Tag: tragedy

A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: George Stevens
CAST: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, Raymond Burr
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 82% Fresh

PLOT: A struggling young man gets a job working for his rich uncle and ends up falling in love with two women, one rich and one poor.


I first saw A Place in the Sun many moons ago at a friend’s house.  I remember enjoying it but thinking it was too soapy for my taste.  Years went by.  I finally got around to watching Woody Allen’s Match Point and was stunned at how much Allen’s film borrowed from George Stevens’ celebrated melodrama.  Having just re-watched A Place in the Sun, my opinion of it has warmed considerably, without diminishing my admiration for Match Point, which remains one of my favorite films of all time.

A Place in the Sun tells the story of young George Eastman, played by Montgomery Clift at or near the height of his powers.  He’s a bit of a layabout who wrangles a job at his rich uncle’s swimsuit factory.  When George meets his rich relatives, I was reminded of a George Gobel quip: “Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?”  That’s George Eastman to a T, a ne’er-do-well in a sea of the well-to-do.

Against company policy, George falls in love (or at least in lust) with a rather plain girl, Alice, played by Shelley Winters in a de-glamorized role that went completely against type at that point in her career, winning her a Best Actress nomination.  Alice and George flirt and hold hands and occasionally neck (mildly scandalous for a 1951 film), but George can’t help but stare at another girl who pops up occasionally: Angela Vickers.  Angela is played by a ravishing Elizabeth Taylor, who was only 17 at the time of filming and empirically one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, if not the world.  It’s not too hard to imagine any man, let alone poor George Eastman, falling in love with her instantly.

But George is still connected to Alice, especially because he’s already slept with her.  When George learns Alice is pregnant, he despairs because he had been planning to end things with Alice to pursue Angela.  Alice even visits a doctor who might possibly provide an abortion.  Of course, this being 1951, “abortion” is never mentioned out loud, nor is the word “pregnant.”  But Alice’s visit to the doctor is handled with incredible intelligence and brilliant screenwriting that manages to say everything it needs to say without ever uttering those forbidden words.

The rest of the film examines what George may or may not be willing to do for the sake of his love for Angela, who loves him back, it turns out…but she doesn’t know about Alice.  Since this is based on a then-famous novel called An American Tragedy (by Theodore Dreiser), it may not be too hard to divine what is in store for George before the final credits roll, but getting there is the fun part.  By casting heartthrobs as the hero/anti-hero and the rich girl he loves, the film cleverly gets us to root for them a little bit, even when George is considering murder.

While Elizabeth Taylor dominates every scene she’s in just by standing there, the Academy made sure Shelley Winters was recognized for her incredibly difficult performance as Alice.  There are some movies where, if a character is an emotional yo-yo, it can be frustrating.  With Alice, Winters never crossed a line into unlikability, even when she calls George at a fancy dinner party demanding he marry her tomorrow, “or else.”  It’s clear she has no options left to her if she wants to have any semblance of a life in polite society (by 1950s standards, anyway).  I felt bad for her.  But I also felt bad for George – to a degree – when he demonstrates how sincerely he has fallen head over heels for Angela.  Not just because she’s stunningly beautiful, but also because she really seems to have fallen for him, too.

Lately, my movie-watching itinerary of classic films has involved a fair share of outstanding melodramas (Leave Her to Heaven, 1945; The Heiress, 1949; Dodsworth, 1936).  A Place in the Sun fits right into that mold.  It doesn’t quite achieve the perfection of The Heiress, but it is a fantastic example of its genre, good enough for Woody Allen to “reimagine” its basic story for Match Point, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re into that kind of thing.

IPHIGENIA (Greece, 1977)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Michael Cacoyannis
CAST: Irene Papas, Kostas Kozakos, Tatiana Papamoschou
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: [Not scored]

PLOT: In ancient Greece, King Agamemnon, in order to appease the gods, is told he must sacrifice his favorite daughter, Iphigenia, before his troops can march to war.


To my mental library of favorite closing shots in cinema, I must now add the final image of the engrossing Greek film Iphigenia.  I won’t spoil it, but the hatred in the eyes, the set expression of the face, spell out exactly what will follow in the years to come without saying a word.  It’s cinematic, yes, but it’s also theatrical, expressing oceans of passion (good or bad) with a stare instead of a monologue.

