Montgomery CLIFT, Shelley WINTERS, Liz TAYLOR Lobby Card A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951) Vintage & Original, George STEVENS

This 11 x 14 inch Lobby Card would look great framed on display in your home theater, signed or autographed or to add to your portfolio or scrapbook! Some dealers buy my lots (see my other auctions) to break up and sell separately at classic film conventions at much higher prices than my low minimum. A worthy investment for gift giving too!

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This LOBBY CARD is an original release (vintage, from the original Hollywood studio release) and not a digital copy or reproduction printing.  

DESCRIPTION:

Previously filmed in 1931 under its original title, Theodore Dreiser's bulky but brilliant novel An American Tragedy was remade in 1951 by George Stevens as A Place in the Sun. Montgomery Clift stars as George Eastman, a handsome and charming but basically aimless young man who goes to work in a factory run by a distant, wealthy relative. Feeling lonely one evening, he has a brief rendezvous with assembly-line worker Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), but he forgets all about her when he falls for dazzling socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor). Alice can't forget about him, though: she is pregnant with his child. Just when George's personal and professional futures seem assured, Alice demands that he marry her or she'll expose him to his society friends. This predicament sets in motion a chain of events that will ultimately include George's arrest and numerous other tragedies, including a vicious cross-examination by a D.A. played by future Perry Mason Raymond Burr. A huge improvement over the 1931 An American Tragedy, directed by Josef von Sternberg, A Place in the Sun softens some of the rough edges of Dreiser's naturalism, most notably in the passages pertaining to George's and Angela's romance. Even those 1951 bobbysoxers who wouldn't have been caught dead poring through the Dreiser original were mesmerized by the loving, near-erotic full facial closeups of Clift and Taylor as they pledge eternal devotion. A Place in the Sun won six Oscars, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography, although it lost Best Picture to An American in Paris.

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CONDITION:

This quality vintage and original Lobby Card is in EXCELLENT to Near MINT condition (old yes, with the normal patina [hand dirt], minor scuffs, faint scratches and there are thirteen very, very tiny pinholes), it is has sharp, crisp details and it is not a re-release, not digital or a repro. It came from the studio to the theater during the year of release and then went into storage where the collector I bought them from kept them for over 62 years!  I have recently acquired two huge collections from life long movie buffs who collected for decades… I need to offer these choice items for sale on a first come, first service basis to the highest bidder.    

SHIPPING:

Domestic shipping would be FIRST CLASS and well packed in plastic, with several layers of cardboard support/protection and delivery tracking. International shipping depends on the location, and the package would weigh close to a pound (14-16 ounces) with even more extra ridge packing.

PAYMENTS:

Please pay PayPal! All of my items are unconditionally guaranteed. E-mail me with any questions you may have. This is Larry41, wishing you great movie memories and good luck…  

BACKGROUND:

A PLACE IN THE SUN removes much of the insight and depth of Theodore Dreiser's source novel, taking just the plot and turning it into a solidly entertaining Hollywood production. Director George Stevens was a capable craftsman who understood the advantages of a studio's resources. He shows his skills in combining top-grade stars and a powerful story, while giving the film a glossy veneer of class. The performances are generally strong, most notably Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Helped strongly by its first-rate tech credits, the film won six Oscars, including for director Stevens, costume designer Edith Head, and composer Franz Waxman, though the Best Picture nod went to An American in Paris.

