A Place in the Sun

A Place in the Sunⁱ is as appalling a piece of propapulp as ever was churned out in support of America's "abstinence only" abuse of adolescent sexuality & associated psychoses.

"Nigger uhh I mean Boy ehmmm... Young man!"

goes the story narrative,

"don't reap the low hanging girl next door."

Right ?

"Because you never know when Massah's pretty young virgin daughter takes a shining to you. Which'll be consummatedly complete yet perfectly inadherent to any explication (seeing how it coincidentally makes no fucking sense nor ever happens as such, no girl ever fell for a guy for no reason ; but nevertheless it's what we need you to act as if you believe so we're gonna make it look as if it happened on our consciousness subversion machine) aaanddd... yeah!!! Wouldn't you be sorry then! Gotta save yourself for marriageⁱⁱ, boi. Gotta save yourself until we're well and done with you ; and don't you forget it, neither."

This apparently makes sense, somewhere (or rather -- as troglodytism knowns no bounds, apparently there's places under the Sun blessed with such retarded young males as'd actually buy into this completely insane not to mention self-contradictory six-ways-from-Sunday fecal compactionⁱⁱⁱ). Because the self-obvious (not to mention quite traditional, to say nothing of naturally occuring)

"Oh by the way lovergirl, once we're married there's going to be a maid living in with us. Well, mostly you, really, I got shit to do. I think she's pregnant, too. You know how they go."

apparently never happened or something. Lalala, nobody in Montgomery, Alabama ever heard of it, so there!

Anyways. Montgomery (Clift) is perfectly worthless as the mysterious youth of subnormal intelligence who's been raised by wolves (personified by a remarkably-lookalike rendition of Virginia Woolf, not merely physically but especially intellectually) in a cabin in the woods somewhere who otherwise spent his first two-three decades mostly keeping to himself / trying for a Norman Bates impersonation. He's worthless for sundry and countless reasons, among which boundless abundance I'm going to arbitrarily pick one : when he's laying on her chest, "asleep", his neck's extended in her arms, exposing a self-obvious knife fight mark. This fails to match the portrait of the shy and silent "strong" type, he makes you want to see his inner arms, fully expecting to encounter the black streaks in their usual places.

None it works any better, not really. The young hussy is revving a (slightly tinny, yet) engine under the ample hood, but she never gets to do much with it besides revving -- and this to the production's great loss, truly. The overpowering idea the viewer's left upon seeing Taylor in this thing necessarily goes along the lines of "gosh-howdy, if they just let her ad-lib she'd probably have done much better than this script". She never gets one good line, it's all Tin Alley hackathon through and through. And supposedly it comes from something them hillbillies actually thought a play. I really can't imagine how Americans managed their daily life in civilised society. If they were so apt to mistake that for a play, they probably mistook hatchets for cutlery and dung for perfume. "Don't worry, it'll fall off once it dries" America over there, born and bred.

People Idiots go around acting like spending this period of her life shooting porn is some kinda waste of a girl's time ; but having seen what they did to poor ol' Lizzie... there's really worse things she could do. Signing with MGM not even chief on the list (though surely towards the top).

1. 1951, by George Stevens, with a very visibly teen-aged Elizabeth Taylor. [↩]
2. Apparently I never reviewed Double Dynamite, oddly enough. [↩]
3. Fecal compactions are the natural byproduct of anal retentives "trusting their gut". Theirs is just as full of shit as everyone else's ; but under the pressure specific to them... well, it compacts, whadda ya want from me. [↩]