Understanding Editing: A Place in the Sun

This is the fifth in my 2025 monthly series Understanding Editing, in which I am alternating Oscar winners for best editing between those I've seen and those I haven't, chronologically, to get a better sense of what makes a superlative version of that craft.

Up until ten minutes before I started watching A Place in the Sun, I thought I was going to be watching King Solomon's Mines. 

Mines, the 1950 Oscar winner for best editing, had been the movie slotted in to take the May spot in Understanding Editing since the series started. I'd say the reason for that somewhat arbitrary decision was that I saw the remake of King Solomon's Mines from 1985, starring Richard Chamberlain, and it was one of the first movies I saw in the theater that I remember really hating. Of course, I couldn't in 2025 meaningfully compare the Oscar winner with a movie I saw 40 years ago, but it was a useful tiebreaker anyway.

I can't remember if I scouted it to check its availability for rental at the time I set the schedule for the series, but if I did, I didn't do a very good job. I tried a couple places to rent it on Tuesday night and couldn't find it, and obviously it was also not available on any of my streamers. (It came up on Amazon as a movie I could watch if I tried one of those sub-services they are always offering, but I never like to get myself involved in that sort of thing. I don't need any more streaming services, even if these smaller services end up being like four bucks a month.)

So in order to get another movie from between the release year of last month's already seen best editing winner (1946's The Best Years of Our Lives) and next month's already seen best editing winner (1953's From Here to Eternity), I just shifted one year ahead and there was 1951's A Place in the Sun, a movie I'd heard of but knew nothing about. 

In fact, throughout the entirety of my knowing about this title, I've confused it in my mind with A Raisin in the Sun, a Sidney Poitier movie from ten years later, which I also obviously have not seen. But A Place in the Sun is not A Raisin in the Sun.

What it is is a melodrama starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters, far darker than I was expecting, which it took me a while to warm up to. Once I started warming up to it, though, I warmed up to it in a big way.

I could sense an auteur's sensibilities in the film's opening, which shows Clift's George Eastman trying to hitchhike his way on a dusty roadside to get to a job in his rich industrialist uncle's factory. This opening, plus the black and white filmmaking, put me more in mind of an independent film than a movie by the director (George Stevens) who would go on to make the large canvas color films Shane and Giant later in the decade. I'm not sure A Place in the Sun is at their level, but it's in the same conversation.

However, as I said, I couldn't tell where this film was going for its first half, and felt a bit frustrated with it. George takes up with another factory worker, Alice Tripp (Winters), against factory rules, so he has to keep their relationship a secret. Because it's a secret, that also leaves him, publicly, a free agent when he meets the beautiful socialite Angela Vickers (Taylor) and falls for her. Things get dark as he juggles the two women and bad decisions need to be made -- or get made, anyway. As nepotism allows George to get promoted well above Alice's station, themes of social class and moral responsibility get a workout. 

It's the shift out of neutral and into the dark, which occurs around the halfway point, that really got me on board, since it also gave the plot a definitive shove in some direction. I guess I'm going to get a bit spoilery from here, so if you care about having the details of a 74-year-old movie unspoiled, tread carefully.

Although I don't see any mention of this relationship on the internet (actually there's just one that I just founded when I expanded my search), I felt like A Place in the Sun has a moment in its second half that is a direct allusion to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. And yes, it does make me feel like a successful cinephile when I can recognize an allusion in a 1951 film to a 1927 film. This is where things get spoilery.

In both movies, a man takes a woman out on a rowboat with the intention of pushing her off and killing her. I won't tell you how it goes in either movie, since you may also not want spoilers for a 98-year-old film. I will say that both characters have a major crisis of conscious as they get farther down a path from which there is no return, and we see the toll of it on their face. However, since I've already characterised the second half of this film as "dark," that will probably lead you to conclude a few things about what may or may not happen.

I suppose I should get to talking about why this film won best editing, and why it feels like a distinctive artistic achievement specifically for that fact.

For that frustrating first half, it felt a bit like a redux of last month's viewing of The Best Years of Our Lives -- not because my feelings about the movies were similar (I love Lives), but because in both of them, I could not see the movie's decisive edge in its editing that won it the Oscar. Then I started to really notice a technique being used by editor William Hornbeck, who had this one win out of four nominations (including It's a Wonderful Life). He also served as Stevens' editor on Giant. 

Dissolves have been around since the start of cinema, so I was out of luck if I hoped that Hornbeck had played any significant role in moving their usage forward. However, the way he uses them is distinct and purposeful.