Along with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift typified the emergence of a new breed of Hollywood star: Prodigiously talented, intense, and defiantly non-conformist, he refused to play by the usual rules of celebrity, actively shunning the spotlight and working solely according to his own whims and desires. A handsome and gifted actor, he channeled the pain and torment so rampant in his private life into his screen and stage roles, delivering remarkably poignant and sensitive performances which influenced generations of actors to come. Born October 17, 1920, in Omaha, NE, Clift began performing in summer stock at the age of 14 in a production of Fly Away Home. Within seven months, the play was running on Broadway, and throughout the remainder of his teen years he remained a fixture on the New York stage. Next, in 1935, was Cole Porter's Jubilee. In 1940, Clift also appeared with the Lunts in There Shall Be No Night, and in 1942 performed in The Skin of Our Teeth. His work in the Lillian Hellman smash The Searching Wind brought any number of offers from Hollywood, but he rejected them to appear in The Foxhole in the Parlor; finally, after earning acclaim for Tennessee Williams' You Touched Me, Clift agreed to make his film debut in the classic 1948 Howard Hawks Western Red River.   From the outset, Clift refused to play the studio game: He did not sign any long-term contracts and chose to work only on projects which intrigued him, like Red River. However, the film was so long in post-production that screen audiences instead got their first glimpse of him in Fred Zinneman's The Search, where unanimous praise for his sensitive, unsentimental, and Oscar-nominated performance made Clift among the hottest commodities in the business. He agreed to appear in three films for Paramount (only completing two): The first was William Wyler's 1949 adaptation of Henry James' The Heiress, with Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard scheduled to follow. At the last minute, Clift backed out of the project, however, to star in 20th Century Fox's 1950 war drama The Big Lift. Upon returning to Paramount, he starred in George Stevens' classic A Place in the Sun, earning a second Academy Award nomination for his performance opposite Elizabeth Taylor, who became his real-life confidante. Clift then disappeared from view for two years, coaxed out of self-imposed exile by Alfred Hitchcock to star in the 1953 thriller I Confess.   For Zinnemann, Clift next starred in the war epic From Here to Eternity; the film was the biggest success of his career, earning him another Best Actor bid (one of the movie's 13 total nominations; it took home eight, including Best Picture). After headlining Vittorio De Sica's Stazione Termini, Clift returned to Broadway to appear in The Seagull; in order to commit to the project, he needed to turn down any number of screen offers, including On the Waterfront and East of Eden. In total, he was away from cinema for four years, not resurfacing prior to the 1957 smash Raintree County; its success re-established him among Hollywood's most popular stars, but offscreen Clift's life was troubled. Tragedy struck when a horrific auto accident left him critically injured. He gradually recovered, but his face was left scarred and partially paralyzed. Still, Clift continued performing, delivering performances informed by even greater depth and pathos than before. His first project in the wake of the accident was 1958's The Young Lions, his first and only collaboration with Marlon Brando.   In 1959, Clift next reunited with Taylor for Suddenly, Last Summer, then starred in Elia Kazan's Wild River. In 1961, he co-starred in The Misfits (the final completed film from another Hollywood tragedy, Marilyn Monroe), then delivered a stunning cameo as a witness in the Stanley Kramer courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremburg. He then starred as Freud for director John Huston. The film was a box-office disaster, suffering a lengthy delay in production when Clift was forced to undergo surgery to remove cataracts from both eyes. He later sued Universal to recover his $200,000 fee for the project; the studio countersued for close to $700,000, alleging his excessive drinking had doomed the picture's success. The matter was settled out of court, but it crippled Clift's reputation, and because of this, and his increasing health problems, he did not work for another four years until director Raoul Levy offered him the lead in the 1966 thriller Lautlose Waffen. At the insistence of star Elizabeth Taylor, he was then offered a supporting role in Reflections of a Golden Eye, but before filming began, he died of a heart attack at his New York City home on July 23, 1966. He was just 45 years old.

