Has there ever been a better movie than A Place In The Sun?

The Godfather

Cool Hand Luke

Jaws

The Thin Man

The General

A Raisin in the Sun

That would take too long, OP.

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo

Good movie but not much replay value. It's dated too.

It's definitely in my top ten.

Was anyone shocked by the ending?

Yes. Yes there are.

OP = Sutton Stracke

R9..well if there are better movies, Kyle, name 'em. Name 'em! Name 'em!

FUNNY GIRL!

Even Stevie Wonder sang a Johnny come lately title song for it!

As a child, I wept when Montgomery Clift’s character was sent to the electric chair.

R13, were you shocked by the ending?

"The Room".

I think I was shocked by how handsome Clift was, R14.

[quote]I think I was shocked by how handsome Clift was, [R14].

When I first saw the film, at the very opening where Clift turns around to face to us, I gasped.

I Want to Live!

Monty got all the girls!

Barry Lyndon.

Did anyone know the ending before they saw it?

I didn’t know the ending. And Criterion has this as part of a summer romance collection??

The best part of it is the drowning of Shelley Winters, but one viewing is enough for that camp. The film is basically melodrama and although Monty and LIz are beautiful, you can see everything coming---even as a kid, I noticed that.

It's kind of depressing, but everyone is great in it.

I have watched the drowning more than once and never tire of it! In fact the scenes between Shelley and Monty are the best in the movie. Elizabeth was incredibly beautiful, but she was just the frothy unattainable diamond Monty was desperate to have. Shelley was his undoing. The movie was a parable. I have to say. In the scene where Elizabeth faints, I laugh outloud. How perverse!

When I see it now, the "themes" are poured on so thickly...the poor guy who gets to sit at the CEO's desk for a moment and sees a huge check, in close-up...him in his tiny boarding house room studying books like "How to get ahead" as the Eastman sign flashes outside his window.

I don't know if it's intentional or not (I *think* so, but I'm not sure)...when George visits his relatives in their home, or goes to a party there...the house is so over-decorated and tasteless.

I enjoy the movie, but it's no masterpiece. A better movie, from that era? What about Sunset Boulevard?

I'm glad An American in Paris won Best Picture over A Place in the Sun. It's a better movie.

It's not an especially great movie, but Monty and Liz were at the height of their beauty so it's worth a watch

All George Stevens movies are worth seeing (at least up to the late 1950s). He started out as a director of photography, on silent comedies. He directed Laurel and Hardy shorts. One Astaire-Rogers movie (arguably the best, Swing Time). Alice Adams, with Katharine Hepburn. Great comedies like Vivacious Lady (Ginger Rogers, James Stewart), The More the Merrier (Jean Arthur Joel McCrea), The Talk of the Town (Arthur, Cary Grant, Ronald Colman). After WWII (his story is told in Five Came Back) his movies became more dramatic, and darker.

Of course.

Shelley and Elizabeth shared a dressing trailer for A Place in the Sun and Shelley adored her. Reading Shelley's autobiography was very entertaining.

OP - Citizen Kane, Vertigo, The Godfather, Mulholland Drive ??

Sunset Blvd, Some Like It Hot, The Battle of Algiers, Forbidden Games, Goodfellas, Rosemary's Baby, All About Eve, The Heiress, Paths of Glory, The Miracle Worker . . . All more memorable and rewatchable

I love A Place in the Sun, first saw it on my 14th birthday at a repertory theater on a rainy day in a bad part of town on a double bill with From Here to Eternity. Patricia Bosworth's Clift biography had just been published in paperback, and my copy was already dog-eared and dilapidated from being read so much, along with an ancient copy of An American Tragedy that I'd lifted from my grandparents' library. This film always takes me back to that time when the world was so romantic and overstated and unattainable. There are better movies. But was there ever a more romantic scene than when Clift and Taylor meet?

I'm not sure, but I know there is no more beautiful couple than Clift and Taylor.

It's a shame Monty never found a nice girl to settle down with!

Gotta say, Suddenly, Last Summer beats it.

Dawson’s 50 Load Weekend

I find Suddenly, Last Summer shallow and sensationalistic. I like it well enough (especially Elizabeth) but what's it really about? I don't really care about those people.

Still has more rewatch value than Place in the Sun.

“Singin’ In The Rain,” OP.

R39 To you

I mean, it is nice to see both sides of Monty’s face, admittedly.

Nice to see him not walking around like a zombie, also.

Oh, the tedious troll compulses again.

Fun trivia: Shelley Winters has played characters that drowned to death in at least 2 movies: A Place in the Sun and Night of the Hunter; some would say 3 counting The Poseidon Adventure, the Belle actually died of a heart attack while almost drowning,

Did I miss any?

R45 Yeah, you missed The Night of the Hunter. Her throat was slit, with a switchblade. She didn't drown.

R44 Go scratch your itchy moles.

What does everyone think of the movie An American Tragedy released in 1931?

Unsolved Mysteries covered the real life murder story that A Place In The Sun was based on. :

R48 it's basically the same story, from the book by John Dos Passos. I've read his books. The movie Place in the Sun is based on the book, American Tragedy, which really fleshes out the story of Monty's character. I highly recommend it.

R50, I thought that Theodore Dreisser wrote the book.

Sylvia Sidney's Alice Tripp is much more sympathetic and attractive than how Shelley Winters plays her. And Frances Dee doesn't have Taylor's allure so that we're left feeling much more ambivalent about Eastman's motivations and actions.

Odd parallels between Phillips Holmes and Clift that would put both squarely in the Sad Tales from Old Hollywood thread: Rumored to be gay, itinerant childhoods on the coattails of the bohemian elite, early promise destroyed by alcohol and no longer wanted by Hollywood, liaisons with Libby Holman (who found gay men intriguing) that ended badly, scandalous drunken car accidents (Mae Clarke sued Holmes for her injuries), early deaths.

[quote]I know there is no more beautiful couple than Clift and Taylor.

You know what, r34? [italic]FUCK YOU![/italic]

Youth isn’t everything!

I wonder if George Stevens wasn't giving the finger to the HUAC committee with that lingering cross-fade of blacklisted Ann Revere.