Stellar cast, great directing, timeless story. This film has it all. Hard to believe Elizabeth Taylor was only 17 years old and this was her first screen kiss. Harder to believe Shelley Winters had to try so hard to convince George Stevens that she deserved the supporting role. Her description of her “audition” in the special features retrospective on this DVD is a hoot.

I found this movie very interesting because of the intentional ambiguity of its characters and their actions. Montgomery Clift’s character, George Eastman, is supposedly a good midwestern guy raised by parents devoted to Christian mission work. He gets a job at his rich uncle’s company, but almost immediately breaks the cardinal rule of not “socializing” with the female employees by seducing Shelley Winters’ character, Alice. Winters’ performance still carries a hefty punch today, but I think that today’s audience probably misses most of the ambiguity of her character as well. We see her as the victim, a poor, hardworking girl who gets pregnant and can’t get the father to marry her because he’s moved on to the beautiful, rich socialite, Elizabeth Taylor. But audiences in the 1950s would have been a lot more judgmental of a woman who had sex before marriage and then tries to get an abortion. But the movie never passes judgment on the characters, it simply shows what they did and Clift was especially brilliant when it came to showing how torn he was emotionally between doing the right thing and doing the unthinkable.

This movie or the book has got to be credited for Match Point somewhere…