Director Michael Cacoyannis’ filmed adaptation of an ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides (Iphigenia in Aulis) does not immediately seem like the kind of film I would cotton to.  I’ve never read any of the ancient Greek plays, nor have I ever read the Iliad or the Odyssey, though I am familiar with their plots…barely.  This is not the kind of literature I have traditionally sought out, and I am content in my decisions.  But a weird thing happened while watching Iphigenia.  After a somewhat rocky start, I became enthralled with the language these characters were using.  I don’t mean the Greek language itself, but the subtitles used in the English translation.  I cannot say with any certainty how closely the subtitles mirror what is actually being said, but if they’re even just fairly accurate, then I now understand, at least to a small degree, why these plays have endured for millennia.

The story itself is one that has undergone countless interpretations and revisions over the course of history.  King Agamemnon (Kostas Kozakos) and his vast army are ready to set sail for war against the kingdom of Troy, but their ships are stranded by a lack of wind.  The seer Calchas informs Agamemnon that the winds will not blow until he sacrifices his eldest and favorite daughter, Iphigenia, to the goddess Artemis, who is withholding the winds because his men have offended her by killing a sacred deer.  (And now I know where the title of The Killing of a Sacred Deer [2017] comes from…knowledge really IS power!)

Agamemnon agonizes over this decision, but his hand is forced by the eagerness of his troops to sack Troy; he’s afraid they’ll mutiny if he doesn’t go through with the sacrifice.  He invents a pending marriage of Iphigenia to the great warrior Achilles to get Iphigenia to the encampment, but Clytemnestra (Irene Papas), her mother and Agamemnon’s queen, tags along unexpectedly.  The rest of the movie churns with gloriously over-the-top melodrama, as Clytemnestra rages at Agamemnon, Iphigenia pleads for her life, and Achilles swears to defend Iphigenia at all costs.  Agamemnon also argues with his brother, Menelaus, in a terrific scene during which they both change each other’s minds just a little too late.  In the meantime, the winds never blow, the Greek troops grow restless, and the seer waits a little too eagerly for the chance to carry out the impending sacrifice.

It was during Agamemnon’s argument with Menelaus that I really started to perk up.  This is not an easy scene to write or act out.  Even with English subtitles, the sentence construction and syntax were occasionally overworked.  I remember thinking at one point, “Huh…this is almost Shakespearean.”  Except these scenes were written roughly two thousand years before Shakespeare was born.  When that concept smacked me in the face, I started paying attention a little more to the style and the passion of the words.  And I can’t explain it, but everything acquired a new dimension.  It started to feel more like a play than a film.  It became – at the risk of sounding a tad abstract – poetic.

That feeling permeated everything after that scene.  Throwaway scenes felt more immediate, and really important scenes felt monumental.  Sure, there is some overacting, particularly from the actor playing Achilles, but really, it’s called for in this scenario.  When Clytemnestra promises her husband that, if he goes through with the sacrifice, she will accept his will but hate him for the rest of her life…I really felt it.  And it’s not just the language, but the zealotry of the acting on display, especially from Irene Papas, who must have salivated at the chance to play this fiery woman, a proto-feminist who accepts her duty as a queen but never lets the king forget who truly rules the roost.

And then there’s Iphigenia herself, played by a waifish, almost elvish actress I’d never heard of before seeing this movie, Tatiana Papamoschou.  In her first scenes, she’s almost too innocent to be taken seriously.  It’s only when Iphigenia learns of her father’s plans to murder her for the sake of war that Papamoschou’s acting style allows her to really embody the character, and she delivers a speech late in the film that is, for lack of a better word, biblical.  She accepts her fate and shames the men around her with the same surgical precision that can be found in the Gospels when Jesus accepts His own fate while dismantling the Pharisees with His words.  There are monumental themes at play behind the scenes, and “normal” dialogue just would not feel adequate.

And then there’s that final shot.  I did a tiny bit of research on the original play, and when you learn what historically happened to the main characters after the play’s events, that last look carries even more weight, foretelling decades of death and tragedy without saying a word.  That a foreign film of a 2,200-year-old play was able to affect me this greatly was very pleasantly surprising to me.  I doubt any newer version with today’s technology or modernized dialogue would affect me the same way.  Iphigenia was a very pleasant, surprisingly effective discovery.