Elizabeth Taylor was the ultimate movie star: violet-eyed, luminously beautiful, and bigger than life; although never the most gifted actress, she was the most magnetic, commanding the spotlight with unparalleled power. Whether good (two Oscars, one of the first million-dollar paychecks, and charity work), bad (health and weight problems, drug battles, and other tragedies), or ugly (eight failed marriages, movie disasters, and countless scandals), no triumph or setback was too personal for media consumption.   Born February 27, 1932, in London, Taylor literally grew up in public. At the beginning of World War II, her family relocated to Hollywood, and by the age of ten she was already under contract at Universal. She made her screen debut in 1942's There's One Born Every Minute, followed a year later by a prominent role in Lassie Come Home. For MGM, she co-starred in the 1944 adaptation of Jane Eyre, then appeared in The White Cliffs of Dover. With her first lead role as a teen equestrian in the 1944 family classic National Velvet, Taylor became a star. To their credit, MGM did not exploit her, despite her incredible beauty; she did not even reappear onscreen for two more years, returning with Courage of Lassie. Taylor next starred as Cynthia in 1947, followed by Life With Father. In Julia Misbehaves, she enjoyed her first grown-up role, and then portrayed Amy in the 1947 adaptation of Little Women.   Taylor's first romantic lead came opposite Robert Taylor in 1949's Conspirator. Her love life was already blossoming offscreen as well; that same year she began dating millionaire Howard Hughes, but broke off the relationship to marry hotel heir Nicky Hilton when she was just 17 years old. The marriage made international headlines, and in 1950 Taylor scored a major hit as Spencer Tracy's daughter in Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride; a sequel, Father's Little Dividend, premiered a year later. Renowned as one of the world's most beautiful women, Taylor was nevertheless largely dismissed as an actress prior to an excellent performance in the George Stevens drama A Place in the Sun.   In 1956, however, the actress reunited with Stevens to star in his epic adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel Giant. It was a blockbuster, as was her 1957 follow-up Raintree County, for which she earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination.   Taylor's sexy image was further elevated by an impossibly sensual performance in 1958's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; another Tennessee Williams adaptation, Suddenly Last Summer, followed a year later, and both were highly successful. To complete the terms of her MGM contract, she grudgingly agreed to star in 1960's Butterfield 8; upon completing the film Taylor traveled to Britain to begin work on the much-heralded Cleopatra, for which she received an unprecedented one-million-dollar fee. In London she became dangerously ill, and underwent a life-saving emergency tracheotomy. Hollywood sympathy proved sufficient for her to win a Best Actress Oscar for Butterfield 8, although much of the good will extended toward her again dissipated in the wake of the mounting difficulties facing Cleopatra. With five million dollars already spent, producers pulled the plug and relocated the shoot to Italy, replacing co-star Stephen Boyd with Richard Burton. The final tally placed the film at a cost of 37 million dollars, making it the most costly project in film history; scheduled for a 16-week shoot, the production actually took years, and despite mountains of pre-publicity, it was a huge disaster at the box office upon its 1963 premiere.   Still, the notice paid to Cleopatra paled in comparison to the scrutiny which greeted Taylor's latest romance, with Burton, and perhaps no Hollywood relationship was ever the subject of such intense media coverage. Theirs was a passionate, stormy relationship, played out in the press and onscreen in films including 1963's The V.I.P.'s and 1965's The Sandpiper. In 1966, the couple starred in Mike Nichols' controversial directorial debut Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, arguably Taylor's best performance; overweight, verbally cutting, and defiantly unglamorous, she won a second Oscar for her work as the embittered wife of Burton's alcoholic professor. Their real-life marriage managed to survive, however, and after Taylor appeared opposite Marlon Brando in 1967's Reflections in a Golden Eye, she and Burton reunited for The Comedians. She also starred in Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew, but none were successful at the box office; 1968's Doctor Faustus was a disaster, and later that year Boom! failed to gross even one-quarter of its costs. After 1969's Secret Ceremony, Taylor starred in The Only Game in Town, a year later; when they too failed, her days of million-dollar salaries were over, and she began working on percentage.   With Burton, Taylor next appeared in a small role in 1971's Under Milk Wood; next was X, Y and Zee, followed by another spousal collaboration, Hammersmith Is Out. In 1972 the Burtons also co-starred in a television feature, Divorce His, Divorce Hers; the title proved prescient, as two years later, the couple did indeed divorce after a decade together.   With no film offers forthcoming, Taylor turned to the stage, and in 1981 she starred in a production of The Little Foxes. In 1983, she and Burton also reunited to co-star on Broadway in Private Lives. Television also remained an option, and in 1983 she and Carol Burnett co-starred in Between Friends. However, Taylor's primary focus during the decades to follow was charity work; following the death of her close friend, Rock Hudson, she became a leader in the battle against AIDS, and for her efforts won the 1993 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. In 1997, the actress once again became a featured tabloid topic when she underwent brain surgery to remove a benign tumor. The same year, she received attention of a more favorable variety with Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration of Life, a TV special in which she was paid tribute by a number of stars including Madonna, Shirley MacLaine, John Travolta, Dennis Hopper, and Cher. Taylor would continue to make her voice heard when it came to issues that she felt strongly about.   In 2003, Taylor refused to attend the Academy Awards out of protest against the Iraq War. Taylor also worked tirelessly in the name of AIDS research, advocacy, and awareness, even appearing in a 2007 staging of the A.R. Gurney play Love Letters opposite James Earl Jones to benefit Taylor's own AIDS foundation -- a performance that earned over a million dollars for the cause. Sadly, Taylor was increasingly plagued by health problems, undergoing cardiac surgery in 2009 to replace a leaky heart valve. On March 23, 2011, she passed away from congestive heart failure. She was 79.

