This is such a dark film, not only in the context of the plot and its substance, but also it looks dark. So many scenes are shot at night or in the shadows and George Stevens and cinematographer William C. Mellor really put you there. You feel like it is nighttime and not just a movie shot at night, because it is truly difficult to see things. I can talk about the cinematography of this film for hours, because it is so fascinating. At multiple instances, characters are blocked out of view with other characters and compositions off to one side of the frame. It forces the viewer to focus not only what the person who is off camera is saying as opposed to doing, but also on what is left in the frame. In this way you also feel like you are a fly on the wall since you are really only viewing certain scenes from a fixed point. Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters give such wonderful performances. It is so interesting how you start out with them in such innocent wide-eyed love and how their love decays into something of darkness, pity, and desperation. The mechanics of the screenplay are really smart in how information is parsed out. The themes of the film in regards to class struggles are also wonderful, but this is where the script starts to derail. The trial at the end feels tacked on, especially in how it is edited. It feels like that could have been a movie all on its own. Additionally, George Eastman really had shit lawyers. No attorney should have let him get in a boat in the middle of the court room and let the prosecutor act out what they thought happened. It’s just dumb since they are not in the water and it is not nighttime. The final moments with priest are also off. It supposes that it was his love of Elizabeth Taylor that killed Shelley Winters. We know that we can’t throw blame on every tangental thing that leads to another person’s death otherwise every character in ROMEO & JULIET should be killed for driving the two of those lovers to their death. George is also his own worst enemy as he easily could have went to the cops after she drowned. That’s why he dies, not because of the stuff the priest says. Still, George being executed despite making the choice to not murder her, is a great dramatic irony that probably is the reason the film is remembered so fondly today. I also wonder how controversial this story was as it was based on a real murder and the film portrays it as an accident 100%. I wonder what the girl’s family must have thought about the film and its popularity.
