A Film Canon

This exquisite adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy translates its deep fear of upward mobility into an aesthetic of horizontality - from the extraordinary depictions of the lake surface where George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) commits the crime around which the narrative is structured, and which are among the most beautiful, Romantic approaches to the American landscape in film to date, to beloved Angela Vickers' (Elizabeth Taylor) preoccupation with speeding, by way of the production line of her father's factory and, ultimately, the expansive set from which a nascent version of the courtroom drama is extrapolated. Less literally, Stevens imbues the movement from frame to frame with an unprecedented fluidity, thanks to a combination of stately pans, fades (occasionally with a third image intervening, creating the nexus between pan and superimposition), slow- motion, pauses and silence, all of which culminate with a series of extreme close-ups of Clift and Taylor's faces. Not only do these redeem the latter's fairly simplistic acting, but they gesture towards a new, more explicitly adolescent, cinematic eroticism, predicated on the very breathless anticipation that Dreiser's novel seems to ultimately deride, but which, in Stevens' hands, becomes tantamount to the virginal ecstasies of the original pioneers, giving the lie to the film's concluding claim to have documented the moment at which youth "emerges from the shelter of life into a world of grown-up problems for the first time"; or, at least, to its implicit dichotomy between youth and "the perspective of genuine problems".