Posted by Valerie DI first saw ‘A Place in the Sun’ several months ago at one of film noir’s own places in the sun, the Palm Springs Film Noir Festival. I was much taken with the film but mostly sat out the after-screening ‘noir/ not-noir’ debate that flared up in the group I was with.
But having seen the movie again, I’m convinced that it’s more than just the dated romantic melodrama that a few argued it to be. I would say that in its dark depiction of young lives tragically disrupted, it’s more than a little “noir-stained”. It’s hard to imagine that fate could lay its hand upon a protagonist more heavily than it does in this movie.
Montgomery Clift plays George, a young man from a working-class family with an evangelical upbringing who’s given a chance to get ahead via a wealthy family connection.
From the moment we see George hitching a ride to get to this new life, we know that he’s not going to have an easy time of it and predictably his arrival at the Eastman plant is less than auspicious.
George is clearly ambitious and covets the American Dream. Nevertheless, even though he’s attractive and personable and shares the name, he’s not readily accepted by the Eastman family and their circle. Nor is he able to make friends with his co-workers since his uncle has forbidden social contact between family and employees.
However, he becomes infatuated with one of the smart set, Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), who either chooses to ignore him or just doesn’t see him. Disappointed and disillusioned, he falls into a relationship with Alice, a factory girl, as lonely as he is. Played by Shelley Winters, she’s a plain but friendly young woman who clearly relishes the attention.
George briefly seems content with it all. Although he’s uneasy about flouting his uncle’s rules, he feels he’s not doing so badly – he has a steady job, some money in his jeans, a room, a car, a girl, perhaps even a future. It’s a far cry from living at his mother’s mission, finishing his high school at home and working as a bellhop.
But with painful and ultimately deadly timing, fate lays down its hand and, at the very moment that George and Alice’s relationship becomes intimate, George’s uncle promotes him and invites him – now as one of them - to the Eastman home.
He’s introduced formally to Angela who now both sees him and recognizes him as an Eastman. She flirts shamelessly with him and the physical attraction between these two impossibly beautiful young people is immediate and intense. They are completely infatuated with one another and, truly, we are witness to one of the most luminously romantic and passionate liaisons ever.
That said, the dramatic and whirling close-ups used around the pair in these scenes convey an ominous sense of claustrophobia, even paranoia. We get the feeling that, appearances to the contrary, this is not a story that’s going to end well.
It doesn’t take long for things to start to unravel. Alice announces to George that she’s pregnant and although at first he insists that he’ll marry her, he begins to retreat from her and increasingly to lie to her as he’s drawn still further into the Eastman circle. His relationship with Angela and his place in the sun, now tantalizingly close enough to be his, are all he can think about.
Alice, angry at being neglected, confronts George. She threatens to tell all and undo his idyllic romance with Angela. He is distraught. His relationship with Alice has seemingly become the only barrier to the fulfilment of his dream. He feels that the fates are conspiring to send his life spiralling out of control.
But what George thinks of as “the fates” could be his own moral frailty – the decisions he’s taken and choices he’s made. He may feel that the fates are conspiring against him but it’s his own actions and his inability to deal with the consequences that have put him in this predicament.
Inadvertently, Angela provides him with a solution to his problem. She makes innocent mention of a drowning that’s happened at ‘the lake’ and George appears to be listening. In that moment, Angela becomes a virtual femme fatale, causing George to stumble into a classic dead-end street where murder looks like the only way out.
***Spoilers***
George moves ahead with a plan to kill Alice, but it’s hastily conceived and it immediately becomes apparent that he is ill-equipped to commit such a crime. Right from the outset, he leaves a trail of clues a mile wide.
He takes Alice rowing on the lake but what happens is not what he’d planned. At the critical moment, he’s unable to move to kill her. For a split second, tragedy is averted. However, Alice accidentally stumbles in the boat and falls into the water. Panic-stricken, unable to swim, she is sure to drown. George has a chance to save her (and himself ) but is unable or unwilling to do so and she dies – just as he had hoped she would.
George’s dilemma deepens. He could report the accident and face up to the consequences. But if he did report it, would anyone believe him? He had set out with the intention of killing Alice and given his premeditation, his innocence would be hard, if not impossible, for him to show.
The line between guilt and innocence is blurred at best. We know Alice had told George that she was afraid of water and that she couldn’t swim. We see his reaction to Angela’s story of the drowning at her lake. We watch him listen to the news report on weekend accidents with aroused interest. We listen to him lie to Alice with greater frequency and ease. We hear his heart beat with excitement and fear as a plan takes form. And, in the end, Alice dies because he makes no attempt to save her. Not only is his innocence hard to argue, his claim to it is hard to defend.
With his religious upbringing, George knows that guilty thoughts count as much as guilty deeds. There is no way out – he is doomed and he knows it. With scarcely a word in his own defence, he succumbs to the inevitable - capture, trial, condemnation. Unwilling to act to save his intended victim’s life, he will not now act to save his own.
His loss of moral certainty, his vision of himself as the victim (rather than Alice or even Angela), and his inability to see the inevitable and tragic consequences of his actions place him at the centre of the noir universe.
Visually, ‘A Place in the Sun’ cleaves strongly to noir, with sets and set-ups that are dark and claustrophobic, multiple off-angle camera shots, high-contrast lighting – all of which contribute to the film’s overwhelming sense of despair.
In one striking scene, George is on the first day of his new job, the morning after Alice has told him she’s pregnant. Stevens frames his interiors to suggest George trapped in a cage – an indication of his state of mind and a foreshadowing of the prison cell waiting.
The film’s design and costuming are central to its noirness. Angela is dressed either in white or in black depending on whether she’s seen as part of George’s place in the sun or conversely as the catalyst for Alice’s death. George is dressed in light tweeds on his first visit to the Eastman family and is both dwarfed by the chair in which he is sitting and rendered invisible by the pillars and grandeur of the home. However, as he is accepted into that social circle, his clothing becomes darker and he becomes more dominant
in the scene.
Director George Stevens also subverts our appreciation of exteriors of great natural beauty through ominous foreshadowing of George’s intent. Overall, Stevens brings a craft to the film equal to the movie’s powerful narrative.
‘A Place in the Sun’ is based on Theodore Dreiser’s epic novel, ‘An American Tragedy’, which runs to over a 1,000 pages. Stevens replaces the sweep and detail of the novel with an intensity and focus that charts the incremental progression of George from an innocently ambitious young man to a confused, guilt-ridden wretch condemned for murder.
As George is led to his execution, his fellow inmates express the hope that he’s headed for a better world than the one he has known. Ironically, he was just beginning to know how good his world could have been. A place in the sun could have been his if he hadn’t been so blinded by the desire for it that he was prepared to do anything to get it.
Sure looks like noir to me.
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