A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951)

By Valerie Deane

Film noir…or not film noir? The question nags this movie like a toothache. Which I have to say is baffling. It’s hard to imagine a film in which fate lays its hand upon a protagonist more heavily than in A Place in the Sun. Having just watched it again, I’m convinced more than ever that the film is truly, deeply noir.

But let’s begin at the beginning.

George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) is a young man from a working-class background who’s been given a chance to get ahead thanks to a wealthy family connection. But we know from the moment we see him hitching a ride to his new job, he’s not going to have an easy time of it.

Clearly ambitious, George covets the American Dream. But though he’s attractive and personable and shares a respected name, he’s not readily accepted by the Eastmans and their circle. Nor is he able to make friends with his co-workers since his uncle has forbidden social contact between family and employees. George becomes infatuated with one of the smart set, Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), who chooses to ignore him or just doesn’t see him. Disillusioned, he falls into a relationship with Alice Tripp, a factory girl who’s as lonely as he is. Played by Shelley Winters, she’s a plain but friendly young woman who clearly relishes the attention.

George for a time seems content with it all. Though he’s uneasy flouting his uncle’s rules, he feels he’s not doing  badly – he has a steady job, some money to spend, a room, a car, a girl, perhaps a future. It’s a far cry from living at his mother’s mission, finishing his schooling  at home, and working as a bellhop.

But then fate begins to show its ultimately deadly hand. At the moment that George and Alice’s relationship becomes intimate, his uncle promotes him and invites him – now as one of them - to the Eastman home. He’s formally introduced to Angela who now sees him as an Eastman. She flirts shamelessly with him and the attraction between these two impossibly beautiful people is immediate and intense.

However, it doesn’t take long for things to start to unravel. Alice announces to George that she’s pregnant and although at first he insists that he’ll marry her, he begins to retreat from her as he’s drawn further into the Eastman circle and to Angela. His place in the sun, now tantalizingly close, is all he can think about. Alice, angry at being neglected, threatens to tell all and undo the idyllic romance. George is distraught. His relationship with Alice is now the only barrier to the fulfillment of his dream. He feels that the fates are conspiring to send his life spiraling out of control. However, what he thinks of as ‘the fates’ could be his own moral frailty – the actions he’s taken, the choices he’s made, and his inability to deal with the consequences.

But then Angela suddenly provides George with what he thinks could be a solution to his problem. In passing, she mentions a drowning at the lake. He listens carefully. Angela has become an accidental femme fatale who causes him to stumble into a classic dead-end street where murder looks like the only way out. George moves ahead with a plan to kill Alice, but it’s hastily conceived and it’s clear that he’s ill-equipped to commit such a crime.

He takes Alice rowing on the lake but what happens is not what he’d planned. At the critical moment, he’s unable to kill her. Then Alice accidentally stumbles and falls into the water. Panic-stricken, unable to swim, she will drown. George has a chance to save her (as well as himself) but is unable or unwilling to do so and Alice dies – exactly as he’d wanted.

What is George to do? He could report the accident and face up to the consequences. But if he did report it, would anyone believe him? He had set out with the intention of killing Alice and given his premeditation, his innocence might be hard, if not impossible, for him to argue. The line between guilt and innocence is blurred at best. We know Alice had told George that she was afraid of water and couldn't swim. We see his reaction to Angela’s telling of the drowning at her lake. We watch him listen to the news report on weekend accidents with aroused interest. We listen to him lie to Alice with greater frequency and ease. We feel his anticipation as a plan takes form. And in the end, Alice dies because he makes no attempt to save her.

With his religious upbringing, George knows that guilty thoughts count as much as guilty deeds. There is no way out – he is doomed and he knows it. With scarcely a word in his own defense, he succumbs to the inevitable - capture, trial, condemnation. Unwilling to act to save his intended victim’s life, he’s unable to move to save his own. His loss of moral certainty, his vision of himself as the victim (rather than Alice or even Angela), and his inability to see the inevitable and tragic consequences of his actions place him at the very center of the noir universe.

