August marks the 75th anniversary of Paramount’s classic A Place in the Sun. Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy was banned in Boston and burned by German Nazis because of how it deal with “low love affairs.” Yet when it was adapted to the screen in 1951 (after already having been adapted in the U.S. in 1931), that controversy didn’t follow. Upon release, A Place in the Sun — the eventual title — was immediately recognized as a perfect representation of 1950s American filmmaking, from the impeccable direction by George Stevens, to the startlingly beautiful performances by Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, plus the script by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown and the cinematography by William C. Mellor.

A Place in the Sun follows George Eastman (Clift) who leans on his wealthy uncle to secure a job. Working in the family factory, George soon takes up with mousey co-worker Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters). The two are happy until George meets the wealthy and beautiful Angela Vickers (Taylor), who represents everything he wants in life. He plans to throw over Alice, but things take tragic turn when she tells George she’s pregnant.

There are stark contrasts between A Place in the Sun and the 1931 original. It’s even more of a divergence from Dreiser’s book. The pre-Code adaptation stars Phillips Holmes as Clyde Griffiths, Clift’s character, with Sylvia Sidney as Roberta Alden, Winters’s part, and Frances Dee as the Taylor character, here named Sondra Finchley. This interpretation contains more of Dreiser’s story beats and it’s easy to see why it was a commercial and critical disappointment upon release. Dreiser himself abhorred it. Paramount didn’t want to remake the film and that, coupled with rising anti-Communist sentiment that became synonymous with the 1950s, made execs fear Dreiser’s story.

Dreiser was big on the Naturalism movement, a 19th-century movement focused on themes like determinism and social commentary. He saw Clyde/George as a puppet to his genes and environment. Dreiser’s novel, based on the high-profile 1900s case of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown, is a tome over 800 pages that can often read like a sermon of the author’s philosophies.

In an interview decades later with the AFI, Stevens said, “I was interested in the mood and emotional effect of the story. I wanted to relate the audience to a character whose behavior it might not subscribe to. To bring that about, one must let the audience see his desire. They have to know his need for the thing that – even accidentally – traps him.” Stevens had promised Paramount he’d completely dissociate from the 1931 film by sticking to the book. He also vowed to rename all the characters. George Eastman was an amalgamation of Stevens’s first name and one half of Eastman-Kodak.

Clift had already made a splash with prominent roles in Red River (1948) and The Heiress (1949), while Taylor  had transitioned from a child star into adult roles, and would be married and divorced, by the time A Place in the Sun came out. The pair became a popular selling point for the movie, with posters putting them front and center. The excellent cinematography often pulled in tight on the two. Part of the movie’s steaminess comes from the intimacy of the camera, and Taylor’s overt sexuality as Angela. But Alice and George’s relationship is more lust-based, and thus the camera is often away from them, looking at an empty doorway.

Where Sondra Finchley in Dreiser’s novel is shallow and tries to dissociate from Clyde when the eventual “tragedy” of the title takes place, Taylor plays the ultimate dream girl who supports him till the bitter end. This culminates in a beautifully filmed sequence where Angela visits George in jail one last time. He tells her to love him for as long as he has left. It’s a bittersweet finale, with the final image being an indelible one of Taylor’s face.

A Place in the Sun became an American classic, with Charlie Chaplin calling it “the greatest movie ever made about America.” It’s certainly a breathtaking examination of the American dream and man’s ability to visit the dark side in order to achieve it. It was nominated for four Golden Globes, winning one for Best Picture (Drama). Seventy-five years later A Place in the Sun today is just as swoony and beautiful, with an undercurrent of tragic darkness, as it was in 1951.