A Place in the Sun (1951)
Directed by George Stevens
A young social climber wins the heart of a beautiful heiress but his former girlfriend's pregnancy stands in the way of his ambition.
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What critics compared A Place in the Sun to
Writer/director Woody Allen ("Melinda and Melinda") tints his own "Crimes and Misdemeanors" with George Stevens's "A Place in the Sun," leaves his beloved New York completely behind for the first time ever and delivers his best film in years.
The electric encounter between Chris and Nola (Scarlett Johansson) over a ping-pong table is Allen's answer to "A Place in the Sun," in which Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor did their mating dance over a pool table.
And like Shelley Winters in George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun," Nola becomes something resembling pure demand.
It needs to be mentioned, though, that Johansson -- even though her character is made out to be more and more a nagging, whining bitch as the movie progresses; she's Shelley Winters in "A Place in the Sun," without any of the compassion shown that character -- survives the picture unscathed.
Yet the more obvious model for Match Point is Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel An American Tragedy, which was made into A Place in the Sun with stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters.
He’s like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” or Montgomery Clift in “A Place in the Sun” or even Tony Perkins in “Psycho.”
He’s an old-school craftsman, an heir to filmmakers like George Stevens ( Shane , A Place in the Sun )—his movies are intimate and expansive at once, and he has a love for, and an understanding of, melodrama: He’s unafraid of intense emotions, written out in a filmmaking language that’s bold yet fine-grained, and audiences today seem to have lost touch with that vocabulary.
If Therese were some thrifty guy, toiling in a garage, you could bet that his fling with a rich and jobless dame would be taut with unease; think of Montgomery Clift, in “A Place in the Sun” (1951), shifting from the wrong to the right side of the tracks and finding Elizabeth Taylor.
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The most classically minded of America's young filmmakers, and the most prodigious, Anderson draws on John Huston and Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann's "From Here to Eternity" and George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun."
Spurned girlfriends and betrayed lovers are nearly instantly forgiving; a young woman's parents offer romantic advice to the stranger who's brashly barged into their home, leading up to the hokiest marriage proposal ever put on film; and a late-night rowing session results in a sojourn on a private island for some stargazing, and not, as some viewers might devoutly wish, A Place in the Sun-style violence.
Directed by George Stevens, the man behind the camera for Gunga Din, Penny Serenade, A Place in the Sun, Shane, and Giant (David Lean and Jean Negulesco provided uncredited directorial assistance), The Greatest Story Ever Told is a failure of staggering proportions, a failure of nerve and imagination.