Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film

5 I See America Kissing: A Place in the Sun

5 I See America Kissing A Place in the Sun I was more seriously engaged in films after I’d had three years of an unnatural experience, which was the war in Europe. And that changed my life and my thinking so seriously that it changed my professional instincts; I knew I wanted to do very different things than I’d done before. —George Stevens, USA Film Festival The essential American soul is hard, isolate, and a killer. It has never yet melted. —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature I Remember Mama gave little indication of how deeply the war affected Stevens. That would be the province of his very next film. A Place in the Sun, based on Theodore Drieser’s novel, An American Tragedy, is the first of Stevens’s postwar films to reflect the personal transformation he underwent during World War II. It is his darkest, most personal and most intellectually far-reaching film, expressing not only a darkening of the spirit that came over him in Europe but also the somber turn his art took after his return. Dreiser’s opus, An American Tragedy, held profound meaning for Stevens, before and especially after the war. He had always searched for his great “tragedy,” the drama that would elevate his work above the 141 “women’s films” he had directed before the war—and with Dreiser and his tragic hero, Clyde Griffiths, both spokesmen for the disenfranchised, he found it. A Place in the Sun would be the pinnacle of Stevens’s career, the result of a convergence of Dreiser’s great material and the serious mood Stevens carried home from Europe. Later, even as his films became more ambitious in scope, more deliberate in execution, he would never achieve the poetry—that graceful blend of intimacy and breadth—that he achieved with A Place in the Sun. Returning from Europe, Stevens felt that he had been part of the fabric of a truly great tragedy and though he may not have known precisely why, Dreiser’s book figured prominently in his ability to resolve, at least artistically, the anxieties he brought back from the trauma of war. The story of how A Place in the Sun came to be made—how tragedy and optimism do battle in the production and in the final poetry of this film— is also the story of how Stevens’s aesthetic was permanently altered at this moment in his career, allowing him to reach a new seriousness in his storytelling. His artistic and social canvas might not have expanded as much as it did after the war had Stevens not found Dreiser just after the war. Stevens wanted to make An American Tragedy into an audience pleaser, a love story with tragic dimensions. What he actually produced was something far more complicated and troubled than that. Always a man of his times, Stevens made a film that told American audiences, no less than himself, just how unreliable and unstable individual and cultural identity was and would remain after the experience of war. The tragic hero of A Place in the Sun, whom Stevens renamed George after himself, is one of American cinema’s first postwar misfits, an icon of social uncertainty. The fact that Stevens battled Paramount so extensively to get this film made is evidence that now he was ready to undertake projects that were personal, and even urgent. Stevens was barely out of his teens when he first read Dreiser’s novel in 1925, the year it was published. He read it again in 1945, just after the war, then noting in the book’s margins his ideas for visual dissolves and dialogue he planned to use. He later said that he first thought seriously of filming it in 1947. After the war, Dreiser’s deterministic view of America —rooted in the story of an idealistic yet misguided young social climber who ascends to the tragic side of the American dream—was especially meaningful to Stevens. He had returned to the States to find 142 I See America Kissing • himself at an emotional and professional crossroads, questioning his and his country’s values, and bearing a decidedly darker view of human nature than before he and his unit saw the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp. Stevens was determined enough to film Dreiser’s book to stake his entire reputation...