know what it is. Oh yes. Yes you do. They have a secret but they are far too young to tell it and they wouldn’t tell you anyway and they are also doomed because the irresponsible and broken youth that their love is founded upon is fading away ever so quickly and so they are running with it, through this picture and through an impossible summer, so that even as they are meant to be shown as falling in love, they are also spiraling away from their very foundations, from the worlds that made them who they were. In short, they are running towards love, towards a constructed hope and a false promise, a love that they will never reach, all the while running out of time. Yes, they have a secret here and the secret exists both in and out of the confines of the film. What happens on screen here stays on screen, but in the real world, the secret is that no matter how conventionally lovely the two of them appear to be together, the truth is that they’re secretly the biggest losers in the world. The two of them are grotesquely beautiful which is what secretly makes them gangly and misshapen and isolated and alone, forever uninvited to the big dance. Who would have the balls to ask? Monty’s the kid with the scar on his face who gets beat up after gym class every day and is also perhaps regularly molested by the neighbor while Liz is the girl that all the guys on the football team have claimed to fuck and haven’t, the girl that all the other girls just love to hate. They might as well run away together and start a club, on screen and in real life, if only so that they might have someone else to TALK to. As far as archetypes go, they’re pretty solid, each the perfect match to the other, each the other’s best friend, the one most like their wounded true self, the one most willing to empathize with it, and in the end, the one who truly knows best what it’s really like. The life inside this particular cage, gilded with fabric or otherwise. The sheer and exacting loneliness of it all, once you find out about it, once you really know the reason why. Once you know.
Are you still with me so far? I told you that this was a strange film. It is. It really is. It’s an incredibly strange and hysterical film as well, especially when one starts deconstructing it. And it gets stranger still. Because enter the other female lead here, ostensibly the one who was supposed to be the main female lead and is often credited as such (despite the presence of Queen Liz), the lovely and talented miss Shelley Winters. As legend has it, Shelley had transformed her physical appearance in order to get this part. Prior to this role, she had pretty much been known as the next blonde bombshell of her day, Universal having been carefully building her image as a sexpot, even at one point having her sharing an apartment with another up and coming starlet, the aforementioned Marilyn Monroe. When she went to audition for Stevens, who wanted her for Liz’s part as the story goes, she met him in a public place dressed in character and he hadn’t recognized her, because of course he was expecting THE Shelley Winters. He and another woman on the far end of the room, let’s call it a diner, were the only two customers in the place. He waited for her arrival for a while and ate his soup or his blue plate special or whatever and then, when he had grown weary of it and assumed he had been stood up, he paid his check and turned to go. That was when he was approached by the mousy, nondescript woman with the hairpins, standing there in her plaid pleated skirt with her bobby socks and her orthopedic Oxford shoes and she said to him, “Hello, Mr. Stevens.” Rumor has it that he offered the part to Shelley on the spot but only if she could duplicate that effect on screen, that of the mousy and forlorn nobody. The lesson here, of course, is that Shelley Winters was one hell of a serious actress and don’t you forget it. Seeing becomes believing. She wanted the part of Alice Tripp, wanted to subsume the image of herself that the studio had been crafting perhaps, and so she did what she had to do in order to get it. But interestingly, and this is when the questions begin again, it’s clearly not the main female role in this picture, though it is sometimes credited as such. She was nominated for the 1952 Best Actress Oscar for her performance, Shelley was, but it’s an award that was eventually given instead (and rightly so) to Vivien Leigh for her role as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, of which I must briefly digress here, just to give you some idea of the caliber of films that Hollywood was releasing right about then and what they were all about and just to give you what I hope is a germane idea of who was starring in them and why exactly. The years of 1950 and 1951 saw the release of A Place in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire, The African Queen, All About Eve, The Asphalt Jungle, and Sunset Boulevard, among others. The two year period immediately following this gave us pictures such as High Noon, The Bad and the Beautiful, From Here to Eternity (also featuring Monty in another tragic role), Stalag 