A Place in the Sun [1951 film]

Try to navigate Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy", a massive gobstopper at 869 pages: there's a good story hidden in there, trying to get out, but it's so sprawling with meandering chatty unessential wall-of-text yip-yap that it makes Ayn Rand look like Elmore Leonard 😏
George Stevens managed to condense it : there’s a compelling sense of unavoidable destiny, of a societal trap slowly, inexorably snapping shut. Stevens, who used to embalm American myths (Shane), directed this melodramatic, overwrought (but not facile in any way) adaptation.