If the 1960s concluded with the Manson Family, I would imagine a likewise beginning akin to that of A Place in the Sun (1951), which opens with a leather clad hitchhiker thumbing down a car. The wariness of all visitors that would mark the end of our fascination of the outsider, was really the end of a fascination of our own extremities, upon the discovery of unsatisfactory conclusions. A Place in the Sun, made a little before all that confusion, is resultingly concerned with the conditions that warranted us opening our doors in the first place.
Lately I’ve been watching reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-air (1990-1996), partly because of the similarities it shares with another seminal ’90s piece, To Sleep with Anger (1990). Though diametrically opposed in many ways, both works are principally concerned with our aversion to the visitor, and both works theorize this aversion as projection. The Banks’ family initially dislikes Will because he’s a reminder of the blackness their social climbing has estranged them from, as is the case with Danny Glover and the family in To Sleep with Anger. A Place in the Sun ostensibly deals with White people, but I can’t help but think that a little of the aforementioned lingers in this movie.
Just before the protagonist George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) enters his wealthy uncle’s estate, the latter makes a remark about George reminding him of his “bellhop”: one of a few classes of labor that, in those days, was racially ambiguous. What simultaneously is and isn’t being broadcasted by this introduction is that, by making this comparison, the uncle is saying that inviting George into their family is the equivalent of inviting a Black person. An assessment that would be a reach, if only the next two hours didn’t unfold.
To paraphrase James Baldwin, what White people don’t know about Black people, is what they don’t know about themselves. And what rich White people, such as the Eastmans, refuse to know about themselves, is what cousin George intends to unveil. The humanity, love, and life anthropomorphized through George, is really present in all the characters the movie purveys. And the magic is in seeing him act as a conduit for others to access those latent passions.
A Place in the Sun
1951
dir. George Stevens
122 min.
Screening Thursday 5/4, 7:00 p.m. at Coolidge Corner Theater
New digital restoration!
Part of the ongoing series: Big Screen Classics