17, The Wild One, and Stevens own Shane. Something was clearly afoot here, something was changing. The movies themselves were changing. They were becoming more self referential, more character driven, more about themselves and the dream factory from whence they sprang. And so by extension, they became more about us as well. Growing darker in the concepts that they covered as well as darker in their execution, these films were much more existential and murkier in moral than the ones that had came before it. Suddenly every character had a large and expansive interior life that could be addressed at will and featured as part of the story line, if the filmmakers chose to do so. Not simply just the character’s history either, not just a pat back story to explain away their actions, but an entirely real and plausible present hiding behind their eyes. It was as if someone had finally figured out after Bogart and Cagney (and to a large degree, Bette Davis as well) that what really made a film protagonist essentially likeable and above all REAL was a relatable personality, good intentions or otherwise. People do not go to the movies simply to see stories of heroes and their heroics. Of course not. We go there to see ourselves, even if it is sometimes only under the pretense of “escaping”. Even the most banal, mindless comedy in the world has some element of the truth in it (and not just the truth, but YOUR truth), otherwise why the hell are you watching it? I can only surmise here that this change came about in American filmmaking and in the way that it tells its stories as a direct result of World War II and specifically because of the bomb and what we had done with it. Something about the specter and the secret thrill and adventure of death maybe, the gray murky middle grounds between good and evil where the big decisions of war are always made, I think that this must have gotten into our collective conscious as a country somehow, lodged itself under our skin and fingernails and stayed. Witness for instance the sexual undertones so obviously inherent in bombing another country, in conquering it, in violating it, in desecrating its landscape and then think of how many war movies we’ve made since 1945. It’s got to be in the hundreds. Or maybe it was that we had defeated the enemy and vanquished the evil empire and this was supposed to sustain us and keep us happy all of the time, yet it so clearly didn’t. Who’s to say really? The soul is a long dark night after all, to paraphrase, and who can say really what one would do if they had to, either to survive or else just to feel ALIVE in some small way again? For after the war and after the bomb, it seemed that acts that were once only the province of the criminal suddenly became everyone’s crimes. Our innocence had been lost somewhere and there was no going back to it. Did two wrongs make a right? Would you kill, would you lie, would you cheat, would you steal if you had to, if it meant your very survival? Or perhaps more importantly, if it meant getting what your heart secretly desired the most, if it meant fulfilling your own God given free will, your own personal will to the power and the glory that your government’s vanquishing of another had now earned you? The American Dream was alive and well and people were starting families and everyone was getting rich or at the very least getting by comfortably again and if you weren’t happy, then by God, that was you fault, because everyone else certainly was, what the hell was the matter with you then? So but if this was true, why so many dark movies then? Why so many packed houses with people laughing evilly at things that weren’t necessarily funny, and sometimes not at all? The character of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, for example, is not just NOT funny, but it’s also almost pathologically HYSTERICALLY FUNNY, it’s a hysterical and brilliant performance that borders on the frightening and then in the end, is also more than just a little sad. Like really sad. Like I felt bad and wanted to cry for Norma Desmond the first time I saw that as a kid. But the audiences kept rolling in, and they were not only NOT crying, but they were laughing, and laughing hysterically too, by all accounts. Same thing with All About Eve, it’s sort of funny, but it’s mostly sad and it’s fairly vicious and sort of hysterical at the same time. Yet people laughed, repeated lines. Suddenly everyone was a sophisticate, an aristocrat, a noble person of blood and of lineage, gorging themselves on pathos and gallows humor and melting Raisinets. But then so what? The so what is that this new crop of films and the stories contained there within seemed to be becoming increasingly darker, inspired by film noir perhaps and then certainly by the war, and that people were responding to them, in like, droves. As if true psychoanalysis wasn’t happening in the shrink’s office at all, but up there on the screen, perhaps where it most rightly belonged in the first place. Who knew what you could or would do if you had to? If you wanted it badly enough, if you had waited your whole miserable life? A