On cross examination, Mason successfully elicits from Clyde a pastiche of obvious lies, a program of would-be deception unlike anything in the novel and so damning that even the defense attorneys are swayed. Toward the end of Mason’s performance, Jephson whispers to his partner Belknap: “It must have been that he did kill her.” Belknap’s reply clinches it: “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.’’ Von Sternberg also undercuts Clyde’s mother’s staunch support of her son. The director does allow her a brief sociological explanation of Clyde’s actions when she visits him on death row. But her excuse that he had not been given “the right start” might be misinterpreted, because she is played by actress Lucille LaVerne less like a devoted mother than a demented one, or at least one three-quarters-of-bubble off plumb. The final courtroom scene, in fact, includes one sequence that makes no sense whatsoever. Von Sternberg has Clyde and his mother
Page 188
smile rapturously at each other just as his sentence is being imposed. Far from dramatizing for the audience what Sarris sees as the moment when Clyde attains self-knowledge and releases his repressed feelings, the interchange more likely convinces viewers that the son has joined the mother somewhere over the edge (34).
Evaluations of von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy have run the gamut from high praise to ridicule. Barry Hayne, in an essay comparing the Eisenstein, von Sternberg, and Stevens versions, finds the Austrian director’s product “ultimately most successful in conveying [the novel’s] essential virtues.” According to Hayne, this success derives from the director’s focus on the internal world of Clyde’s psyche, a region of cold, unfeeling passivity (146). But, aside from the fact that Dreiser would have rejected out of hand such a pejorative gloss of his character’s mental makeup, the film fails to deliver essential insight into why von Sternberg’s Clyde turns out as he does. Since the audience sees so little of his blighted background and never gets a sense of his urgent early material and sexual desires as Dreiser so elaborately documented them, it can only guess at some kind of unexplained psychopathology. Harry S. Potamkin doubtless had such a consideration in mind when his contemporary review of the film complained that it displayed no “process” and that its ‘‘unit structure lacked thematic motivation.”26
Robert Penn Warren later dismissed the film as a mixture of “bathos, dishonesty, and total confusion.”27 Two of the three specifications in Warren’s indictment hold water. The bathetic elements are most blatant in the trial scenes, in which von Sternberg often pursues melodramatic effects. Beyond the confusion created by Clyde’s tepid sexuality, other botched elements include several that are important conceptually. An example of the latter is the inclusion of a scene featuring a vendor hawking peanuts and popcorn to the crowd pushing into the courthouse for the trial. The film audience might logically assume that such a scene was meant as a negative commentary on the American judicial system. Indeed, Dreiser had employed similar devices to make the trial seem like a circus for that very reason. But the director’s scene has no logic. Since von Sternberg’s Clyde is patently guilty and is found so in short order, the system obviously works well. But bathetic and confused as the film assuredly is, Warren’s charge of dishonesty misses the mark if by it he means to include von Sternberg’s decision to find Clyde guilty. Such a verdict is no more dishonest than Eisenstein’s “innocent by means of capitalist insanity” plea. Each is a legitimate reading of an open-ended text, though neither duplicates that text’s rich philosophical ferment.
Page 189
In the case of the von Sternberg version, many of the novel’s thematic strands are included, but they are not intellectually integrated. The Austrian director created the confusion that Robert Penn Warren laments rather than reproducing the complexity of the source text because he did not effectively “reimagine” his material in the light of his ideological perspective.
Nearly two decades later, Dreiser’s novel inspired an adaptation by another prominent director, George Stevens. In 1947 he began planning to put on film an updated version with its accusatory title intact. But this was the time of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee’s growing influence and Stevens felt obliged to water down the novel’s unwelcome message about the national life. In this case it was the political climate rather than the director’s own ideology that colored the character of the adaptation. The direction in which Stevens’ serial revisions were heading can be seen in the new title he first substituted for Dreiser’s, namely The Lovers. His final decision to call the 1951 film A Place in the Sun reestablished Clyde (renamed George Eastman and played by Montgomery Clift) as its focal point, but kept clear of any indictment of society. Through Steven’s reformulation, George became more sympathetic. Roberta (now called Alice Tripp and played by Shelley Winters) changed from a sweet, small-town girl to a whining nag. Sondra (given the name Angela Vickers and played by eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor) was transformed from an airhead into a loving goddess. The affair between George and Angela was to become the emotional core of the film.