American actress Shelley Winters was the daughter of a tailor's cutter; her mother was a former opera singer. Winters evinced her mom's influence at age four, when she made an impromptu singing appearance at a St. Louis amateur night. When her father moved to Long Island to be closer to the New York garment district, Winters took acting lessons at the New School for Social Research and the Actors Studio. Short stints as a model and a chorus girl led to her Broadway debut in the S.J. Perelman comedy The Night Before Christmas in 1940. Winters signed a Columbia Pictures contract in 1943, mostly playing bits, except when loaned to United Artists for an important role in Knickerbocker Holiday (1944). Realizing she was getting nowhere, she took additional acting instructions and performed in nightclubs.   The breakthrough came with her role as a "good time girl" murdered by insane stage star Ronald Colman in A Double Life (1947). Her roles became increasingly more prominent during her years at Universal-International, as did her offstage abrasive attitude; the normally mild-mannered James Stewart, Winters' co-star in Winchester '73 (1950), said after filming that the actress should have been spanked. Winters' performance as the pathetic factory girl impregnated and then killed by Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951) won her an Oscar nomination; unfortunately, for every Place in the Sun, her career was blighted by disasters like Behave Yourself (1951).   Disheartened by bad films and a turbulent marriage, Winters returned to Broadway in A Hatful of Rain, in which she received excellent reviews and during which she fell for her future third husband, Anthony Franciosa. Always battling a weight problem, Winters was plump enough to be convincing as middle-aged Mrs. Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), for which Winters finally got her Oscar. In the 1960s, Winters portrayed a brothel madam in two films, The Balcony (1963) and A House is Not a Home (1964), roles that would have killed her career ten years earlier, but which now established her in the press as an actress willing to take any professional risk for the sake of her art. Unfortunately, many of her performances in subsequent films like Wild in the Streets (1968) and Bloody Mama (1970) became more shrill than compelling, somewhat lessening her standing as a performer of stature.   During this period, Winters made some fairly outrageous appearances on talk shows, where she came off as the censor's nightmare; she also made certain her point-of-view wouldn't be ignored, as in the moment when she poured her drink over Oliver Reed's head after Reed made a sexist remark on The Tonight Show. Appearances in popular films like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and well-received theater appearances, like her 1974 tour in Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, helped counteract such disappointments as the musical comedy Minnie's Boys (as the Marx Brothers' mother) and the movie loser Flap (1970). Treated generously by director Paul Mazursky in above-average films like Blume in Love (1974) and Next Stop Greenwich Village (1977), Winters managed some excellent performances, though she still leaned toward hamminess when the script was weak. Shelley Winters added writing to her many achievements, penning a pair of tell-all autobiographies which delineate a private life every bit as rambunctious as some of Winters' screen performances.   The '90s found a resurgence in Winters' career, as she was embraced by indie filmmakers (for movies like Heavy and The Portrait of a Lady), although she found greater fame in a recurring role on the sitcom Roseanne. She died of heart failure at age 85 in Beverly Hills, CA, in early 2006.

