Lights, Camera, Conversation... — The timelessness of some tales

Old movies, sometimes, can seem shockingly new, as if they were made yesterday. All that's needed is empathetic identification

A still from "A PLACE IN THE SUN"

After a star departs, we reach for the films to remind us that she's still with us. And so, I settled on “A Place in the Sun”, which satisfied quite a few criteria. I hadn't seen it in years. It has Taylor in one of her earliest dramatic roles, where she looked her fragile-loveliest. And, it is in black-and-white, which is always a treat from the studio days, rock-sturdy compositions with a mysterious diaphanousness that all but disappeared once the world of cinema turned to all-colour.

As I began to watch, I was well-prepared for a dated curio — it won six Academy Awards, after all, and the maxim of mature movies dictates that the more the Oscars, the less it has lasted — but I was surprised, even shocked, at how gut-churningly visceral it still is. A film I expected to be a shrine to Taylor — at her Madonna-whore best; she's both the mother whose breast soothes the stricken hero and the hourglass-swimsuit poster girl who inflames him — turned out to be a monument to Montgomery Clift.

He plays George Eastman, a man from the wrong side of the tracks who convinces himself that all he's good for are an assembly-line job and the arms of fellow-prole Shelley Winters (who was always playing women who fell in love with the wrong man and paid the ultimate price — run over by a car in “Lolita”, sliced by a knife in “The Night of the Hunter”, and drowned in this story) — until he meets the blue-blooded Taylor.

Taylor falls in love with Clift, and his greatest scene is his clean confession to her father about his more-than-modest background. He's framed with his back to us, so we don't see his trademark deer-in-headlights gaze and his slightly-delayed reactions to events, but his Method-y diction — he utters words twice and makes it seem like the mere act of speaking is a mortal struggle — is all that's needed to tell us that despite his thoughts of killing his girlfriend (she dies, but not through his hands), he is not a bad man at all.

He's like us, wanting something better than what he's been born with, a place of his own in the sun — he's A Talented Mr. Ripley without the talent, without the cunning, just the yearning. And, this empathetic identification makes the stomach tighten as the noose tightens around him.

Stevens constantly reminds us of the law on his hero's trail — through radio announcements, the sirens of police vehicles, and the insistent background music that keeps building until the superb scene where Clift is finally caught. The music subsides. We see the lawman before Clift sees him, smoke snaking out of his lips before this simple declaration of doom — “You're George Eastman.” Clift's defeated reply is equally simple — “Yes.” The lawman then utters the inevitable — “You're under arrest.”

We watch old films from a distance, consoling ourselves with such platitudinous reassurances as “it was radical for its time” — but if the story resonates, if the protagonist's plight seizes us, there's still a startling immediacy. Something that was supposed to be about the timelessness of Taylor ended up a chilling reminder that the universe is listening in on our darkest thoughts in our darkest moments, and it's only a matter of time before we pay the price.

(Lights, Camera, Conversation... is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films)