From Theodore Dreiser novel, adapted by Patrick Kearney and Michael Wilson. Poor relative to rich family Montgomery Clift gets job in Uncle's factory, falls for simple but loyal worker Shelley Winters, gets her pregnant. But meanwhile he falls for socialite Elizabeth Taylor. (The scene where they meet, over a snooker table, is strongly reminiscent of the initial meeting between Jonathan Rhys-Myers and Scarlett Johannson in Match Point, interestingly).
Stevens directs in long takes, sometimes with one of the characters back to camera; William Hornbeck uses dissolves a lot, particularly between scenes, but occasionally to striking effect, particularly where a shot of the lake very slowly fades into one of Shelley. (Poor Shelley, she ends up drowned in Night of The Hunter, too.) His editing inspired Jim Clark on The Innocents.
Nice deep focus photography from William C Mellor, winning Oscar, such as in the great scene where the kids zoom away from the jetty, whilst we hear on the radio the body's been found.
Perhaps goes on a bit in courtroom scene - there's not really anywhere for it to go at this point (Raymond Burr is the DA). The irony is it looks like he's changed his mind about killing her. But he's done a lousy job about covering his tracks.
Good score from Franz Waxman winning him Oscar, along with Hornbeck, Stevens, writers and costumes (Edith Head, one of her eight).
"Stevens' version of the Dreiser masterpiece ultimately again misses the novel's tragic force. The novel's sociological study of class conflict is sidetracked, so one's abiding memoir of the film was not of a factory worker's ambition cheated by fate, but of enormous close-ups of Taylor and Clift kissing." John Douglas Eames, The Paramount Story.
Q thought she spotted an early version of the Jaws theme in the lake sequence.
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