The New Pictures

A Place in the Sun (Paramont), judging from the competition so far, is the picture to beat for IQSI'S Academy Awards. Producer-Director George Stevens' modern version of the late Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is at once a faithful adaptation of the novel, an artful job of moviemaking and an engrossing piece of popular entertainment.

Novelist Dreiser, who was outraged at Hollywood's earlier version of his book,* might well have felt flattered by the new one. No director could hope (or want) to reproduce the mass of detail which Dreiser took from life to fill out the case history of a young man charged with the murder of his cast-off sweetheart. Moviemaker Stevens, working with an intelligent script by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown, captures the power of the novel without its heaviness, the insight without the inventories. The story still flows inexorably from the springs of character and environment. And though Stevens concentrates on its poignant love affairs, he neither overlooks Dreiser's implied social comment nor oversimplifies it with trite labels.

A Place in the Sun is the story of George Eastman (Montgomery Clift), a poor, ambitious boy who pursues the dream of a Horatio Alger hero to his own undoing. He hitchhikes to the distant city, where his rich uncle manufactures swim suits on the vast scale and cuts a swath in local society. There, from a shipping clerk's job in the factory, George catches tempting glimpses of a life of wealth, glamor and importance.

But glimpses are all he gets. Ignored as a poor relation, both inside the factory and out, he drifts from loneliness into an affair with a plain, forlorn girl (Shelley Winters) who works on the same assembly line. Suddenly, his luck turns. He gets a promotion, and with it an entree to the socially elect circle in which his wealthy relatives move. He falls giddily in love with the queenliest young beauty of the set (Elizabeth Taylor), and she with him.

Then an obstacle intrudes; the factory girl is pregnant and demanding that he marry her. Between desperate maneuvers to put her off, George basks in the brightening promise of the right marriage and a front-office career. By the time events force him to a decision, he is too deep in the dream to face the reality; he chooses the simple way of murder.

Thanks to Director Stevens, all three of the picture's stars do the best acting of their careers. In the pivotal role, Actor Clift's sensitive, natural performance gives the film a solid core of conviction. Actress Taylor plays with a tenderness and intensity that may surprise even her warmest fans. In a film of less uniform excellence, Shelley Winters' mousy factory girl would completely steal the show. Shy, petulant, or shrilly nagging by turns, she makes the most of her unconventional role and of the movie's boldest scene, when she gropes, on a choked-up brink of tears, for a tactful way to ask a doctor for an abortion.

But no one can steal the show-from Producer-Director Stevens, whose firm grip is on every foot of A Place in the Sun. Stevens' unerring timing, and his skill at filling any situation with the last shade of emotion and meaning, enable him to direct the picture at a deliberately slow pace that still weaves a spell without dragging for a moment.

He makes imaginative use of his sound track: the cry of a loon, the distant whine of sirens, the barking of dogs become recurring motifs bound up with the action. His camera is effectively restrained; it peeks through doorways or stands patiently in the corner like a hidden witness; and when it moves suddenly into closeups, the effect of intimacy is breathtaking. The film's seduction episode is a textbook example of director's magic. The players, barely visible as dim silhouettes, are no less Stevens' raw materials than the sounds, shadows and camera movements. And he molds and shapes them into probably the frankest, most provocative scene of its kind yet filmed in Hollywood.

Captain Horatio Hornblower (Warner), in the person of Gregory Peck stalks his igth Century quarter-deck for a good two hours while the scuppers run with French and Spanish blood. Though he looks, acts and sounds more like a junior Lincoln than a British sea dog, Peck's coolness in carnage and steely command presence are all that C. S. Forester fans could ask of their hero.

In a reasonably faithful movie version of the Forester story, Peck sails under secret orders to the Pacific, delivers arms to a Central American rebel named El Supremo, captures the Spanish warship Natividad in a surprise attack, and rescues the Duke of Wellington's sister (Virginia Mayo) from plague-ridden Panama City. A political turnabout changes El Supremo from an ally to an enemy, and the first big blaze of .Technicolor gunfire has Peck's 36-gun frigate trading broadsides with the 50-gun Natividad, captained by El Supremo.

Back in Europe, Peck begins his one-man war against the French. He coolly raids the port of La Teste, destroys four anchored French warships and, after his own vessel is riddled by shore batteries, sinks it in the mouth of the harbor. Captured by the French and hustled toward Paris for a date with the guillotine, Peck tweaks Napoleon's nose again by escaping. He frees a batch of British prisoners, seizes a ship in the heavily guarded port of Nantes and sails back to England to become an admiral.

For a swashbuckling romance, Captain Hornblower is played with commendable restraint, and Director Raoul Walsh even attempts a few rudimentary explanations of Hornblower's naval strategy. Largely because Virginia Mayo spends a good part of her time wasting away with swamp fever, the love affair seldom becomes sticky enough to slow up the action. The best of it keeps Captain Hornblower right in his element--routing the lubberly French and Spanish, against an expertly staged background of crashing mainmasts and exploding gun decks.

Force of Arms (Warner), based on a story by Richard (Guadalcanal Diary) Tregaskis, is endowed with a title, theme and background strongly reminiscent of the movie classic based on Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (starring Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper). But there the resemblance ends. Force of Arms, despite some grimly realistic combat scenes, moves mechanically from one predictable climax to the next.

During a brief leave near Naples, Platoon Leader William Holden falls in love with WAC Lieut. Nancy Olson. The only curb to their passion lies in the fact that Nancy wants nothing but marriage, while Holden wants anything but. The film also ruminates at length on the debilitating effects of love: after meeting Nancy, Holden returns to the front so concerned for his own safety that he shocks his men by deciding to outflank a Nazi strong point instead of charging it in the headlong rush which seems to have been his usual, if unconventional, employment of infantry tactics.

Inevitably, Holden thinks his caution caused the death of his best friend (Frank Lovejoy). He finds redemption by rushing back to battle 'and getting captured by the Germans, while Nancy makes a Cook's tour of the front lines in search of her man.

Playing opposite each other for the fourth time, William Holden and Nancy Olson manage to keep Force of Arms from surrendering completely to the demands of its plot. And Director Michael Curtiz' combat scenes are sharpened to a fine edge by the addition of Signal Corps film of the actual battles of San Pietro, Venafro and the Rapido River.

* In 1931, he sued unsuccessfully to prevent release of Paramount's An American Tragedy, with Sylvia Sidney, Phillips Holmes and Frances Dee, on the ground that the movie had watered his novel down to a mere murder story.

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