A Place in the Sun (1951)

Directed by George Stevens

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What happens when you are born into one world, but you want desperately to enter another? My cousins in Italy never knew that strife, because everybody shared the same world, and that was the same with us in America, at least where I lived. The richest men in our town were the owner of the biggest grocery store, the owner of the oldest pharmacy, and the funeral director. I went to school with their children. We heard Mass at the same church. I played ball with the boys, one of whom, one of the sons of the funeral director who had taken over the father’s business, came to our home on the evening when my father died. I knew that there were social classes, somewhere, as you might know that there were hunters in the outback of Australia who brought their prey down by boomerangs, or that some people in England whose distant ancestors were good at marauding lived in big manor houses. Only when I went to college did I meet anyone who lived rich — who had gone to a boarding school, for example, or who summered in Bermuda.

Now, it is one essentially American story, to rise up by your energy and your brains to move from the working class to the middle class, or from the middle class to the elites. I don’t think it is the American story, but I have to confess that the possibility is a great feature of the imaginative world an American dwells in. And that’s what led Theodore Dreiser to write his sprawling novel of social climbing, An American Tragedy, which the screen writers Harry Brown and Michael Wilson, and the director George Stevens (one of our favorites at Word and Song (see the wonderful I Remember Mama) managed to turn into a tightly focused film, A Place in the Sun, our Film of the Week.

Our Word of the Week was sunshine, and when I was hunting down various English phrases having to do with that, I came upon “a place in the sun,” the English for something Pascal said in one of his Pensees:

“Mine, thine: ‘This dog is mine,’ said those poor children. ‘That there is my place in the sun.’ There you have the onset and the image of usurpation all the world over.”

In our film, the hero and villain, young George Eastman (Montgomery Clift), wants to get free of the straitened circumstances in which he has lived all his life. He’s got a rich uncle, an industrialist, and so he finds his way into the man’s factory, hoping that just working there, just getting his foot in the door, will lead to better things. In his terrible loneliness, he drifts into a “relationship,” neither moral nor responsible, with a clingy young woman, Alice, who loves him and who is afraid that she will lose him. Alice is played brilliantly by Shelley Winters, at her unpleasantly vulnerable best. But in a happy turn of fortune for George, his family take an interest in him, and before long has fallen in love with a young socialite, Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor, still girlish), whom he has met at one of his uncle’s social gatherings.

Thus we have a man torn between two worlds, fitting in neither one of them, and when Alice finds out about Angela, she plays her trump card: she is going to have a child. One word from her would ruin all his worldly hopes. So George takes Alice out on the lake, knowing that she cannot swim. Stevens and the screen writers leave matters unclear. It seems as if George has premeditated it all: he rents the rowboat under a false name, and his behavior before and after the incident at the lake is obviously suspicious. What incident at the lake? I will not reveal more here than is necessary — and besides, the “what” is ambiguous. Let us just say that two go out, but only one returns, and George is accused of murder in the first degree, a capital crime.

From the films he directed, I’m guessing that George Stevens was a deeply religious man; only faith, I think, could bring the tragedy-ridden couple out of their sadness and their disappointment in one another, in his Penny Serenade; and in this film, we are not permitted to forget that a man may be morally guilty of a crime he may not have committed in fact, nor that punishment is sometimes the potent medicine whereby God may heal an embittered soul. A Place in the Sun isn’t an easy film to watch and we don’t recommend it for children. For sheer fun, you might go to another one of Stevens’ films, the delightful romantic comedy The More the Merrier, featuring three of our favorites (Joel McCrea, Jean Arthur, and Charles Coburn). But sometimes the hard look at your country or your soul is what you need. A Place in the Sun will deliver.

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