4 Movies / February 16
Preceding Marlon Brando and James Dean as the hot young Method actor of the late 1940s and early ’50s was the unforgettable Montgomery Clift.
Physically beautiful and emotionally intense, with an arresting profile and a penetrating gaze, Clift created a new kind of romantic hero – shy, troubled, sexually ambiguous and uncertain of his place in society. He brought out a maternal instinct in his feminine costars (Elizabeth Taylor, Lee Remick) and a competitive spirit in his masculine ones (John Wayne, Burt Lancaster).
Clift was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on October 17, 1920. He was acting on Broadway by the age of 15, and five years later was appearing in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play There Shall Be No Night.
Clift was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the first of his films to be released, Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 The Search. (It was filmed after Red River, released later the same year.)
Other nominations included two more as Best Actor, for George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) and Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953); and one as Supporting Actor for Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).
A 1956 automobile accident left Clift’s handsome face altered, with his quicksilver reactions dimmed and his body dependent on drugs and alcohol. He continued to act in films, although with diminished power, until his death in 1966.
All told, Clift made only 17 films. TCM’s tribute is comprised of a quartet of representative performances.
Red River, Howard Hawks’ Western about a cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail, stars John Wayne as a Texas rancher and Clift as the adopted son with whom he clashes over management of the drive. Wayne, apparently resentful of the attention paid to his younger costar, was quoted to the effect that “Clift was acting, they said. Duke’s only playing himself. But, hell, I played an old man in that, and I was only 40!”
I Confess (1953) is an Alfred Hitchcock a thriller in which Clift plays a priest who hears a confession to an accidental killing during a robbery. The pragmatic director, who shot his films according to a predesigned plan, said of his star that “He was a Method actor, and neurotic as well. ‘I want you to look in in a certain direction,’ I’d say, and he’d say, ‘Well, I don’t know whether I’d look that way.’”
From Here to Eternity is the Oscar-winning screen version of the James Jones novel about Army life in Hawaii at the time of Pearl Harbor. Clift plays Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a beleaguered soldier, and Burt Lancaster is a sympathetic sergeant.
Lancaster would later say, “The only time I was ever really afraid as an actor was my first scene with Clift…I couldn’t stop my knees from shaking…I thought he was going to blow me right off the screen.”
Wild River (1960) casts Clift as a TVA agent in 1930s Alabama who tries to evict a stubborn old woman (Jo Van Fleet) from her home in the face of rising waters caused by the building of a dam. The film contains Clift’s best post-accident performance, due no doubt to Elia Kazan’s sympathetic direction.
Lee Remick, who plays Clift’s love interest, noted that “He did inspire in me, as he did in most women, I suppose, the feeling of wanting to look after him. He was like a wounded bird – so vulnerable.”
