Stevens’s A Place in the Sun is a rework of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. He renames the characters, too, so that Clyde Griffiths becomes George Eastman. It’s like renaming Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Tarzan. He and his screenwriters are emphatic that Alice Tripp’s murder is crucial for the story’s Hollywood success. Dreiser’s critique of American materialism is reduced to an undercurrent. Quibbling aside, Stevens won an Oscar for Best Director, and Michael Wilson and Harry Brown won Oscars for Best Screenplay.
Stevens has two picnic episodes; Dreiser has one. The first is Stevens’s creation in which Eastman and the beautiful Angela Vickers (formerly Sondra Finchley) loll in the sunshine. “We’ll go swimming together, lie in the sun together,” says Vickers, “go horseback riding through the pine woods,” she says. Her invitation is the source of the film’s title, which suggests (we are to believe) Eastman’s desire for status and wealth.
The second picnic episode loosely follows Dreiser’s crucial murder episode in which Eastman decides to murder stodgy Alice Tripp (formerly Roberta Alden). According to Stevens, this is an accident, not premeditated murder.
There is a buildup of urgency because Tripp announces that she’s pregnant. When Eastman hesitates, she threatens, “You’re gonna marry me tomorrow, or I’ll tell the newspapers everything [about Angela].” Reluctantly, George agrees to marry the next day. But while driving to a nearby lodge, he suggests, “I tell you what—why don’t we – let’s take out lunch and go down to the landing. We can rent a boat and have our picnic.”
As afternoon fades into darkness, they remain in mid-lake. Rowing to the middle of the lake, Eastman, and Tripp sit facing each other; she pleads for love, and Eastman is deep in thought about killing her. When Tripp says, “Maybe you wished that I was dead. Do you wish that I was dead?” Eastman flinches. He to the other end of the boat, and when she leans over to embrace him, the boat tips. Tripp cannot swim; George saves himself.
See George Stevens. A Place in the Sun (1951). Screenplay by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown is based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), Josef von Sternberg. An American Tragedy (1931). Screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein is based on Dreiser’s novel (1925); Mandy Merck in Hollywood’s American Tragedies: Dreiser, Eisenstein, Sternberg, Stevens. Oxford: Berg, 2007.
The cast: Montgomery Cliff as George Eastman; Elizabeth Taylor as Angela Vickers; and Shelley Winters as Alice Tripp