Montgomery Clift

To my mind and eye, Montgomery Clift is the greatest film actor this country has ever produced, largely because he jettisoned acting out for acting in. While others feel that Brando was the Greatest Ever, Clift didn’t rely on what Brando never left behind: the conventional stage, and the predictable mechanics of theatricalization. But Brando was smart enough about the human psyche to understand that it thrives on the known, and that “sexiness,” depends on declaring itself outright: audiences don’t want to dig for it since they spend so much time at home, digging for their own. Brando was a master showman who was perfectly well aware, too, that the actor–the walking figment of one’s imagination–increases his power over an audience if he can convince them of this imagined fact: he’ll break the fourth wall (or screen) and claim them. And isn’t that what everyone wants, ultimately–to be claimed? Clift, a much more recessive personality and controlled screen artist, couldn’t find himself in bombast, and it was his constant reducing during a scene–hand gestures that quieted down after a while, and then stopped; a slight jerking of his small frame when Marilyn Monroe extends her compassion in a bottle strewn junkyard in 1961’s literally and figuratively fantastic “The Misfits”– that was essential to his screen presence as well, that white flat movie place Clift filled with one character again and again: the unknown but often despised one. (This character reached his apex when Clift played Freud in John Huston’s 1962 bio-pic, or shall we say bio-poem? Original script? By Sartre!) Clift’s poetry was in the drama of emotional mishap: characters who didn’t like his character because he was a Jew, or a murderer, or Something Else. As such, he upstaged Hitchcock’s fabled love of cinema minimalism when he played a priest in the director’s strange 1953 film, “I Confess.” Clift’s utterly compelling under-the-emotional-radar-but-with heart-and-guilt-cutting-his-breath-short at-nearly-every-turn show underscores that, while Hitchcock hated “acting,” he didn’t know what to do when an actor was even better at being a “model,” then his rage and manipulation could demand. And since that tension doesn’t exist for Hitch with Clift, the movie is without tension. Another story about the modernist-minded performer: In 1961 he was making “Judgement at Nuremberg,” with Stanley Kramer. Judy Garland was in the film. Kramer invited Clift to watch a take featuring Judy, and when Kramer turned to Clift after the take was over, tears were streaming down Clift’s cheeks. Kramer: Ah, wasn’t Judy marvelous? Clift (crying): No. Because she’s playing her character’s tragedy even before she opens her mouth. While beautiful, Clift was rarely considered “sexy,” because he couldn’t even claim himself; his effects depended on you going in and finding his unspoken pain or joy–the erotics of silence–behind his pale skin, dark hair, and character defining posture. (A sensitive straight male acquaintance, explaining Clift to his girlfriend, who had never seen him in a film, said: Listen, I’m not into men at all, but with him. Wow.) While Brando played cowboys, Clift was the quintessential lonesome cowboy, a tumbleweed of reduced-for-the-camera everything: desperation, loneliness, hope. While it’s almost impossible to remember what Clift said in a movie, or how he said it, you can remember what Brando said because, despite his fabled laxness with the script, what he said was scripted; he was enough of a stage actor to believe it began with the playwright or screenwriter, while Clift’s modernism had little to do with language and everything to do with being watched, and letting the surrounding air be the improvisation. In silent film terms, Brando was Chaplin, and Clift, Keaton.