The trial scenes in A Place in the Sun differ markedly from von Sternberg’s. In the Stevens film, George tells the truth on the witness stand but is incriminated by a cascade of circumstantial evidence. He soon finds himself awaiting execution on death row. Stevens measures his protagonist’s guilt in the film’s final scenes. Surprisingly, given his recalibration of the source narrative to this point, the director’s verdict echoes von Sternberg’s, not Eisenstein’s. Unlike either of the older directors, however, Stevens introduces Reverend McMillan at the end of his film and the task of assessing George’s responsibility for Alice’s death falls to the minister. In the penultimate cell block scene, George wonders how he can decide if he deserves to die in the electric chair. McMillan responds that one point holds the answer — when George was in the water with Alice, was he thinking of her or Angela? George’s silent discomfiture speaks volumes. McMillan then articulates what the condemned prisoner now presumably sees: “In your heart it was murder, George.” The prominent place given this scene clearly invites the audience to share McMillan’s judgment of George. In the novel, Clyde realizes that had Sondra been the one thrashing helplessly in Loon Lake, or even the attractive Roberta of the previous summer, he would have made more of an effort to save her. But this realization is just one passageway in a labyrinth that fails to lead him toward insight into his share of the guilt. Stevens extracts this one filament from the tapestry of tortured self-examination that makes the last scenes of An American Tragedy great literature and uses it to tie up the loose
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ends of his film. That he misses an opportunity to recreate the marvelous ambiguity of the novel is nowhere more apparent than in his characterization of McMillan. The novel’s “strange, strong, tense, confused, merciful and too after his fashion beautiful soul; sorrowing with misery, yearning toward an impossible justice” becomes the smugly certain appraiser of George’s actions in the film (Dreiser, An American Tragedy, II, 371).
Stevens’ puzzling personal verdict pronouncing George a murderer barely beats the final flap of the film spool. It can be looked at in at least two conflicting ways. On the one hand, an unfriendly critic might perceive it as a lapse into the sort of incoherence that mars von Sternberg’s version of the novel. After all, Stevens has rigged a number of things inducing viewers to withhold harsh judgment of George while they vicariously participate in his romance with Angela. (George’s earlier kindness to Alice even when nagged, Angela’s beauty and verve juxtaposed to Alice’s frumpiness and torpor, the distant camera location during the drowning scene, etcetera.) From this dissenting point of view the film finally looks confession magazine formulaic, its last minute moral tacked on to its questionable content to placate conservatives. But a more sympathetic critic might be intrigued by Stevens’ implication of the audience in George’s crime. After all, probably even most women viewers of A Place in the Sun tend to sympathize at least somewhat with George facing Alice in the boat, given Angela’s magnetic appeal. What the picture accomplishes may be a masterstroke of manipulation worthy of Hitchcock whereby we confront our own darker selves. Might not we be pushed to murder if confronted by similar temptations?
There are many other aspects of the film to stimulate both Stevens’ admirers and his detractors. Among the admirable is the opening scene in which the hitchhiking George is passed by Angela’s speeding white Cadillac convertible and picked up by a ragged man driving an ancient black Ford truck. It makes for a most effective shorthand rendering of the boy’s outsider status. Stevens captures the spirit of Dreiser’s sexual politics by suggesting in various ways that George is thinking of Angela even while pursuing Alice, including a ubiquitous VICKERS sign flashing outside his apartment window. And in an inspired moment during the scene when George and Angela first meet in the billiards room at the Griffiths mansion, his uncle steps in and insists the boy call home. While Clift sheepishly explains to his mother at the mission he is being a good boy, a playful Taylor grabs the phone and tells the worried woman George is with her. Stevens
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could not have succeeded better at making explicit the resistless attraction George feels for the careless life of the rich as opposed to the drab world of his own background.
