His Enduring ‘Place’

Driving home from the Academy Awards ceremony in 1952, director George Stevens placed the Oscar he had just won for directing the drama “A Place in the Sun” on the seat between him and his then-teenage son, George Stevens Jr.

“He turned to me and said, ‘We’ll have a better idea what kind of picture this is in about 25 years,”’ Stevens Jr. recalls. “It was a kind of thinking [about the enduring quality of movies] that didn’t go on then. Here it is 50 years later, and it is a film that is just about as good of an experience now as it was then.”

This week, Paramount released the DVD of “A Place in the Sun” ($30), which features a new documentary with interviews with Stevens Jr., associate producer Ivan Moffat and stars Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. Other extras include commentary by Stevens Jr. and Moffat, the theatrical trailer and excerpts from the younger Stevens’ documentary on his father, “George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey.”

“A Place in the Sun,” based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel “An American Tragedy,” stars Montgomery Clift in his Oscar-nominated turn as the ambitious poor relation of a wealthy family who is determined to find a respectable place in society. Winters is the plain woman he meets while working at his uncle’s factory and whom he gets pregnant; Taylor is the rich woman with whom he falls in love. “A Place in the Sun” received six Oscars, including best director, cinematography (William C. Mellor) and scoring (Franz Waxman).

Stevens Jr. learned six years ago at a film preservation meeting at the Library of Congress that the original negative of “A Place in the Sun” had been lost.

“I thought back to when I started the American Film Institute,” says Stevens Jr., a respected writer-director. “We were concerned with preserving old films and that usually meant silent films and prewar films. It never occurred to me that the more ‘modern’ films were in danger.”

So he called Sherry Lansing, president of Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group, to see what could be done.

“She was shocked,” he says. “She said, ‘We will do whatever we can to restore this picture.’ That started a restoration process that took a couple of years. Happily, it worked out well by finding other [original material] and using improved laboratory technique. We worked on the soundtrack with the people at Pacific Post.”

The objective in mixing a new soundtrack, says Stevens Jr., is “to make the picture sound the way it did when George Stevens mixed it on the sound stage at Paramount. There is a risk that if people don’t know the film, you can alter the sound levels and dynamics and subtleties.”

Although “A Place in the Sun” was both a huge commercial and critical success for Paramount, Stevens had to sue the studio to make the movie.

Studio executives at Paramount were reluctant because a 1931 adaptation of “An American Tragedy” had failed at the box office, and because the film’s subject matter included unwed pregnancy and abortion.

“[My father] was under contract, and he couldn’t make a picture anywhere else,” Stevens Jr. says. “So he got a lawyer from San Francisco to file a suit against Paramount, and they eventually came around.”

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The Criterion Collection has released the great 1941 Preston Sturges comedy “Sullivan’s Travels” on DVD ($40), a movie about the making of a movie.

Joel McCrea, in one of his greatest turns, plays a successful comedy director who decides to make a socially responsible film about human suffering. Because he knows nothing about suffering, he disguises himself as a hobo and takes off on the road. Veronica Lake plays a struggling actress who accompanies him.

The lovely DVD includes Kenneth Bowser’s acclaimed “American Masters” documentary, “Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dream”; a production stills archives; a scrapbook of original publicity materials; the theatrical trailer; a four-minute radio interview from 1951 with Sturges, conducted by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper; and rare audio recordings of Sturges reciting a poem and singing a song.

Also featured is a fact-filled interview with the filmmaker’s widow, Sandy Sturges, and a wonderful, wryly amusing commentary track with director Noah Baumbach (“Alive and Kicking”), Bowser, and Christopher Guest and Michael McKean of “This Is Spinal Tap” and “Best in Show” fame.

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Robert De Niro, Edward Burns and Kelsey Grammer star in John Herzfeld’s “15 Minutes” (New Line, $27), an uneven action thriller about just how far people will go for their 15 minutes of fame.

In this case, two killers (Karel Roden and Oleg Taktarov) rampage through New York City with video camera in hand.

The digital edition includes two entertaining documentaries: “15 Minutes of True Tabloid Stars,” featuring interviews with Maury Povich, Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael, and “Does Crime Really Pay?” with Gloria Allred and Mark Fuhrman.

Besides the wide-screen edition of the film, the disc includes the trailer, a music video, a behind-the-scenes look at the film, cast and crew filmographies, six deleted scenes and commentary from Herzfeld that is far more compelling than his film.

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The live-action version of the popular cartoon “Josie and the Pussycats” proved not to be the cat’s meow with audiences and critics earlier this year.

The DVD (Universal, $27) of the musical comedy starring Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson features a wide-screen version of the film, music videos, trailers, a behind-the-scenes featurette, production notes, talent files and passable commentary from directors Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont.