George Stevens' 1951 adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy may be far from the original novel, but in its way it is more American a tragedy. Stevens tells Dreiser's story of a reluctant factory worker who is fatally drawn to the world of the idle rich, but his film also evokes a new American dream: Hollywood, the dream factory. Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor at the height of their popularity loom larger than life in the closer-than-close-ups that mark their love affair in A Place in the Sun; "I loved you before I ever saw you," the worker-hero admits to the fuzzy image of his debutante lover. Dreiser's observations on class strains in America are not lost in the "big picture," only updated. And Shelley Winters gives a wonderfully sympathetic/pathetic portrayal of Clift's pregnant textile-worker girlfriend, earning one of the film's many Oscar nominations for her efforts. But even the look on her face as Clift throws her over for his soft-focus lover recognizes an unsettling truth about A Place in the Sun: the issue is finally not class but the personal trauma of a young man whose chronic wanderlust and indecisiveness are aggravated by a harping libido-Montgomery Clift, in the moody, interior performance that crystalized his screen persona for all time. He singlehandedly takes the film out of the realm of social determinants and into Dostoevskian depths of psychology.