A place in the Sun

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Movie
German title A place in the Sun
Original title A place in the sun
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1951
length 117 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director George Stevens
script Michael Wilson
Harry Brown
production George Stevens
Ivan Moffat
music Franz Waxman
camera William C. Mellor
cut William Hornbeck
occupation

A Place in the Sun (AKA: A Place in the Sun ) is a multi-award winning, American melodrama by director George Stevens in 1951 with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead roles. After An American Tragedy (1931), it is the second film adaptation of the novel ofthe same name by Theodore Dreiser and tells the story of a penniless young man who is even ready to commit a crime for social advancement.

action

George Eastman travels to New York from Chicago to work in his uncle Charles' factory. There he met the young worker Alice Tripp and began an affair with her. His uncle noticed him because of his great enthusiasm for work and offered George a better position. At an elegant dinner party, he meets the attractive wealthy Angela Vickers and falls in love with her. George is convinced that through his connection with Angela he has found his "place in the sun". When Alice informs him that she is pregnant, the plan threatens to collapse.

While George spends a short vacation at a romantic lake with Angela, events roll over. Alice learns of George's relationship with Angela and travels after him. She openly threatens to blow up the relationship and her pregnancy if he does not marry her immediately. George looks for a discussion and drives Alice out on the lake, where there is an argument. Her rowboat capsizes and Alice drowns. George manages to reach the bank and flees in a panic. Alice's disappearance calls on District Attorney Frank Marlowe. He quickly discovers the relationship between Alice and George and finds witnesses for the boat trip together. He has George arrested as a suspected murderer. It comes to trial. Angela's father hires a lawyer for George to keep his daughter's name out of the process.

Several witnesses incriminate George during the trial. Marlowe claims that George capsized the boat on purpose to get Alice out of the way. George defends himself by portraying what happened as a fatal accident.

The jury found him guilty and handed him the death penalty. As he awaits his execution, George is plagued by nightmares and guilty feelings. Only the approval of a clergyman helps George to come to terms with himself and to accept the consequences of his behavior. Shortly before his execution he is visited again by Angela, who tells him that she still loves him.

background

In the socially critical novel An American Tragedy , published in 1925, Theodore Dreiser processed the impressions he had gained as a trial observer in the case of Chester E. Gillette, who was sentenced to death in July 1906 for the murder of his pregnant lover , the factory worker Grace Brown. In the course of the trial it had been established that Gilette committed the murder in order to be free to marry a rich heiress. As early as October 1926, Patrick Kearney adapted the novel into a play of the same name, which was performed in a total of 216 performances, including with Miriam Hopkins in a leading role. In February 1931, a new production in New York brought 137 performances.

Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights in early 1930 and initially intended to hand over the direction to Sergei Eisenstein , who stayed in the USA for a few months at the invitation of Jesse Lasky . The draft of the script, which would have run for almost three hours, met with the enthusiastic approval of the author. But in the opinion of the producers, the social criticism of the original was too much in the foreground. The whole project was stopped, the script was revised several times and responsibility for the film was transferred to Josef von Sternberg . With Phillips Holmes , Sylvia Sidney and Frances Dee in the lead roles, the adaptation was an artistic and financial failure. Dreiser was so angry about the result that he tried in vain to judge the film's premiere to be prohibited. He criticized the script's many freedoms compared to the original and accused the studio of portraying the central character as a fool rather than a victim of the capitalist system with its material temptations. In the end, he was awarded $ 80,000 in damages.

The director George Stevens , who now owned the film rights to the novel, reached an agreement with Paramount about the remake of An American Tragedy in late 1948, immediately after the work on I Remember Mama was finished . The finished script changed the initial premise of the novel considerably. The romance between George and Angela is brought to the fore, while Alice's death is portrayed as an accident, and not, as in the book, as a cold-blooded planned murder. In order to increase the commercial chances of the film, the studio changed the title to " A Place in the Sun " shortly before the official release date in July 1951 in order to convey an overall positive message to the audience and to consciously move away from the socially critical model distance. The advertising campaign consequently also focused on the relationship between George and Angela. The posters and visual media focused on close-ups of a kissing scene between Clift and Taylor, while marginal mention was made of Shelley Winters as Alice and the criminal implications of the plot.

Elizabeth Taylor was under 18 when filming began in Inlet , New York, and George Stevens later freely admitted that he had not seen any of her films before then. He hired the actress because he saw in her an embodiment of the very qualities that make a man instantly fall in love with a certain woman.

Not so much a real girl, but the girl on the chocolate box, the beautiful girl in the yellow Cadillac convertible that every American boy is convinced he can marry at some point.
Not so much a real girl as the girl on the candy-box cover, the beautiful girl in the yellow Cadillac convertible that every American boy sometime or other thinks he can marry.

Filming was exhausting for Taylor, especially since Stevens had her repeat some takes very often. One scene in particular, in which she climbs out of the lake in a bathing suit, turned into an ordeal for the actress. The shoot was done in freezing temperatures, and the director kept asking Taylor to repeat it over and over. An intense friendship developed between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift during the shooting, after the actress initially had more romantic feelings for her co-star. George Stevens took advantage of the increasingly caring way Taylor treated her partner by rewriting the script in a few places and making Angela's character softer and maternal. This results in a certain ambivalence in the film relationship between George and Angela, which seems to go far beyond the purely sexual. One scene in particular makes these nuances clear: After George and Angela have kissed passionately - the shot is filmed in an enormous close-up by the director - George finds it difficult to find the right words to express his love. The young woman takes him in her arms and whispers in his ear:

Tell mama ... tell mama all.

