Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the drama "A Place in the Sun," released by Paramount Pictures in 1951.

The film was based on Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel "An American Tragedy," with a screenplay by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown.

"A Place in the Sun" was directed by George Stevens and stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters, with support from Anne Revere, Kief Bricell, Fred Clark, and Raymond Burr.

[light music] George Eastman, a young man raised by devout parents who eked out a meager living as street missionaries, has hitchhiked his way from Chicago to upstate New York.

After a chance meeting, his wealthy uncle, Charles Eastman, has offered George a job at his swimwear factory.

When George presents himself at his uncle's lavish home, the family and their well-to-do friends pay him little attention.

But George is smitten by Angela Vickers, the beautiful daughter of another wealthy local businessman.

The next day, George's cousin, Earl, puts him in a menial job at the swimsuit factory, where women make up most of the workforce.

Earl impresses upon George the company's strict policy against romantic relationships between coworkers.

Despite this warning, George becomes friendly with Alice Tripp, a young woman who works with him, and they begin dating on the quiet.

Because George is genial and a hard worker, his uncle, Charles, takes an interest in him and begins to include George in his family's social life.

As a result, George repeatedly encounters Angela Vickers.

He becomes more and more infatuated with her, as well as with the wealthy lifestyle she represents.

George's heady entanglement with Angela leads him to neglect Alice, who becomes increasingly distraught at his behavior.

Finally, George attempts to break off his relationship with Alice, but she refuses.

She tells George she is pregnant with his child and angrily demands that he marry her.

[light music] "A Place in the Sun" was the second motion picture adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's massive 1925 novel, "An American Tragedy."

The book is considered a classic example of naturalism, a form of literary realism that emphasizes the exterior social, economic, environmental, and hereditary factors that determine the character's behavior.

A naturalistic writer includes highly detailed depictions of scenes and events, presenting them in an objective, observational way, much like a scientist describing animal behavior in the wild.

This literary style is clearly akin to dramatic presentation, and within less than a year of its publication, a stage version of "An American Tragedy" by Patrick Kearney had a short run on Broadway.

The play was later used as a secondary source for both motion picture adaptations of the novel.

The first, titled "An American Tragedy," was released by Paramount Pictures in 1931.

Directed by Joseph von Sternberg, it starred Philip Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, and Frances D. Dreiser, who reviewed the screenplay beforehand, said it, it outraged the book because Sternberg refocused the plot to depict what Sternberg called the sexual hypocrisy of the petty bourgeois social class.

The movie provoked a mixed critical reaction.

A review in the New York Times called the film emphatically stirring, while the New York Daily News characterized it as intensely dramatic, moving, superbly acted.

But the naysayers complained the film was less intense than Dreiser's novel, blaming, as one put it, Sternberg's failure to understand Dreiser's larger dramatic purpose.

In the event, the film proved popular in Europe, but, for the most part, failed with American audiences.

As a result, when George Stevens first proposed a remake of "An American Tragedy" in 1948, Paramount Pictures executives were wary.

They were additionally concerned that the story would be perceived as an un-American attack on capitalism at a time when the United States was newly engaged in a cold war with the Soviet Union.

In response, Stevens updated the story from its original setting of the 20s, renamed all its characters, and changed the title to minimize the association with the novel and the earlier film version.

The screenplay now concentrated on the second of the novel's three parts, focusing primarily on the romance between the hero, renamed George Eastman, and the beautiful young heiress.

Theodore Dreiser based "An American Tragedy" on an actual criminal case, the 1906 murder of 20-year-old Grace Brown.

She worked in a skirt factory in Cortland, New York, and became pregnant by Chester Gillette, a nephew of the factory's owner.

Grace drowned while boating on Big Moose Lake with Gillette, who was subsequently convicted of her murder and executed.

Dreiser included many details of the crime, trial and execution in his novel.

Even with all the changes made for the postwar movie, the story remained rooted in a real, early 20th century crime.

Montgomery Clift was 29 when "A Place in the Sun" was shot in 1949, while Elizabeth Taylor was only 17.

Director George Stevens cast Taylor without having seen any of her previous films.

He envisioned her character, Angela Vickers, he said as "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."

Despite her experience in movies, Taylor was intimidated by Clift.

She later recalled, "Monty was the New York stage actor and I felt very much the inadequate teenage Hollywood sort of puppet that had just worn pretty clothes and hadn't really acted except with horses and dogs."

But Clift was kind and supportive during the filming, and the two went on to become lifelong friends.

Stevens initially refused to audition Shelley Winters for the role of factory girl Alice Tripp because he knew her primarily from the blonde sex pot role she played in crime dramas, but Stevens did agree to meet her in the lobby of the Hollywood Athletic Club.

"I rushed back to my apartment," Winters later wrote, "Dyed my hair Brown, took the polish off my nails, combed my hair flat, and washed my face clean of makeup."

Wearing dowdy clothes borrowed from her sister, Winters went to the club and was unrecognized by Stevens until he was about to leave.

He asked, "Shelley, if I test you for this role and you get it, will you let me photograph you like this?"

She agreed and later said the role changed her life.

In "A Place in the Sun," director Stevens made frequent use of editing techniques more common in silent films.

The many slow dissolves prompt the audience to retain images from one scene while they watch the next.

Stevens also often used double exposures to convey a character's thoughts.

In addition, as noted in a review in "Time Magazine," Stevens makes imaginative use of his soundtrack, the cry of a loon, the distant whine of sirens, the barking of dogs become recurring motifs bound up with the action.

Steven's habit of shooting the same scene again and again, put "A Place in the Sun" over budget with a final cost of $2.3 million and over 400,000 feet of film.

Stevens and editor William Hornbeck, who won an Oscar for his efforts, worked for over a year to assemble the final cut.

But a 1950 release would've put "A Place in the Sun" into competition with another major Paramount production, Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," so the studio postponed the release of Steven's film until the following year.

"A Place in the Sun" opened in 1951 to a generally enthusiastic critical response, especially for the performances by Clift, Taylor and Winters.

A review in the "New York Herald Tribune" said, "George Stevens directed it with workman-like powerful restraint and without tricks or sociological harangue.

He's drawn excellent performances from Montgomery Clift, who was thoroughly believable as the young man, Elizabeth Taylor, who was remarkably well cast as the daughter of a wealthy social clan, and Shelley Winters, who was particularly moving in the role of the unwanted sweetheart."

The film was a hit also with audiences, earning $7 million in its initial release and winning six Academy Awards, most notably for best screenplay.

There has since been a critical reappraisal of "A Place in the Sun."

Pauline Kael, film critic for "The New Yorker" wrote in her 1982 book, "5001 Nights at the Movies," "Perhaps because Stevens methods here are studied, slow and cumulative, the work was acclaimed as realistic.

Though it's full of murky psychological overtones, darkening landscapes, the film is mannered enough for a gothic murder mystery.

While it's sleek capitalists and oppressed workers seem to come out of a Depression cartoon, the industrial town is an arrangement of symbols of wealth, glamour and power, versus symbols of poor, drab helplessness."

But whatever one's reservations about this famous film, it is impressive.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.