★½ A Place in the Sun (1951)
[Gino: 1.5 sp]Gino says: 'This film, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelly Winters won 6 Oscars. Yet, I give it 1.5 stars because I found it really boring and not pleasant. I will say the look of the film was rather polished, but that didn't help me.
The story [spoiler alert] revolves around a man [Clift] who is working his way up in his wealthy uncle's business and gets a factory girl [Winters] pregnant. At the same time, the rest of his life keeps getting better, including a relationship with a well-to-do socialite in the family [Taylor]. So at some point you end up with this big tension where if he could just erase this factory girl all his dreams would come true. He sets out to do just that, but can't go through with it. An accident happens which takes care of it for him, and he is arrested and eventually [major spoiler] is executed.
I guess my problem is that (A) the guy is pretty boring so you kinda don't care what happens to him [nor is the factory worker or even the socialite like-able so you don't care about them], and (B) since he contemplates murder and really very nearly commits it, it doesn't in fact, you don't care about the "courtroom drama" part of the film. Nor am I one to cheer that he "gets what he deserves".
To be fair, this is based on a play I think called "An American Tragedy", so it is a tragedy; I am not complaining about that. But it is not subtle, and has been done better subsequently.'
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4 comments:
Gees G, I saw this years ago and remember liking it. Maybe you need to stop watching these old films. You never ever like them. Why torture yourself?!
Well, that's not strictly true: This year I recommended "Night of the Hunter", you know I like "Touch of Evil"; those are both 1950s films, and I recommended "The Apartment", though that was a bit newer. I haven't really reviewed that many oldies, actually. In any case, I still like to watch them to educate myself a little.
I also gave a recommendation to "On the Waterfront."
I didn't mean to cause a firestorm of contraversy here. It was just an observation that you seem to discount, often times very severely, films that many consider to be classics. There is nothing wrong with that. You like the films you like. But you have said on occasion that you have issues with older films. I tend to dislike films that seem to take place in barren locales so I tend to avoid them.
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