A Place in the Sun (1951)

First, some housekeeping. I've stepped away from this blog for a while due to getting my wisdom teeth pulled outta my head. It's pretty difficult to maintain motivation when you're in either in pain or on high dose pain killers. Regardless I've pretty much recovered and am getting back into this thing. So the movie reopening this blog is 1951's A Place in the Sun.

A Place in the Sun is very much a classical Hollywood romance. An attractive man juggling two attractive women with the implicit understanding he must choose. All in all not exactly a bad setup, but this sort of thing generally works best when you actually care about the people involved. Unfortunately A Place in the Sun makes this pretty difficult. Our protagonist, George Eastman, is a typical down on his luck guy from a poor family looking for a job. Lucky for him he's got a rich uncle (and a poor family? That's a bit weird) who gives him a job, and promotes him a few times just because. At this job he meets and falls in love with Alice Tripp, a poor young woman who is working to support herself, but at the invitation of his rich uncle George goes to a party where he meets the socialite Angela Vickers. George falls for Angela too. It is already difficult for me to sympathize with two legs of this triangle as George and Angela don't seem to have actually worked for what they have; getting everything from rich relatives. This lack of sympathy is compounded in George's case as he gets Alice pregnant and instead of being there to financially and emotionally support her he spends more time with Angela under the pretense of procuring advancement within his workplace from his uncle. Alice isn't innocent either as she attempts to emotionally manipulate George into marrying her by threatening suicide. As much as I have little sympathy for Angela she really does seem the most innocent in all this though she exists more as a symbol than an actual character.

In fact there is an interesting network of symbols  built from the love triangle of A Place in the Sun. Alice is a symbol of the classic "American dream" of building one's self up from nothing. Alice represents a simple life of the working class ideal. She's a little rough and unkempt but a trusting, kind and loyal individual (barring the manipulative threat of suicide anyway). Angela is the "old money" aristocratic life. She's very refined and done up; never a hair out of place. Likewise she is also depicted as rather vapid, impulsive and carefree; completely divorced and alienated from the standard working life. And we have George caught in the middle of these two lives. Who George ends up with and under what circumstances can't help but pass some kind of judgement on which of these two lifestyles is better or more virtuous. It is especially interesting then, that, about 2/3rds of the way through the film, Alice and George fall off a rowboat into a lake, but only George emerges. While the film suggests Alice's death was an accident George took her out on the lake in the first place with intent to murder her so it hardly matters to the overall plot (or my own opinion of the character) whether it is an accident or not; especially since the police treat the case as a murder. George is put on trial and found guilty, a verdict that the movie goes out of it's way to support by confirming that George does indeed love Angela. To me, this positions the lifestyle Angela represents as one that is seductive and dangerous as George's pursuit of it leads to his demise. However, there is another interesting wrinkle here that complicates that message: Angela's decadent old money lifestyle is safe for her and her family. A Place in the Sun doesn't criticize the socio-economic hierarchy Angela represents so much as enforces it's rigidity. As a member of the lower class, George is unfit to pursue advancement to upper-class life and any attempt to do so is fated to destroy him. If he had stayed with Alice on the other hand he could have lived a happy simple life. I hope I don't need to explain why this messaging, whether intentional or not, pisses me off.

So that was A Place in the Sun. do all classic Hollywood romances have to exclusively feature horrible people? Can't we have a genuinely caring and loving relationship for once? Please? Next time's Some Like it Hot is a comedy so maybe I'll get lucky with this one.