Visually, A Place in the Sun registers as high noir. High-contrast lighting and multiple off-angle camera shots emphasize the drama’s overwhelming sense of despair. In one striking scene, George is on the first day of his new job only the morning after Alice has told him she’s pregnant. The film’s director George Stevens frames his interiors to suggest George trapped in a cage – an indication of his state of mind and a foreshadowing of the prison cell waiting. Stevens even subverts our appreciation of exteriors of great natural beauty, rendering them ominous and ill-disposed.

Costuming in A Place in the Sun also is central to its sense of noirness. Angela is dressed either in white or in black depending on whether she’s seen as part of George’s place in the sun or conversely as the catalyst for Alice’s death. George is dressed in light tweeds on his first visit to the Eastman family and is both dwarfed by the chair in which he is sitting and made invisible by the pillars and grandeur of the home. However, as he is accepted into that social circle, George’s clothing becomes darker and he increasingly dominates the scene.

A Place in the Sun is based on Theodore Dreiser’s epic novel, An American Tragedy, which runs over a 1,000 pages. Stevens replaces the sweep and detail of the novel with an intensity and focus that charts George’s incremental progression from an innocently ambitious young man to a confused, guilt-ridden wretch condemned for murder. As he’s led to his execution, his fellow inmates express the hope that he’s headed for a better world than the one he has known. Ironically, he was just beginning to know how good his world could have been. A place in the sun could have been his if he hadn’t been so blinded by the desire for it that he was prepared to do anything, even murder, to attain it. How could anything be more noir than that?

Valerie Deane

JAIL BAIT (1954)

By Gary Deane

“There is nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.”  Vladimir Nabokov

Once upon a time, Friday night wasn’t Friday night on college campuses without a screening of one or both of Ed Wood’s famously bad Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956) or Glen or Glenda (1953), a demented cult classic that baffles to this day. The latter is notable for its groundbreaking if unhinged portrayal of LGBTQ issues (Wood himself was an enthusiastic cross-dresser, with a particular fondness for angora).  

Wood’s story is well-known (if not entirely understood),  thanks to Plan 9’s epic exposure on late-night television beginning in 1961, followed by its citing as ‘The Worst Film Ever Made’ in Michael Medved’s best-selling book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980). Wood had become an object of cult fascination himself, an obsession fed by the release of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), one of The Best Films Ever Made Not to Receive an Oscar Nomination.  

In 1947, Wood came to Hollywood and began writing scripts and directing commercials and TV pilots along with several micro-budget westerns.  Glenda or Glenda was Wood’s first feature and it was a miracle that he ever got to direct another one.  However, two years later Wood teamed up with Alex Gordon, a writer from the UK and they set to work on a grungy little crime drama, Jail Bait. Gordon, who would go on to co-found American International Pictures, provided Jail Bait a semi-coherent storyline and some narrative flow, something to which few other Ed Wood films can lay claim. 

Jail Bait opens with Don Gregor (Clancy Moore), the wayward son of a world-famous plastic surgeon getting bailed out of jail by his sister, Marilyn (Dolores Fuller), for possession of an unregistered firearm. Keeping an eye out are the two cops in charge of the case, played by Lyle Talbot and a pre-Hercules Steve Reeves in his first shot at stardom. The pair knows that Gregor's fallen in with a low-rent gangster, Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) who together have pulled off a couple of small-time heists.

  

When Don gets home, he grabs another gun and goes out to meet Vic. They go off to rob a movie theater, but not before the action cuts to a striptease show (in some expurgated versions of the film, it’s a blackface minstrel show), which has nothing to with anything. Later the robbery goes awry when Don panics and all hell breaks loose. Vic subsequently kills Don and forces Don’s father, a surgeon, into giving him a new face. However, the good doctor discovers his son's body at Vic’s apartment and makes plans to take his revenge.

Doctor Gregor is played by Herbert Rawlinson, a former silent-era leading man who scratched out a living afterward by taking any roles he could get, most of them uncredited.  It’s hard to say who gives the worst performance in Jail Bait but the winner might be Rawlinson, who has the lion’s share of bad dialog in a film that revels in it. As he says after a hard day at the office, “You know, I had to perform a very difficult operation this morning…and it was very strenuous and complicated. Plastic surgery seems to me at times to be very, very, complicated.” And, "This afternoon we had a long telephone conversation earlier in the day”. Maybe it was just as well that Rawlinson died the night after shooting his last scene in the movie. All this and sets and décor so impoverished and tacky that one of the biggest laughs comes when Fuller calls Brady a "cheap crook", only to have his girlfriend, Loretta (Theodora Thurman exclaim, “Cheap? Just look at the place! Vic is anything but cheap!” 