Filming was completed at the end of 1949, but the final cut dragged on for so long that the film was not officially distributed until July 1951. Largely cut out were z. B. the scenes with Anne Revere , who shortly before had to answer to the committee for un-American activities . For director George Stevens, the film was the first part of his "America Trilogy", which he continued in 1953 with the western My great friend Shane and in 1956 with the epic Giants (also with Elizabeth Taylor).

reception

Contemporary reviews

Contemporary reviews praised the director's craftsmanship in bringing the bulky material to the screen. The lack of socially critical comments in the original was perceived as particularly positive.

AH Weiller, film critic for the New York Times , called the film a work of beauty, tenderness, strength and insight in his review of August 29, 1951 . By bringing the plot into the present day and dispensing with the template's social criticism, which was sometimes perceived as template-like, in the script, the actual core of the statement with its mix of tragedy and romanticism was neatly carved out of the gloomy and pompous template .

The film critic Emanuel Levy described the remake a few decades later as "exaggerated", the version by Josef von Sternberg had turned out much better, and the performances of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor were not convincing. The portrayal of the romance between George and Angela is a milestone in US film history as far as the portrayal of eroticism is concerned.

Levy reports on a letter in which the novelist Raymond Chandler panned the film shortly after it was released. Chandler thought the film was high-handed, it couldn't reach the audience's feelings at any moment, and the frequent close-ups of Elizabeth Taylor's naive gaze almost made him gag reflex. The idea of ​​the lower class of the life of the upper class is as ridiculous as one can imagine. Ultimately, says Chandler, the film was made by someone who never had a creative idea.

Reviews of other artists

In 2015, director Todd Haynes praised the “ cinematic implementation of the story ” of Ein Platz in der Sonne as “ beautiful ”. The film helped him develop the template for his own film Carol . In particular, the camera work is positively highlighted by Haynes. Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor are in some scenes " three-quarters turned away from the camera " or " only to be seen as silhouettes ". The viewer is thus “ trusted to add in their head what is not shown ”. These shots are contrasted with " incredibly intense close-ups " of the actors. In addition, the " white and black gradations [...] are incredibly saturated ". The “ strange combination of holding up and pulling out ” triggers the feeling of “ both observing a story and experiencing it ”.

Awards

Academy Awards (Oscars)

At the 24th Academy Awards on March 20, 1952, the film was nominated nine times and won six awards.

Golden Globe Awards

At the 9th presentation of the Golden Globe Awards , the film won the awards for "Best Film - Drama" and thus prevailed against Endstation Sehnsucht, among other things .

Further nominations were:

Other awards

A place in the sun ran at the 4th Cannes International Film Festival in the competition for the Grand Prix award , but did not win.

George Stevens and the assistant director Charles C. Coleman received the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film in 1952 for A Place in the Sun. In the same year, the screenwriters Michael Wilson and Harry Brown received a WGA Award in the category Best Drama.

In 1991, A Place in the Sun was added to the National Film Registry .

1997 A Place in the Sun was inducted into the Hall of Fame - Motion Pictures of the Producers Guild of America (PGA).

He appears twice on the American Film Institute's leaderboard :

Remakes

In 1954, CBS aired an hour-long TV version as an episode of the Lux Video Theater starring Ann Blyth , John Derek , Marilyn Erskine and Ronald Reagan .

In 2005, Woody Allen provided with his film " Match Point " a free adaptation of the material of the social climber who cheated on his wife and murdered the pregnant lover for the sake of his social status - with the crucial difference that at the end of "Match Point "the guilt of the murderer is not recognized, so that he gets away with it.

media

DVD release

  • A place in the sun . Paramount Pictures 2003 (also contains the documentary George Stevens and His Place in the Sun )

Soundtrack

  • Franz Waxman : A Place in the Sun - A Symphonic Scenario , on which: Sayonara - Orchestral Suites . BMG / RCA 1995, sound carrier no. 09026-62657-2 - Digital new recording by the Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin under the direction of Elmer Bernstein
  • Franz Waxman : A Place In the Sun - Suite , on the other: Sunset Boulevard. The Classic Film Scores of Franz Waxman . BMG / RCA Victor, undated, sound carrier no. GD80708 - New recording (1974) by the National Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Charles Gerhardt

literature

  • Theodore Dreiser : An American Tragedy. Novel (Original title: An American Tragedy ). German by Marianne Schön. 101 - 118 thousand. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1978, 643 pages, ISBN 3-499-14166-3

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brenda Maddox: Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? A Myth of Our Time , Evans, 1977, ISBN 0-87131-243-3 , p. 77
  2. ↑ http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=2&res=EE05E7DF173CE473BC4151DFBE66838A649EDE
  3. ^ Film review by Emanuel Levy , English, accessed December 23, 2009
  4. ↑ George Stevens' biography of film critic Emanuel Levy , accessed December 23, 2009
  5. ↑ Spiegel.de: 'Carol' director Haynes: 'When you are in love, you always feel guilty'. Retrieved April 10, 2016 .
  6. ^ A place in the sun in the competition in Cannes 1951 , English, accessed on December 23, 2009
  7. ↑ DGA Award winner of the fifties (directing feature film) , English, accessed on December 23, 2009
  8. ^ WGA Award winner 1949 - 1995 ( Memento from October 1, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), English, accessed on December 23, 2009
  9. ↑ IMDb: Awards , English, accessed on December 23, 2009

Web links