Since I don't want to assume you know a lot about editing, I'll explain what a dissolve is. It's when the image from one scene slowly transitions into the image from the next scene, such that one image is "dissolving" and the other one is taking its place, and both are visible during the period of transition. There is also usually, though not always, the suggestion of the passage of time, so it works well in a montage of images that suggest time elapsing. 

With A Place in the Sun, its the duration of their simultaneous visibility that struck me as profound. There were a lot of instances of this in Hornbeck's dissolves, but I think specifically of one involving Taylor's face with a look of concern on it, lingering for an almost uncomfortably long amount of time over the next scene, which depicts the thing she's concerned about. It almost makes her a presence in that scene, hanging over it like an apparition. 

I say it's uncomfortably long not because Hornbeck misuses the technique, but because the extra three to five seconds is enough to make us notice this as a violation of the normal usage rules for dissolves. Editing techniques are almost designed to go unnoticed, as editing is most often the silent aide to good storytelling, not calling attention to itself. When it does call attention to itself, it's to a purpose, and of course there are both good and bad versions of it calling attention to itself. Here, it's very much good, and only calls attention to itself, I would argue, if you are looking for it, as I was. For most viewers, it would just be subconscious.

In A Place in the Sun, the dissolves had the effect of casting a slow pall of the inevitability of the unfolding tragedy. I didn't mention it before now, but A Place in the Sun is adapted from a 1925 novel which also became a play called An American Tragedy. The dissolves used here mostly show a slow crawl of one thing to another thing to another thing, changing scenes and passing a period of time for us, but also underscoring the preordained nature of the events that follow when you make one bad decision. You can't dissolve through things that are unpredictable, only through things that are playing out according to a tragic predetermination. And the use of this technique becomes ever more thought provoking as we see where the narrative is going.

In retrospect, the inability to get King Solomon's Mines seems like a very lucky stroke indeed. That might have gotten me more examples of editing in an action or adventure context, as I had in earlier series entries like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Sergeant York, but it likely wouldn't have deepened my appreciation of the narrative capabilities of editing like A Place in the Sun did.

Next month, as mentioned earlier, it will be my second viewing of From Here to Eternity, the 1953 best picture winner -- which I know for certain will be available to rent. 

Mistakes were made

Remember how I planned out my viewing schedule to watch something special as my landmark 4,000th movie, even going so far as to have a guy I've never met loan me some of the movies from his collection to enable this special viewing?

Yeah, that was all for naught.

Due to the inherently fallible process of keeping lists, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise was not actually the 4,000th movie I'd ever seen. I now realize it was actually the 4,007th.

I'll explain.

Among the many movie lists I keep, which include year-by-year breakdowns in their own Word documents and a movie order document I've been keeping since 2002, are two master lists. One of these is the original Word document I have been updating for nearly 25 years, which is just a flat list of all the movies I've ever seen. The other is an Excel document that I introduced within the past 15 years, which is essentially an exact duplicate of the Word document, but with a bunch of supplemental information (director, year, whether I liked it or didn't) included to take advantage of the greater database-type capabilities of Excel. Because the Excel document is a duplicate and it's a more useful document overall, there's no real need for me to keep updating the Word document. But I continue to do it out of habit, and because I find it funny that this same document has followed me around for well over half my life.

Rather, it's supposed to be an exact duplicate -- and herein lies the problem.

In the lead-up to our move to Australia last summer, I got out of the habit of updating the Excel spreadsheet. Some of the numbers were off -- the total I'd seen in the theater vs. on video did not match the total of good movies vs. bad movies, and the total breakdown of movies by the first letter in their title did not match either of those. Instead of stopping to figure out which numbers were wrong and get it all sorted out, I backburnered the whole thing. In the meantime, I continued updating my other lists, including the master list on Microsoft Word. A simple list involving no formulas is much easier to stay on top of.

However, it also makes it a lot more difficult to tell when you're making mistakes. Like, forgetting to add certain movies to the master list.

I didn't realize this was happening at the time, of course, and therefore used the running total that I manually update at the bottom of this list as my indicator of how close I was to 4,000. But a running total updated manually is highly fallible, especially since you can't just consult the row number on the left side of the document like you can in Excel. If you think you've seen 3,999 movies and there are 3,999 rows in your spreadsheet, that's a nice a quick check of your math.

