A Place In The Sun 1951 ((NEW)) Download

A Place in the Sun (1951) is a powerful social drama and romance from director/producer George Stevens. The black and white film plays on the audience's emotions, by involving and drawing them into complicity with the tragic resolution. Methodically, the film is stylistically dark, almost with film-noirish qualities, yet it has some of the most romantic and passionate sequences ever filmed - between the radiant debutante, 18 year-old Elizabeth Taylor (in her first adult role) and 29 year-old Montgomery Clift, who stars as a laboring wage slave.

a place in the sun 1951 download

The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, and won six - Best Director (the first Oscar for Stevens), Best Screenplay (Michael Wilson and Harry Brown), Best B/W Cinematography (William Mellor), Best Dramatic Score, Best Film Editing, and Best B/W Costume Design (Edith Head). Its other three nominations were for Best Picture (it lost to An American in Paris (1951)), Best Actor (Montgomery Clift) and Best Actress (Shelley Winters).

Mr. Eastman: I ran into him in Chicago. Marsha: Is he going to lead us in a prayer? Mr. Eastman: Oh, he's not at all like Asa or his wife. He's very quiet, pleasant. Not much education but ambitious. He looks amazingly like Earl. Earl: What's he do? Mr. Eastman: He was the bellhop in my hotel. Earl: Oh fine, I always wanted to look like a bellhop. Mrs. Eastman: But Charles, why do you have to bring him on here? Mr. Eastman: There's always a place at the plant for a boy like that. Mrs. Eastman: But what are we going to do about him socially? Earl: That's easy. We can all leave town. Mr. Eastman (assuring): Well, you people don't have to take him up socially. He just wants to work and get ahead - that's all.

The next day, George is led on a tour around the factory by Earl Eastman and warned about keeping the Eastman name unsullied. He is also expressly commanded to obey the company's 'no fraternization' rule - to dissociate sexual relations from the workplace - and to separate the laboring class from the executive/managerial top of the hierarchy:

One night, caught necking by the police in an open convertible in a deserted woodsy area, they return in the rain to her place. Although Alice informs him that visitors are not allowed in by Mrs. Roberts (Mary Kent) - the landlady, they begin dancing inside to music, emanating from an illuminated radio sitting on the open window sill. The camera slowly freezes on the radio and dissolves to an early morning rooster's crowing with the same shot of the window as George departs - the radio plays static. [The shot of the changing window, seen both at night and the next morning, was deliberately filmed to avoid the obvious - and the censors. Off-screen, George spent the night and had sex with her, contravening the laws of society and the factory - with disastrous consequences that ultimately lead to his downfall.] A loud factory whistle blows to signal the start of a new day.

During an inspection that morning, Charles notices his nephew in the packaging assembly line area, and decides: "This is no place for the boy...I don't think it would hurt to give that boy another position." Charles promises to give George more responsibility with a promotion: "I'm going to move you up...You've earned it." George is invited to a party at the Eastman mansion on the 15th of the next month. Rootless and drifting, George begins to feel like somebody after finding some direction in his life. But he has been brought into a lifestyle and social status that he could not have had without his uncle's assistance. Alice overhears the invitation, and comments that she is planning a party for George that same evening - the date of his birthday.

Ending Badly William A. O'Rourke I've been telling students for many years that Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) is one of the best American novels, up until the time Clyde is caught, then it goes into the toilet, more or less. A great book than goes down hill at the end. Recently, I looked at it again, to see if what I have thought for so long is true. AAT is divided into three books; book three is essentially a police procedural, and here Dreiser makes use of what was historic material, since a similar killing had taken place, along with a circus-like trial, a fixture of the era, some twenty years earlier, one that had "inspired" the book. So, part of the problem is that there's a lot of telling at the end, unlike the showing that had been going on earlier, such as the "murder" scene on the lake. In that way, the first two thirds of AAT is more a product of Dreiser's imagination, until reality takes over, since the actual murderer did not share Clyde's fictional background. The character of Clyde had been pulled out of Dreiser's own murky inner life. Dreiser has never been accused of being a stylist, so a difference in language is not the question; it is more a matter of Dreiser letting the public record interfere with his re-imagining. In any case, in the 1951 movie, A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens, Stevens spends hardly any time on the trial or Clyde's incarceration. There is an old Hollywood saw: "You take good books and make bad movies, and you take bad books and make good movies." A Place in the Sun is a wonderful movie, but it pushes only one part of Dreiser's novel. Stevens has Elizabeth Taylor come visit Clyde on death row, whereas, in the novel, no such meeting with Sondra, the rich girl, takes place, and when Clyde is marched off to the death chamber, Elizabeth Taylor's face is superimposed behind Montgomery Clift, and Clift's expression can only be read to mean that it is worth being executed in order to have dated Elizabeth Taylor, not the message that Dreiser wanted to convey. ATT, though, is a great novel, great enough to survive a bad ending in either medium.

The circa 1900 French crystal wall sconces and chandelier over the staircase originally hung in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. They were purchased for the Mansion by First Lady Alice Persons in 1951.

The three-piece girandole set on the mantel appears in photographs from Governor Persons 1951 inaugural reception at the mansion. The marble around the fireplace was part of the 1950 renovation and is from Sylacauga.

The Drawing Room is used as a family room or den area in the home. The 19th century gilt framed pair of pier mirrors which rest on low marble-top tables were also purchased in the estate sale in 1916. The fireplace equipment, wall sconces and ceiling fixtures are also original to the house. The over mantel mirror matches the mirror in the Parlor. The ebony Steinway grand piano was donated in 1983.