Remembering Monty Clift

Ervell E. Menezes

Remember Monty Clift? Not a question for today’s film buffs. But for me, he was an iconic figure who came back into the frame after watching Freud — the Secret Passion recently. The dreamy-eyed, enigmatic figure, a la James Dean, his roles flash back vividly. Clift was one of Hollywood’s original method actors (like Dean and Marlon Brando), who learnt their craft from masters like Lee Strasberg, Michael Chekhov and Stellar Adler.

Born in Nebraska in 1920, Montgomery Clift’s career was brief but eventful (the actor died at 46 in 1966), with roles in A Place in the Sun, I Confess, From Here to Eternity, The Young Lions and Judgment at Nuremberg.

I can still imagine him as a victim of the Nazi torture in Nuremberg. It haunts me. The court scenes too are taut, very special, and one was just beginning to witness the behind-the-scenes of the Second World War.

It also has a stellar cast that includes veteran Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich (Hollywood’s German face) and Judy Garland, among others.

But that was not Clift’s only claim to fame. As Father Michael Logan, he hears the confession of Ruth Gradford (Anne Baxter) in I Confess, a movie that lucidly deals with the Catholic vow of secrecy a priest takes for what he hears in the confessional.

It is about the murder of a gardener/ shady lawyer Villette by Otto Keller (Q. E. Hasse), a German immigrant, who along with his wife Alma (Dolly Hass) works with the priest, who zealously guards that information. Karl Malden plays Inspector Larrue and what follows is truly Hitchcockian, for it is the great master himself who does the honours in his own special way and at the height of his career in 1952. It also earned Anne Baxter a special niche in Hollywood.

In The Young Lions, based on Robert Shaw’s book of the same name, Clift plays an American soldier Noah Ackerman in Germany, and though it is an important cameo, he doesn’t dominate action as in his other films. Maybe the presence of Marlon Brando and Maxmillian Schell (who is in many of Clift’s movies) tended to overshadow him because this Edward Dwytryk movie made quite a mark in the late 1950s.

Clift’s underplayed performance in the lead role of Freud — the Secret Passion rounds it all up. The director John Huston does well to recreate the psychological overtones, psychoanalyses and the Oedipus Complex.

Though it is all of 140 minutes, the film never slips out of grasp. So much for Huston, who replaced Jean-Paul Sartre as scriptwriter with Charles Kaufman and Wolfgang Reinhardt. Psychology, too, was a new genre in the early 1960s. Called “Sigi” by his wife, he gives it a human touch, and Clift was supported by a great cameo by Sussanah York as one of his patients and lesser ones by Eric Portman and David McCallum of U.N.C.L.E. fame. But the movie gave a composite view of one of the great actors of his time whose reckless ways sadly contributed to his early demise.