I recently watched National Velvet for the first time, which starred a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor.  Watching that film, I was surprised to see how confident she was at so young an age, and a bit disturbed by how she looked like my mental image of adult Taylor just shrunk down in size.

And, yet, I may be even more startled by the 19-year-old version in 1951’s A Place in the Sun.  She is stretched to impossibly thin for her height, yet also pleasantly filled out in the right places.  Still, I don’t know how anybody could have carnal thoughts about her, as she looks as delicate as a porcelain figurine.  There is something strong and fragile about her simultaneously.

The actual star of this movie is supposed to be Montgomery Clift, though I feel Taylor steals the show.  I’ll confess I haven’t seen many films of his, and most of my knowledge about Clift comes from The Clash song “The Right Profile”. 

Here, he plays the distant relative of a wealthy family which owns Eastman, the factory that may as well own whichever town this is.  At least nepotism isn’t exploited, as Clift is put in a very lowly position, stacking boxes as they roll off the conveyor belt.  Not only that, but the reception from the family is icy: “Do you already have a place?  I can recommend a nice little boarding house a secretary of mine used to say in.”

One of the workers filling the boxes on that line is Shelley Winters.  They start giving each other the eye but try not to become an item and defy a company policy against fraternizing.  Things get kicked up a notch when he takes the only seat available at the movies and ends up right next her.  I love the moment where she says to him, “Small world”, and the sailor on the other side of her says, “That’s what you think.”

Inevitably, she ends up with a bun in the oven around the same time Taylor and Clift start to take a serious interest in each other.  I found it interesting this film subverted my expectations, as the wealthy socialite played by Taylor turns out to be intelligent, witty and funny, while the working class Winters becomes increasingly whiny and grating.  This movie seems to be the start of Winters being stereotyped as such characters, while Taylor is different here from other roles I have seen her in.  It is especially interesting to see her amusing rapport with a traffic cop she playfully tries to speed away from.

Blackmailed by Winters into marriage, Clift decides the the only option is to kill her and try to pass off her death as a boating accident.  The setup for this was telegraphed waaay in advance, as she had innocuously told him very early on that she can’t swim–an admission that seemed curiously unmotivated at the time.  And this may seem like a horrible thing to say, but I have to admit I was kind of rooting for him to finish her off.

In that regard, it is interesting how Clift plays an anti-hero in this movie.  That is something pretty startling for a picture from 1951.  For reasons I find difficult to articulate, I found this to have a similar vibe to The Talented Mr. Ripley.  You know this guy can’t get away with it, but you can’t help but want him to.

Given the vintage of this film, it is inevitable Clift will be caught, tried and sent to the electric chair.  It felt rather pointless to even see the trial since you know the censor board back then would mandate a killer has to be punished.  What, did you really think he would be declared innocent but his comeuppance would be suffocating to death by Taylor straddling his face?

Despite rather conventional plotting, the movie has excellent photography.  Some of the shot compositions are downright painterly.  The scene where he and Winters take a boat out on the lake is a long series of crossfades, each shot easing into the next as soon as the last one has transitioned out. 

With each transition, the next shot is darker than the last.  And the cinematographer does some amazing things with very little light, such as a scene where all we can see is Winters’s eye in a sea of black.  There’s another scene where only the curve of a hip catches the light, like the thinnest crescent moon.

Random observation time!  This was based on a novel by Theodore Dreiser, which I somehow misread as Theodore Geisel and found myself very confused.  I like a line from the cop who doesn’t believe Clift and Taylor are just talking while parked at a make-out spot: “Look here, boy, they invented the house.  It’s a very good thing to talk in”.  Anne Revere, who played Taylor’s mom in National Velvet, is Clift’s mom here.  An image that will stay in mind for a long time is an amazing shot of the speedboat circling in the background while the radio on the pier in the foreground relays news that would be of great interest to the people in that boat.

I liked, but didn’t love, A Place in the Sun.  There is undeniable chemistry between the leads, but the movie repeatedly sinks into melodrama worthy of a soap opera.  I think it would be interesting to see what somebody might do with this material nowadays, without having to pull any punches.

Dir: George Stevens

Starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters

Watched on Paramount Presents blu-ray