Clift pulled the wool over our eyes

Yeah, but George was the one who impregnated Alice. He owed her something. She was only demanding her rights. And even if that doesn't make sense to a modern worldview, it totally would have been expected in 1951.

Alice was one depressing woman. The marriage would have never lasted as George did not love her. She did blackmail him to marry her. He should have never touched her to start with. George really made his own bed. I agree she was more selfish than George.

but I think if any man with a will to live a happy life was put in that situation they would think/do the same.

How was she selfish? No he shouldn't have been messing with her but, he ruined her life. Things weren't as easy for unwed women back then.

"I think if any man with a will to live a happy life was put in that situation they would think/do the same."

Really? So all us men who want to break up with some woman are just murderers plotting an opportunity so we can kill them and get away with it? Okay.

That's how he wanted you to feel! George was not an upstanding man...and the only conscience he had was the one telling him to run. No remorse for Alice...no love for Angela...just himself.

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Let's keep it in perspective: Clift killed the other girl in order to marry Elizabeth Taylor(!). It may be evil, but it strikes me as a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Yes! One of the most depressing novels I have ever read-- and one of the best film adaptations I have ever seen. Chilling, and cuts out all Dreiser's, shall we say, verbosity.

Sure! We see them fall into the water and the boat capsize...but THEN we see a slow dissolve of what apparently is several minutes before he exits Loon Lake. We are never afforded the opportunity to see events unfolding once they are in the water to George scrambling extremely agitated and wild-eyed from Loon Lake. Yes, this angle is set-up for us to draw our own conclusions. My conclusion is he found the perfect chance to murder Alice. And he did...unseen to the audience. And he gambled on his boyish and dimwit mask to get him off on insufficient evidence. He gambled incorrectly, for as over-the-top Raymond Burr was as the prosecution, he saw right through Eastman's game. And Eastman was too proud to go to the chair confessing his guilt. He stuck like a sociopath right up to the end. Through Angela Vickers, he wanted prominence and wealth and success...he wanted his place in the sun. He didn't love her. He wanted her merely for sexual gratification while he clawed to own the Eastman company and beyond. I draw this conclusion because he would sleep with anything, anytime, as he presents by immediately breaking the company rule and bedding the easiest conquest possible right off the bat; Alice Tripp. Clift is so shrewd with his performance he succeeded in, as I will stick to, pulling off one of the screens greatest villains! Of course...its my opinion.

You think he didn't know sex led to a baby? He knew but, as you say. He got on top of her cause that's what guys do.

Oh you cards! You crazy kids with your "Alice or Angela? Shelley Winters or Liz Taylor? Know who I'd choose! *wink wink, nudge nudge* Know worra mean? Eh!" etc. OK. We get the point. If you have a plain girl and you meet a beautiful one, just bump off the former. Beauty is its own justification.

Anyway, I jest. But besides this, there seems to be a tendency to defend George on the grounds that he's a simple, uneducated, poor, working-class boy who suddenly finds the Good Life almost - almost - within his grasp and is *astonished* by this fact. Because of this, it's understandable, so some of you say, that he conceives and plans the murder of a young woman who he's gotten up the duff.

No, he didn't go through with it, but he watched her die. She was carrying his son or daughter, and he watched her drown. (People questioning whether Alice *is*, in fact, pregnant, seem to forget the scene where she's alone at home and goes out to her mailbox - and she's noticeably in the early stages of pregnancy and walking accordingly. She's alone. Why would she be faking weight gain and a waddling walk as well as wearing a maternity smock when she's all alone?)

And what is Alice? She too, is simple, uneducated, poor and working-class. But she's a woman. Do the dreams and desires of the Good Life for a working-class girl, as opposed to boy, matter less, somehow? Alice's dreams were smaller than George's, admittedly, but they were her dreams. And what did she get for wanting 'a little house' and to do 'all the things that married couples do'? For caring for this man even though she knew he loved someone richer, someone more beautiful than she could ever hope to be ('Poor George' she says, holding out her arms to him)? She gets a watery grave, that's what.

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