Streaming A Place in the Sun Online
Mardi, août 24th, 2010 |
Streaming A Place in the Sun Online.
Movie Title: A Place in the Sun A Place in the Sun is available for streaming or downloading. |
I haven’t read Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” on which this 1951 film is based, but I can see how the word “tragedy” is used in its classic sense - that of a character who meets disaster because of a tragic flaw. So even though purists might see “A Place in the Sun” as a romanticized version of Dreiser’s tale, I certainly found it serious enough for me.
Directed by George Stevens, the film opens with Montgomery Cliff thumbing a ride. He’s going to the town where his rich uncle owns a mill. He’s awkward among his affluent relatives and happy to get a job, any job. And so even though he has to start at the bottom, packing bathing suits into boxes, he’s aware of his future opportunities. Shelly Winters is cast as a factory girl he starts romancing. But then, his fortunes suddenly turn, he’s invited to more and more upscale social events, and he falls in love with Elizabeth Taylor. The plot thickens as Shelly Winters announces her pregnancy and Montgomery Cliff finds himself trapped. The consequences are horrific as we watch his dreams all crash down around him.
I was captured by the story right from the beginning in a screenplay that kept the tension mounting and never let up. I identified with Montgomery cliff and found myself sympathic to his plight. He plays a complex character and has a lot of moral choices to make. He sweats, he shakes, he cringes, his eyes fill with tears. Certainly, he was one of the finest actors of his time and his performance is magnificent. Elizabeth Taylor was just 17 years old then and sure was a beauty. As she explains in an interview as part of the special features on the DVD, this was her first serious role. “Before that,” she says jokingly, “all my leading men were either dogs or horses.” She also tells us that Montgomery Cliff, with whom she maintained a long friendship with until his death at the age of 45, was her first movie kiss. “I had only just had my first ‘real’ off-screen kiss just two weeks before,” she says. Shelly Winters talks about her role too. She wanted the role of the factory girl badly. However, at the time, she was typecast as a glamour queen. And so she dressed in an extremely plain way when she went for her screen test. She sat demurely in the office and George Stevens didn’t even recognize her.
I loved this film. It had everything. Romance. High drama. Great acting. Moral choices. And I also loved the “behind the scenes” special feature that was on the DVD. “A Place in the Sun” might have been made more than 50 years ago, but the theme is universal and as valid today as the day it was written. I therefore give it my highest recommendation. It’s simply wonderful.
Theodore Drieser was among America’s earliest realistic authors, and his massive 1925 AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, loosely based on real events, was a best-selling shocker filled with premarital sex, abortion issues, and social failures. The novel was filmed in 1931–and Drieser was so outraged that he successfully sued Paramount to force reshoots and a new edit. The result did not please Drieser, Paramount, or the movie-going public, and when censorship began to rear its head both the novel and movie were quietly shelved.
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By the late 1940s, however, censorship began to relax, and A PLACE IN THE SUN was among the first films to take advantage of the fact. Unlike the 1931 film, producers did not attempt to film the whole of the novel; they instead focused on the second half. The result was singularly powerful.
George Eastman (Montgomery Cliff) is the poor relation of a wealthy family–and when seeks aid from them he is given a menial job in the factory, where he becomes intimate with factory worker Alice (Shelly Winters.) But when George is suddenly promoted he begins to enter the world of his dreams–and it includes glamorous socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor.) And now only the commonplace and unexpectedly pregnant Alice stands between him and all that he has ever desired.
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The script veers toward excess more than once, but director George Stevens and his extraordinary cast carry the film to unexpectedly powerful effect. Previously known as a sex-bomb, Shelly Winters fought hard for the role of Alice and with it gives the first in the series of truly brilliant performances for which she would become so well known. Elizabeth Taylor was one of the leading beauties of the screen, and her acting chops had been in clear evidence for some time before A PLACE IN THE SUN went before the cameras, but it here that she first truly showed what she could do with serious drama; she is flawless. And then there is Montgomery Cliff.
Although Marlon Brando and James Dean made “Method Acting” a household term, Cliff was very much of the same school, and he broke new ground in film several years before either Brando or Dean made the screen. And A PLACE IN THE SUN shows Cliff at his finest, offering a truly amazing, powerful performance as the highly-driven but morally weak George Eastman, stumbling over ever trip-wire society can place in his path. It is a truly devastating performance, gut-wrenchingly painful in honesty, offered without a trace of artifice in evidence.
As the film progresses the moral issues evolve in several very unexpected ways, most particularly as they reference degrees of guilt, premeditation, and at what point intent becomes the same as fact. In the process A PLACE IN THE SUN develops a highly disconcerting “there but for the grace of God go I” quality. I think this particularly true for those among us who can look back upon what might best be called “youthful indiscretions;” we are left to wonder what choices we might have faced if things had been only very slightly different in our lives.
The DVD print is not remastered, but it is pristine, and it comes with a slight but interesting bonus package that includes interviews with the surviving stars. Strongly recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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