American producer/director/cinematographer George Stevens made his professional acting debut at age five in the company of his actor parents. Developing an interest in photography as a hobby, Stevens became an assistant movie cameraman at the age of 17. From 1927 through 1930, he was principal cameraman at Hal Roach Studios, shooting such classic two-reelers as Laurel and Hardy's Two Tars (1928) and Below Zero (1930), as well as a handful of feature films, including the 1927 Western No Man's Law. Stevens was elevated to director in 1930 for Roach's Boy Friends series. Dismissed from Roach during an economy drive in 1931, Stevens moved to Universal and then to RKO to direct comedy shorts (he later professed to hate two-reel comedies, though he enjoyed the company of the comedians with whom he worked, especially Laurel and Hardy). RKO promoted Stevens to features in 1934; after several medium-budget projects, he was assigned the "A" feature Alice Adams (1935) over the protests of the film's star, Katharine Hepburn. When Alice Adams proved successful, Hepburn's attitude toward Stevens did a "180," and she insisted that he direct her starring vehicle Quality Street (1936). Another Stevens triumph from this period was the Astaire/Rogers confection Swing Time (1936), in which the director's father Landers Stevens played an important supporting role. Producing as well as directing from 1938's Vivacious Lady onward, Stevens turned out a string of critical and financial successes: Gunga Din (1939) for RKO, Woman of the Year (1942) for MGM, and Penny Serenade (1941), Talk of the Town (1942) and The More the Merrier (1943), all for Columbia. Stevens' directorial style displayed the same acute sense of visual dynamics that had distinguished his earlier work as a cameraman; the director refined and improved upon that style through sweat and persistence. Once he reached the "A" list, Stevens became one of the most meticulous and painstaking directors in the business, commencing production only after extensive research, filming take after take until perfection was achieved, and then spending as much as a full year editing the finished product. During World War II, Stevens was made an officer in the Signal Corps, filming vivid color footage of such historical milestones as the D-Day maneuvers and the liberation of the death camps; much of this footage was incorporated into the 1984 documentary George Stevens: A Filmaker's Journey, assembled by George Stevens Jr. After the war, Stevens produced and directed his final RKO assignment, I Remember Mama (1948), then moved to Paramount for what many consider his crowning achievement -- 1951's A Place in the Sun, a brilliant filmization of the Theodore Dreiser novel An American Tragedy. While much of the film's content is dated, Stevens succeeded in transferring a bulky and verbose novel to the screen in purely visual terms; he also thrilled the bobbysoxer fans of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor by shooting their love scenes in huge, provocatively lit closeups. A Place in the Sun won Stevens his first Oscar for best directing in 1951. Fifteen years later, he threatened legal action against NBC should the network edit out any portion of Place in the Sun for telecasting purposes, and he was backed up in his suit by the California Legislature. The more time and effort Stevens expended on his individual projects, the fewer he produced. His output between 1953 and 1959 consisted of Shane (1953); Giant (1956), in which he put the awkward Cinemascope screen to superb artistic use, winning his second Oscar in the process; and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). From 1960 through 1965, Stevens labored on a mammoth filmization of the life of Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). The film was a failure for several reasons, not least of which was Stevens' curious insistence upon using big-name stars in every role (this is the movie in which John Wayne, as the centurion at the Crucifixion, proclaims "Trew-ly this man wuz the son of Gawd"). Greatest Story lost Stevens his hard-earned autonomy; for his last film, The Only Game in Town (1970), he was little more than a glorified hired hand to stars Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty. While George Stevens' reputation was tarnished by the disappointments of his last years, critics and fans alike have taken a "forgive and forget" stance since his death in 1975, preferring to cite his huge manifest of hits rather than his final faltering misses.