So how did I eventually realize I was off? Well, I've gotten some free cycles at work during school holidays, and don't mind telling you that I've been spending the time to finally get the Excel document caught up -- which means adding more than a year's worth of movies. I've had my Letterboxd diary up on one monitor and the spreadsheet up on the other, and have steadily caught up.

The problem arose when I noticed myself approaching 4,000 on the spreadsheet, but not approaching what I knew was my 4,000th movie on Letterboxd.

Oops.

So once I did fully catch up on the Excel spreadsheet, I copied the list from the Word document and pasted it next to the list from Excel. Scanning down the list, I was able to find seven titles that I had failed to include on the Word document but had added correctly on Excel, thanks to my pretty infallible Letterboxd diary.

Seven? How could I be off by that much?

Well, each time I see a movie, I update either four or five lists, depending on whether the movie is from the current year or not. Forget any one of these lists -- like the master list -- and something has slipped through the cracks that may not be detected for months, or even years.

But seven? Really? That much?

So -- if you are still reading this -- you are probably now curious: What was my 4,000th movie, after all?

It was:

That's right, the second film I saw for the Melbourne International Film Festival, a Chinese modern-day noir called Black Coal, Thin Ice. Which I gave a middling 2.5 stars out of 5.

Oh well.

Here's the thing, though -- it doesn't really matter.

In updating this list over the decades -- funny how I can say that now -- I have found various movies here and there that were simply not on my list. This is so obviously the case that I probably not need even say it. In fact, if I'm really being frank, I'd say that even the list I have now probably has 15 to 20 movies that are not on it. They'd be mostly movies I saw when I was a kid, and could not be sure I actually saw, or may not even remember seeing. Then there are also movies I do include on the list that I'm not sure I've seen start to finish. This is an inexact process at best.

Within the past two years alone I realized that Showgirls was not on my list. I definitely saw Showgirls, no doubt about it. But for whatever reason, it never made it on to the list. And since I saw Showgirls at the time it was released, it would have been among the first thousand movies I ever saw. Go back and retroactively add it, and it throws off not only the 1,000th movie I saw, but also the 2,000th and the 3,000th.

That's why it's best to see milestones as symbolic. Even when I thought Sunrise was my 4,000th movie, I knew in my heart of hearts that it was almost certainly not exactly the 4,000th. The most it could have ever been was an approximation of my 4,000th movie, a ceremonial viewing designed to celebrate the fact that I am reaching 4,000 movies sometime between the months of June and October in 2014.

And as such, it will remain, "officially," #4,000.

If Black Coal, Thin Ice has a problem with that, it can lodge a complaint with the front office.

The sun rises on 4,000 movies

"Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen, for Vancetastic's 4,000th movie of all time! An extravaganza so big, it had to be stretched out over two nights!"

That's right, I fell asleep while watching my latest big milestone movie, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

It seems like only yesterday that I was watching the 3,000th movie I'd ever seen, but in fact, it was May 12, 2010. That was when I lined up the Bernie Mac baseball vehicle Mr. 3000 on a Wednesday night to mark the occasion. Even then it seemed like only yesterday that I'd just been planning #2,000, which was Casablanca on September 16th of 2005. And though I don't have an exact date for #1,000, I made note at the time that it was the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback, which I watched in time to rank with my 1999 year-end films, meaning the viewing on video was sometime in late 1999 or early 2000. Clearly, that was not one I scheduled intentionally.

So what to do for #4,000? There was no obvious blind spot (Casablanca) or thematically appropriate choice (Mr. 3000), and I didn't want to just leave it up to the whims of my schedule (Payback).

What actually happened was that I put this question to the members of the Flickcharter discussion group on Facebook, and after sifting through some funny joke responses ("You could watch The 400 Blows ten times!"), some titles that fell into the "list of shame" category emerged. A few days later, one of the members who lives in Australia was sending me the five Bergman films I am now making my way through -- and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.

Sunrise -- or Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans -- struck me right away as the appropriate choice. It's something I have been meaning to see for some time, and in fact I included it in a September 2012 blog post intended to determine what was my new biggest blind spot after I had crossed Sunset Boulevard off my list. I had also included on that list Bergman's Persona, another of the movies I got from my Flickchart friend, but Sunrise jumped to the top for another reason: It was the first winner of the best picture Oscar.

Well, sort of. Those of you who have a casual familiarity with the history of best picture titles won't recognize Sunrise as one of them. You will correctly note that William Wellman's Wings won the first statue in 1927.