In at least one way, A Place in the Sun transcends both the Eisenstein scenario and the von Sternberg film as adaptation. Stevens successfully dramatizes George’s sex drive, that ruling passion defining Clyde as it does all of Dreiser’s male protagonists. From the film’s first scene in which the hitchhiking George stops to admire a billboard bathing beauty with pneumatic breasts, no doubt about his first principle can be entertained. With the mission background and the auto accident eliminated, George finds himself thrust immediately into the affluent Eastman social circle. His first visit to his uncle’s mansion provides a chance meeting with Angela, and Clift gives Taylor an unanswered look that smolders with sexual desire. Taylor comes across on screen as something like Dreiser’s ersatz-religious-feminine icons Suzanne Dale of The “Genius”28 and Berenice Fleming in The Cowperwood Trilogy,29 too beautiful to touch. Not to George, however. Thanks to Stevens’ direction of Montgomery Clift, George’s attraction to Angela comes off as overwhelmingly physical. Downplaying
Page 190
George’s blighted background and social-climbing ambitions also reinforces the sexual motivation.
George’s libido stays on display throughout the early scenes leading up to his affair with Angela. When his cousin gives him a tour of the Eastman business, which Stevens converts into a swimsuit factory, George swivels around at one point to admire a model posing in the design department. When he enters the boxing room where he will work as foreman, several girls proffer appreciative whistles. Unlike the curiously neutered Clyde of the von Sternberg film, George responds, focusing on the smiling Alice Tripp. When George and Alice meet by accident later at a movie theater, the kissing couples around them further stimulate his need and the relationship is launched. Despite intervening glimpses of Angela, George urges Alice to submit, finally succeeding after he rushes into her room to quiet the radio she had accidentally turned up through her opened window.
A promotion at the factory and invitation into the Eastman social circle caps George’s success with Alice. When Angela approaches him out of obvious attraction at the first society party he attends, the two quickly become involved, successive scenes of their enraptured dancing charting the course of their intimacy. Meanwhile, Alice informs George of her pregnancy and begins the programmatic shrewishness designed to irritate the audience as much as her would-be husband. Shelley Winters’ Academy Award performance helped Stevens realize his unhidden agenda of building sympathy for George in his ultimate choice of Angela over Alice, a necessity given the novel’s recasting as a love story. As if the physical disparity between Winters and Taylor were not sufficient to do the job, Stevens has Clift call Winters “Al.” Interestingly, Clift objected to Stevens’ and the actress’ interpretation of her role because, in the actors judgment, it was too “downbeat, blubbery, irritating’’ to render George’s attraction to her comprehensible. In fact, Clift’s overall conception of the film seems at odds with Stevens’ given the actor’s gut feeling that Eastman is an “essentially unsympathetic” character.30 Actually, Stevens makes him more sympathetic than does the novel or the other film versions in a variety of ways. Certainly George displays none of the callous cruelty of von Sternberg’s Clyde in dealing with the pregnancy, for example. Instead, he comes across as genuinely concerned about Alice’s well-being until his predicament drives him to consider doing away with her.
After Alice’s long but unsuccessful abortion interview with a moralizing physician, George returns to his room and listens to a news broadcast highlighting reports of Labor Day weekend auto
Page 191
accidents and drownings. In a close-up sustained for several seconds, Clift’s face registers recognition of a possible way out, but Angela provides specifics for his plans later during an intimate moment at Loon Lake. She tells George about a couple’s drowning there and the fact that the man’s body had never been recovered, a revelation that sets up the film’s climactic scene. George considers and apparently rejects the idea of drowning Alice as they drift on Loon Lake. Then Alice paints a verbal picture of their scrimping and saving future life together that is so depressing the audience might be forgiven for hoping he will kick her overboard and hold her under for the rest of the film. But Stevens fudges the last moments of the take. Alice mistakes George’s tortured appearance for evidence of a physical illness and when she lurches toward the front of the boat to help, he stands up and tosses them both into the water. Their thrashing is recorded by a distant camera shot that disallows judgment of Clyde’s action. When Stevens zooms in sufficiently to reveal a figure in the water, we recognize George swimming ashore.