Our current Movie of the Month, 1951’s A Place in the Sun, is a high-emotions noir about a desperate social climber who drowns his pregnant girlfriend so she doesn’t get in the way of his wealthier, prettier romantic prospect. In essence, it’s an epic-fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor. She was the most marriageable woman of all time, after all, apparently lethally so. At the time, Taylor was just starting to make the transition from child star to adult romantic lead, and A Place in the Sun doesn’t ask her to do much other than to look elegant while modeling classic gowns designed by Edith Head. Most of the film’s more serious brooding is left to Taylor’s costars Montgomery Clift & Shelley Winters as the factory-worker couple who’re undone by her natural glamor.
Elizabeth Taylor’s onscreen transformation into a convincingly mature actress did not begin & end with A Place in the Sun. It was a gradual rebranding over several projects under her studio-system contract with MGM. If you’re curious to track her progress through this transitional era, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.
Conspirator (1949)
Elizabeth Taylor’s first role as an adult character was co-lead of the Cold War espionage thriller Conspirator, starring opposite Robert Taylor. Elizabeth plays Robert’s 18-year-old bride but was only 16 at the time of shooting, while her co-star was more than double her age, in his late 30s. That might sound like a gross, old-fashioned approach to Old Hollywood romance—and maybe it is—but it’s at least acknowledged & addressed in the text. Elizabeth plays a young, bratty teenager who has no business getting married, while Robert plays a Soviet spy posing as a British officer who’s attracted to her because she’s naive and easy to manipulate. There’s some sly humor to the way the pair star in entirely separate movies for the first half of Conspirator. Elizabeth is playing girlish, flirty games while Robert is plotting to subvert the Western Bloc, often undermined by his young wife’s immature antics. That tension slowly deflates once the bride is fully clued into her husband’s true allegiances, but the path to that reveal is more fun than you might expect.
Of course, the teenage Taylor radiates pure movie star glamor in this otherwise mediocre Red Scare noir — the same natural glamor that she echoes in the soon-to-come A Place in the Sun. There’s something incredibly charming about her character’s insistence on being treated like an adult, while also being too scared to sleep alone during thunderstorms and waiting around like a puppy for her crush to call on the telephone. Conspirator is far from her best onscreen work, but it is a clear marker of her transition into being seen as an adult by her audience, almost to the point of it being her character’s arc. In a third-act argument with her Filthy Commie husband, he remarks, “You’ve grown up, haven’t you?”, and she spits back “You can’t lie to me anymore, if that’s what you mean.” The couple’s age gap may make for an uncomfortable pairing, but the movie clearly knows what it’s doing with it; the paranoid anti-Communist politics on the other hand . . .
Father of the Bride (1950)
Vincent Minnelli’s original adaptation of the 1949 novel Father of the Bride is just as bubbly & fluffy as its later adaptations in Norah Ephron’s 1991 version and the most recent straight-to-HBO-Max remake. Like in A Place in the Sun, Taylor isn’t asked to do much in the picture besides look elegant in her couture gowns, this time including an iconic wedding dress (that ironically telegraphs of her many tabloid-covered weddings decades down the line). Most of the film’s psychological grit defaults to the titular father (Spencer Tracy), who narrates his neurotic breakdown as he watches Daddy’s Little Girl prepare to walk down the wedding aisle, struggling to reconcile how he sees her vs her actual, adult autonomy. In that way, it’s a perfect role for the teenaged Taylor, who was asking audiences to stop looking at her like a little girl and start seeing her as an adult. It’s also a strange, upsetting reflection of macho insecurities lurking just under the surface of every American dad’s Neanderthalic skull.
The 1950 Father of the Bride might be light-hearted fluff, but it’s still high-quality fluff when compared to the mawkish sentimentality of its two remakes. At the very least, its surrealistic nightmare sequence in which Tracy sinks into the floor while walking Taylor down the aisle is the high-water mark for the series as visual art. More importantly, there’s something about the promo shots of Tracy spanking Taylor in her wedding dress that gets to the core of this series’ Suburban Dad Psychosis more than anything that happens in the actual films. This is fundamentally a comedy about how fathers infantilize their daughters for as long as they can get away with it, so there’s something apt about casting a young actor who was pleading to no longer be infantilized by her audience as a child star.
Giant (1956)
Taylor didn’t fully come into her own as a lead actor playing adult characters until she reunited with A Place in the Sun director George Stevens for the sprawling Texas family drama Giant. Specifically, it happens about halfway into the epic melodrama, just when my borrowed library DVD prompted me to flip the disc over to Side B. In the first 100 minutes on Side A, Taylor plays a defiant but romantic teenager who’s swept off her feet by a Texas cattle rancher (Rock Hudson), only to discover that her handsome, charming husband is also a raging racist & misogynist in most social settings, as is the way of his home state. At the start of Side B, she’s shown knitting in the family parlor, her hair pasted grey for an unconvincing geriatric stage-drama effect. Decades into her marriage to an old-fashioned, uptight cowboy, she’s still a progressive do-gooder who challenges his Conservative views on women and the Mexican servant class every chance she gets, which means she has a lot more to chew on here than she has in Conspirator, Father of the Bride, or even A Place in the Sun. Giant is the kind of well-meaning, anti-racist drama that’s just old & creaky enough to undercut its point by casting white actors in brownface for the minor roles, but it’s still surprisingly left of center for a studio production of this epic scale, and Taylor is the main mouthpiece for its political messaging.
I’m tempted to pitch Giant as what might happen if Douglas Sirk guest-directed a season of Yellowstone, but the existence of Sirk’s Written on the Wind (released the same year, also starring Hudson) makes that comparison somewhat redundant. Stevens was a formidable contemporary of Sirk’s, but there’s nothing especially stylish or personal about his filmmaking craft that makes Giant more essential viewing than Written on the Wind or Imitation of Life, which combine to cover a lot of the same thematic territory. He was a talented workman director within the studio system, most reliable for his ability to manage large-scale productions without them spiraling out of control. It’s not a flashy, auteurist approach to directing, but it does allow for the Old Hollywood dream factory to do its work at peak efficiency. If nothing else, Giant is worth seeing for the spectacle of its cast. It almost seems impossible that a single movie could gather Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper and Sal Mineo all in one picture, but when you stretch your runtime out 3.5 hours and your setting over multiple decades, you have the space for that kind of feat. Taylor & Hudson are the white-hot center of the drama, though, and they’re the main reason to clear an evening to watch it in full. When Hudson first spots a teenage Taylor on her family farm, she’s riding a wild, misbehaved horse and he absentmindedly calls her a “beautiful animal” in a way that equates the two. Years into their marriage, that wild streak never fades, and the adult version of Taylor’s character is given plenty open land to run free and buck Texas social conventions, to her husband’s fury & frustration. It was a career-making role for her, one that cleared a path to the even juicier roles in Tennessee Williams & Edward Albee adaptations that were just over the horizon.
-Brandon Ledet