A Place in the Sun (1951)

  This week I got to pick for Cinema Club so I picked A Place in the Sun because it was the highest on my queue.  I didn't know a thing about it, which I thought put us all on equal footing.  Now I'm worried I'll get dragged for this choice.

George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) is a poor cousin to a very rich family, having grown up in a religious mission.  He runs into his uncle (Keefe Brasselle) by chance and is offered a job mostly out of pity.  Arriving at his uncle's swimsuit factory, he is assigned to a menial job stacking boxes.  There he meets Alice (Shelley Winters), but company policy prohibits dating between employees so they must keep their relationship secret.  George thinks he's part of the working masses, but with a connection to the company owners, Alice knows it's only a matter of time before he is pulled into upper management.  Sure enough, an invite to the Eastman house results in George meeting society darling Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), a rich and beautiful heiress.  An unplanned pregnancy ties him to Alice but he can't let go of Angela and all she represents.  So he begins to plan Alice's murder.

I really thought this was going to be more like From Here to Eternity, all melodramatic sighs and relationship drama, not a two hour Perry Mason episode (complete with Raymond Burr!) but the second Alice tearfully explains that they're in "trouble" I was like Oh No.  A 2004 study determined that 20% of pregnancy-related deaths are homicides.  That is 1 in 5.  It is the leading cause of death for pregnant women, and Black women are 4.5x more likely to be murdered than white women.  In that sense, it's interesting that this movie made in 1951 would focus on it, although of course sympathy is supposed to go to George, not Alice.  The "tragedy" of the original novel, An American Tragedy, is that George is forced to bear consequences of his murderous thoughts.  

Also, side note:  isn't it insane that the novel took 752 pages to tell the same story as a 48-minute episode of Dateline?  Wild.

Anyway, it was pretty impossible for me to take this film seriously even though Clift is very good in it.  Winters is her usual weepy self, and Taylor is pretty and vivacious.  Both leading actress roles are barely fleshed out as the characters exist only to provide motivation for Clift's character.  There's never any reason given why either of them would want to be with him, only why he would want or not want them.  It does still feel very prescient but that's honestly more depressing than anything else.  It's not streaming anywhere legally but you can rent it on Amazon Prime.