But at the time that first Oscar was given out, it was one of two awarded on the evening. Wings won the Oscar for Outstanding Picture, while Murnau's film was credited with the award for Unique and Artistic Production. That second category lasted only one year, and it was retroactively determined that Wings had indeed achieved the highest honor for a picture in 1927. So that's what the history books say.

Still, that makes it a pretty good, and "unique" (in more than once sense of that word), choice to mark a milestone like 4,000 movies. For good measure, it was also one of two movies in the most recent Sight & Sound poll top 10 that I had yet to see.

Since this post is more about the experience of reaching 4,000 movies than the movie itself, I'll contain my thoughts on the movie to just two paragraphs.

If Sunrise seems unusual to us today, I can only imagine how unusual it must have seemed at the time. The story essentially involves an unnamed man living in an island vacation spot with his wife and young child, who is having an affair with a "girl from the city." The city girl convinces him to try to remove his wife from the picture by taking a boat trip with her and pushing her overboard, then claiming it was an accidental drowning. The man is out at sea in the rowboat, determined to go through with it, to the point that he has actually started lumbering menacingly toward her and leaving no doubt about his intentions. When he sees the fear and revulsion on her face, he has a change of heart and rows them to shore, where she runs from him. He catches up and apologizes so profusely that it appears to rekindle some deeply buried sense of affection between them. So completely does he recommit himself to his wife that he not only earns her forgiveness, but actually launches into a day and night on the town that recalls the carefree romanticism of their old days together. As it is customary for me not to spoil the ending of a movie, even one that is 87 years old, I will leave off my plot synopsis at this point.

What I find so strange about the movie is its fantastical belief in the power of love and the idea of redemption -- oh, and the fact that there's a part in the middle where a pig gets drunk on a bottle of spilled wine. We're talking about a wife who learns that her husband actually intends to kill her, to drown her, and yet she believes so fully in his sincere repentance that they become like youthful lovebirds again in a matter of hours. Who does that? It almost seems like something I should be seeing in one of my Bergman movies, some kind of meditation on God's unconditional love and how an earnest confession of sins can earn a person absolution. Aside from these wilder moments of the narrative, though, Sunrise is pretty amazing with respect to how it was actually appreciated by the Academy at the time: its technical achievements. The film is notable for its use of superimposed images, as Murnau layers images of his lover's face over the man as he contemplates the potential murder, and images of the city over their foggy coastal setting as she tries to sell him on a different life. The film also has a very sophisticated scene involving the storm that overtakes them at sea, with storm effects that must have challenged every existing method for creating such a scene. And the filming of those foggy nighttime scenes in the opening 20 minutes is simply magical. Overall, it's an impressive accomplishment, if also a supremely odd one.

And yes, I did fall asleep while watching it. On Sunday night, I brazenly thought, "Sure, no problem, I'll take down this 90-minute silent movie starting at 9:30 after having two glasses of wine with dinner." When that was not entirely possible, and two naps did nothing but push things well past midnight, I gave up and finished the last half-hour on Monday night. Maybe not the best call on a milestone movie night, but it's fairly representative of how I have to watch movies these days, so in that sense it's fitting.

So back to reaching 4,000. As I am also 40 years old, this achievement seems to hold for me a certain symmetry, beyond its status as simply another milestone. It brings my lifetime average cleanly to around 100 movies a year. And given how few movies I was watching, relatively speaking, for the first half of my life to date, that tells you how busy I've been in the second half.

This is also my fastest thousand movies. It took me until I was 26 years old to hit 1,000, and then nearly another six years to hit 2,000. Since I have been a father for almost all of my last thousand movies, I would have suspected that I got from 2,000 to 3,000 more quickly than I got from 3,000 to 4,000. But that's not the case. My previous thousand films took me 4 years, 7 months and 26 days, while these last thousand took 4 years, 3 months and 6 days. I initially couldn't account for it, but then I remembered that I watched only a couple movies a month in the months leading up to my wedding back in 2008. That alone could account for the difference.

The question I think I should be asking myself is what I think of getting to this milestone. Milestones are wont to make us contemplate the bigger questions, like How We Are Spending Our Time, and What We Are Doing With Our Lives. What might I have accomplished by now if I had had a more modest movie intake, and was hitting 2,000 movies at age 40 rather than 4,000?

Instead of fretting too much about that, I think I'll continue onward and upward and just get out to see #4,001 -- Guardians of the Galaxy -- tonight.