12/26/22
Newsletter #200
The Crack of Dawn
Marlon Brando is generally given credit as the actor who brought Method Acting to the movies, but it was really Montgomery Clift. Clift hadn’t attended the Actor’s Studio, as all of the other method actors would, but had learned the Stanislavsky Method from the Russian acting teacher, Mira Rostova.
Clift began making a name for himself on Broadway in the late 1930s. In 1939 he was in the cast of the Broadway production of Noël Coward's Hay Fever. And as topics collide in this newsletter, Clift participated in one of the first television broadcasts. Hay Fever was broadcast by NBC and was aired during the 1939 New York World's Fair, along with a speech by President Franklin Roosevelt. This broadcast is often considered the “launch” of television, although it wasn’t.
By 1946 Montgomery Clift was the hottest young actor on Broadway. Howard Hawks cast him in Red River (1948), opposite John Wayne. The pairing of Clift and Duke, each with such different approaches to acting, is exciting and electric from the word go. Next to Duke, Clift seems small and somewhat effeminate, but holds his own all the way through the film, including a final fist fight.
However, due to various circumstances, Clift’s first released film appearance was in a completely OK film made by the great director, Fred Zinneman, called The Search (1948). Other than being shot on location in war-devasted Berlin, the film is utterly run-of-the-mill. Monty gives a totally all right performance. But Clift’s fame was running ahead of him. He was nominated for an Oscar and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.
Then Red River was released, and everybody saw that he was actually as good as the hype. And then he co-starred in William Wyler’s terrific film, The Heiress (1949), and his reputation was cemented. Montgomery Clift was a movie star. Then Maron Brando made his first movie, The Men, in 1950.
Promptly, Montgomery Clift got his two best film roles, A Place in the Sun (1951) and From Here to Eternity (1953), and received Oscar nominations for both. Then he starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953).
His career was stupendous, what could possibly go wrong?
On May 12, 1956, while leaving Elizabeth Taylor’s dinner party, Montgomery Clift got in a car wreck on Mulholland Dr. and destroyed his face. This was right in the middle of shooting the utterly miserable film, Raintree County (1956). By The Young Lions (1958), with Marlon Brando and Dean Martin, that really should have been a good movie, Clift is a complete disaster: half of his face is paralyzed, and he’s obviously become a drunk.
Now, in a final interweaving of previous facts, Stanley Kramer, the man given the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1961, did two brilliant pieces of casting in his great film, Judgement at Nuremburg (1961), that are awe-inspiring. Judy Garland as an abused German girl, and Montgomery Clift as a mentally disabled German baker who was sterilized by the Nazis. Clift is on-camera for 12-minutes and it’s both breathtaking and heartbreaking. He was able to take everything that had gone wrong for him and put it this performance. And he received his fourth Oscar nomination.
Montgomery Clift managed to last for 5 more years, and made a couple of interesting, if not good, films: The Misfits (1961), Freud (1962). Clift was scheduled to star in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), when he died in 1966 at the age of 45. Ironically, Clift was replaced in the film by Marlon Brando.
And that’s the rest of the story.