On the other hand, a number of small and more serious flaws mar A Place in the Sun, especially in its final stages. Some of these mistakes might be overlooked if committed by a filmmaker less conscious of detail. But Stevens invited the closest scrutiny by insisting that he was “one of those directors who believes every element that goes into a picture affects the viewer, although the viewer may not realize the impact of tiny minor things” (quoted in Bosworth 183). An amusing slipup occurs in a late scene in which Taylor, worriedly awaiting word concerning her lover’s fate, sits on a couch framed by a wide window. Just outside the window the violent wind, obviously produced by a machine, nearly bends the saplings in the foreground double while not a pine needle in the forest beyond so much as quivers. More damaging is the bizarre way in which Stevens pretties up Dreiser’s prison scenes. In place of the novel’s death row, described after the author’s visit to Sing Sing as a monument to “human insensitiveness’’ and “destructive torture” demanding a thousand deaths of its victims, Stevens invents a penitentiary more like a country club (Dreiser, An American Tragedy, II, 352). Flower baskets adorn the cell block and the inmates enjoy a continuous serenade from a songbird. The explanation sometimes offered that these amenities were forced by Stevens’ concern over possible criticism from right-wing Congressmen fails to persuade. Surely not even they would have objected to a more realistic portrait of prison conditions. But the most telling of Stevens’ offenses to the novel has Angela visiting George in his cell for a tender goodbye. No single facet of the film more clearly demonstrates how thoroughly Stevens’ adaptation diminishes its source. The scene has its place, flowing as it does out of the director’s emphasis on the novel’s love story, but how impoverished that emphasis looks compared to Eisenstein’s or even von Sternberg’s.
I have tried to demonstrate that neither Eisenstein’s scenario nor the two adaptations of An American Tragedy realize the novel’s full potential for cinema. Each unnecessarily narrows the range of the book’s vision. Each fails because of impinging ideologies transcended by Dreiser in the novel. As for the other two film versions of Dreiser novels, Jennie Gerhardt and Carrie,31 the former fails solely for artistic reasons and the latter for both artistic and ideological reasons, as I will seek to demonstrate.
Dreiser sold Paramount the rights to Jennie Gerhardt in 1932.32 Despite his previous trouble with the studio, his dealings this time
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were relatively agreeable. A minor flap developed with producer Schulberg over Dreiser’s right to approve the script, which the novelist had neglected to ensure while acting as his own agent. But all was smoothed over when the movie, directed by Marion Gering, appeared the following year and Dreiser pronounced it “moving” and “beautifully interpreted” (quoted in Swanberg 406).33
Jennie Gerhardt, the movie, does copy most of the novel’s characters and situations with a surface fidelity.34 From the directly lifted opening scene (Jennie and her mother scrubbing the steps of a posh hotel staircase), the Gerhardt family’s poverty is front and center. Jennie’s rescue from the underclass, first by Senator Brander and then by Lester Kane, forms the backbone of the film’s plot. The moral outrage of Jennie’s father and the gossipy Gerhardt neighbors over the heroine’s relationship with Brander is made manifest in two telling scenes. In the first, two women discuss the wristwatch Brander has given Jennie and in the second old Gerhardt smashes it in a fit of righteous rage. Gossip hounds Jennie throughout the film as it does in the novel, and Lester’s ultimate decision to embrace respectability leads to the tragic conclusion.
The most important departure from the book in Gering’s film involves Jennie’s character. Sylvia Sidney in the title role comes across as much more sophisticated and self-possessed than her saintly counterpart. She projects very little of the almost pathologically giving nature of the novel’s heroine. In this isolated instance, the filmmaker actually improves on Dreiser. For this, the few moviegoers who saw Jennie Gerhardt in the 1930s and the fewer who have seen it since should be grateful. Even Hollywood’s legendary sentimentality could not easily equal the simpering emotion of this novel, Dreiser’s weakest. But Gering squanders the gain in characterization on several ill-advised attempts at leavening a deadly serious story with comic relief. One unaccountable scene features a would-be Romeo’s inept attempt to win a girl on a park bench. If this prefiguring of a ‘‘Laugh-In” blackout does not lighten the load sufficiently, there are several chuckles added to Jennie’s and Lester’s tour of Europe. But the most striking deficiency of the film qua film is its choppy editing. The superabundance of scenes gives it an episodic quality that its few virtues cannot make up for. In the last analysis, the picture earns the disregard into which it has fallen.