     

Given that the film's budget was only $21,000 for a 4-day shoot, Wood did well by it and there’s arguably something more to the production than might meet the uncommitted eye. Jail Bait is the closest Wood ever came to making a legitimate movie and entering the Hollywood mainstream. Though he was out of his depth as a director, especially with actors, the movie manages to be more enjoyable than a lot of the run-of-the-mill crime dramas and B noirs of the day far less suspenseful. Jail Bait’s wacko plot and daft dialog are all just part of the movie’s aberrant charm. It’s so consumed with its own internal logic and so thickly riddled with clichés that they almost stop being clichés and the movie takes on a strange, otherworldly sense of its own (Or almost of its own. Looking to cut corners, Wood used the same dream-like flamenco-guitar score as he did in Mesa of Lost Women, 1953).  

A big chunk of Jail Bait’s perverse allure can be credited to Timothy Farrell, an actor with mustachioed good looks, an authoritative baritone, and a smarmy, suspect manner. Farrell actually was purpose-built for film noir and played the lead in half a dozen crime titles involving Wood. The problem for Farrell was that he wasn’t that much of an actor and Wood was just about the only one who would hire him. But no matter how chintzy the production, incongruous the story, or cheap the patter, Farrell managed at least to give a conscientious performance, one often at sizeable odds with material. Maybe he just had ambitions at sizeable odds with reality. 

Farrell, born Timothy Sperl, grew up in Los Angeles and after serving in the Army Air Corps in WWII, got a job as a bailiff with the Los Angeles Marshal’s Office. Around the same time he started getting bit parts in low-rent B titles. The first was Test Tube Babies (1948) in which he plays a sympathetic doctor who counsels a young couple that there’s no shame or scandal in test tube fertilization and artificial insemination. Of course, the information is sandwiched between plenty of nudity, some wild parties, and cat fight.

Farrell’s bedside manner won him a similar part in Hometown Girl (1949) another ‘sex hygiene’ film that dealt with unwed motherhood. Both films had been produced by schlockmeister George Weiss who then cast Farrell as a scumbag gymnasium owner and drug pusher in a trio of crude quickies, The Devil’s Sleep (1949), Racket Girls (1951), and Dance Hall Racket (1953). The first of them was mostly an excuse to showcase endless lengths of female-wrestling and cat-fighting footage, the last a cheesy curio written by and co-starring stand-up social satirist and fall-down substance abuser Lenny Bruce who died of a morphine overdose at age 40.  

Shortly after, Farrell appeared in another seedy Weiss-produced title Paris after Midnight (1951) which boasted famous stripper, Tempest Storm. During production, Farrell along with everyone else on the set was busted in a highly-publicized vice-raid, never a good thing to happen to a sworn peace officer.

However, none of it seemed to stick and in 1954 life met art when his legal and theatrical careers dove-tailed in the George Cukor film, A Star is Born in which he was cast as an officer of the court. It happened again when Farrell secured a regular part as court bailiff in a late ‘50s television series, Accused, featuring, among others, Robert Culp and Pamela Mason.  

    

Farrell’s screen career ended in 1957. Meantime, he’d managed to hold on to his job in the Los Angeles County Marshall’s Office and rose through the ranks and was appointed County Marshall in 1975. He was fired four years later, following his conviction on corruption charges. 

The legacy of Ed Wood lives on with events such as the University of Southern California’s annual ‘Ed Wood Film Festival’ at which students are charged with writing, filming, and editing an Ed Wood-esque short film based on a predetermined theme. His movies were spoofed on the much-loved Mystery Theater 3000 and several remade as pornographic features. Many of his bizarre transvestite-themed sex novels have been republished.

Wood also established a theme with Jail Bait that he would return to several times: that weak-willed parenting can lead to disaster. This was hinted in Glen or Glenda, then given full-throat in Jail Bait and The Violent Years (1956), a juvenile delinquency yarn in which a rich and spoiled girl with indulgent parents forms a vicious girl gang with a penchant for robbing gas stations. It's just what happens. 

Gary Deane