movie might. What say we go see one? Who was to say what was wrong and what was right anymore? We all had blood on our hands now in one way or another and so perhaps it was best to just let the chips fall where they already lay. It was all situational anyway, wasn’t it? There were no real experts or authority figures anymore, no steadfast code of ethics or morals by which one might hope to construct a sympathetic protagonist, or at the very least, an HONEST one, simply because the reality was that EVERYONE was an authority or an expert in one way or another now, since everyone had now truly become the author of their own particular American lives and destinies, and looking back now, it seems that the better stories of the period tended to reflect that. Not to belabor the point anymore than I already have, but it would appear that the formula for this, the maxim that the very best writers and actors and directors of the age appeared to begin living by, was in fact, a simple reduction. Lie to your audience, boys and girls, and what you’re doing is telling a mere fable. It’s child’s play and then only that, fit for the matinee show, you’re only lying to yourself if you think otherwise. But, BUT, tell the cold, hard truth about a thing, about your characters flaws and troubles and weaknesses and what a sick son of a bitch he or she is, and now all of a sudden you’ve got yourself a story. The truth was that life was a confusing fucking place, and nobody knew anything about it really (least of all movie stars) and still don’t, and so perhaps your best bet was to try not muddle a film up too much with any of YOUR outdated notions of heroics and what a hero is supposed to MEAN exactly according to old one-dimensional constructions that were rather poorly sketched in retrospect and then also oh so easily traced along the black and white lines you cribbed them from, along outdated nexuses of what was supposed to be good, right. The truth was that films like that weren’t real life. And so then move over slapstick and move over producing simple melodrama for simple melodrama’s sake. For it was at this point that the true artists of the medium in this country, the Van Goghs and the Picassos of American cinema, began to enter the building in earnest. Looking back now, I guess we should all be grateful.
But so then the point was that A Place in the Sun and how it succeeds here where it shouldn’t is mostly because of the risks that it did decide to take, which was merely to lay the bride bare, and that this had great unintended consequences for the film and that it had started quite early on, even in the casting of the piece. Monty. Liz. Shelley. All strong personalities in their own right and all playing completely against who they truly were in real life. In a way, it’s the utter strangeness of this that makes the film that much more jarring and therefore relatable in the first place, the sense that these characters on the screen are somewhat flawed by design. The text of the film’s story does marginally lend itself to this, and it’s authentic, but then so do the personalities of the actors. Liz is very obviously a wonderfully nice person in real life (you can just tell) who just happens to be playing a spoiled bitch here. Shelley is perhaps more suited to Liz’s role, being the desirable sex-bomb type, but she is playing completely against that, against what the audience had been used to seeing from her up to that point. Monty’s the wild card, the enigma, the Hollywood revenant no one really knows and he sweats and stumbles his way through the entire film, looking for all the world like he just might throw up. It’s incredibly fascinating to watch. We open up here on Monty’s character George Eastman hitchhiking into town en route to ask his rich uncle Charles for a job at his factory, which said hitchhiking is of course an early establishing shot to his class and to his place in this society. On the road he espies a billboard for his Uncle’s factory, which manufactures women’s bathing suits of all things, with a pretty girl on it and the tagline reading “It’s an Eastman!” A shiny new convertible rolls past him with a beautiful young woman in it who honks and waves at him. I’m going to go ahead and try to skip as best I can the majority of the class symbols peppered throughout this film, simply because they’re already well documented elsewhere and secondly because they’re mostly unnecessary and in fact, a bit embarrassing now in the grand scheme of things. When George arrives at the factory, he is hassled for a bit until he presents the card that his uncle had given him when they had met in Chicago at a hotel that Charles had stayed at where George was working as a bellboy. George is escorted to the President’s office where he is told that his uncle is not at the factory that day as it turns out but instead at home. When you’re Charles Eastman, you can take off as many days as you want is the establishing message here, I’m assuming. He is invited out to the Eastman mansion instead that evening where he wears a simple tweed jacket that he had seen earlier in a store window downtown…
