A Place in the Sun (DVD, 2001)

George Stevens' lavish adaptation of this classic casts Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor as the star-crossed lovers. As George Eastman (Clift) hitchhikes into the town where a job awaits him at the factory of his affluent Uncle Charles (Herbert Heyes), the lovely Angela Vickers (Taylor) speeds by him. Although the job entails packing bathing suits all day, the young man works hard in his eagerness to get ahead. Driven by loneliness, he becomes involved with coworker Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), a simple woman of limited appeal, in a relationship which defies company policy. After receiving a promotion, he's invited to a party at the home of the wealthy Vickers family, where he meets Angela, and the two quickly fall in love. While he and Angela continue to see each other, he is forced to continue his involvement with Alice, who threatens to get him fired by revealing their relationship. At the end of a whirlwind summer George and Angela receive the approval of her father (Sheppard Strudwick) on their marriage plans. Shortly thereafter, Alice informs George that she's pregnant with his child. Stevens transforms Theodore Dreiser's biting critique of America's caste system into a glossy romantic melodrama. Sumptuously photographed by William Mellor, who frames the almost inhumanly attractive couple in some of the most dizzyingly enraptured close-ups in movie history, the film features excellent performances by Shelley Winters and Clift, whose presence maintains an earnest, haunted passivity.