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Archive for the ‘Montgomery Clift: SCREEN GOD’ Category

A Place In The Sun

13 Sep

A Place In The Sun – produced and directed by George Stevens. Romantic Tragedy. A young man aspires to love and success and is waylaid. 122 minutes Black and White 1951.

★★★★★

Seeing Elizabeth Taylor aged 17, as Angela Vickers sail into a mansion, you know she belongs there and you want to belong there with her. For Angela Vickers takes it all for granted. Like Daisy in The Great Gatsby, she has money in her voice. She has the silver chinks. She has everything and she gives everything, so the film naturally and inevitably slants towards her. Shelly Winters as the working class trull is given the opposite: neither sex appeal nor charm nor sympathy. She is brought into performance from beginning to end like the melted ice cream she serves and seems to be enduring morning sickness from the start. A self-pitying, sulky, nauseous look distorts her visage, a quart bottle of platitudes ready to pour. Washed around by his mother, Anne Revere and the two young women with whom he becomes involved, Montgomery Clift as George Eastman is a piece of driftwood shoved by every eddy. His body is flaccid and stooped. His face stares at us and reveals nothing but the hurt he might feel for a passing dog. His beauty registers as great but uneventful. One can read anything into his beautiful eyes, or nothing. For he cannot seem to summon any temperament. But the story is his, and so one reads, not George, but what happens to him. He stands there while it happens, not a character but a circumstance. His entire story, that is, points to Angela Vickers, as the only visible point of life, and the picture aims at what she promises to us all by her very existence on earth. Eastman is a character fostered by a magnate uncle who recognizes his resourcefulness; nepotism aside, George clearly could have succeeded in business on his own merits. And finding work he can do well and rise by is enhanced by his relations to Angela Vickers who has the sureness of her effect on men to go out for what she wants, as she does from their first big scene. We see her willfulness and her will,. We would call her spoiled, but she isn’t because she’s so kind, so happy to be alive, so generous, so gravely honest, so bright, and above all so loving. All the fun in life is lodged with her, all the beauty, all the romance. And never before or since on the screen have these qualities been so resplendently visible. Our hearts go out not to Clift or Winters, but to this wonderful girl, and to her baffled sadness and the life-long love that like a melody sings through it right to the end and beyond. Taylor’s performance throughout is gloriously right, natural, spontaneous, and her final scene is one of the greatest pieces of acting ever filmed, the finest piece of acting she ever did, and the most lyrical. Indeed, the whole film plays like something sung. It brings into being a beauty wider than either of the two beautiful faces of its leads or their romance. Did he kill her? Is he guilty. The priests says yes, of course. But the film says that the question is irrelevant. For it says that his love was a life experience so great that death is not in competition with it at all. Guilt, death, they are not even the same frame. Life has an inherent celebration in it, despite everything. Revealing this to us makes A Place In The Sun the most deeply life-loving film ever made. And the most beautiful.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Anne Revere, COURTROOM DRAMA, Directed by George Stevens, Elizabeth Taylor: SCREEN GODDESS, ACTING GODDESS, FILMED BY William Mellor, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MATING, Montgomery Clift: SCREEN GOD, MUSICAL SCORE BY Franz Waxman, MUST SEE, OSCAR WINNER, PRIZE WINNER, ROMANTIC DRAMA, TRAGEDY

 

Red River

08 Jan

Red River — directed by Howard Hawks. Western. On a 1,000 miles cattle drive a domineering boss conflicts with his rebellious son. 133 minutes Black and White 1948.

* * *

A journey story, and like all journey stories (picaresque stories, road movies), the overriding suspense is how the journey will end, the parenthesis of the beginning and that end filled only with episodes. Actual drama between characters never has the force of this interest. So this movie is like Hawks’ Air Force, which has only one small drama, that of John Garfield’s change of heart– a change which leaves no more conviction to the character than that of Montgomery Clift finally taking on John Wayne. When he does so, Hawks’ camera closes up again and again on Clift’s facial beauty, which is considerable at this stage of his life, but scarcely has to do with anything. Hawks even has Joanne Dru even make love to that face. The film is made overlong not just by her presence in it but the presence of her character in it, which is called upon to say and do preposterous things and to crash the ending. She recites her lines monotonously, in imitation, I suppose, of Dorothy Mcguire, and she is all Hollywooded up in hair, makeup and costume. But she was a last minute replacement, poor woman, and the entire section of which she was a part should never have been shot. The film should have ended with the meeting of the antagonist Wayne and the protagonist Clift in a finale in which Walter Brennan deals Wayne the coup de grace. But Hawks rewrote the story every day as he shot it, and he got to dislike John Ireland pretty quickly. Ireland plays a defiant gunslinger named Cherry, but Ireland did not take his work as an actor seriously and also took up with Joanne Dru whom Hawks fancied. So Hawks more and more diminished Ireland’s role, and more and more built up Brennan’s role as comic relief, thus diluting its power, which is the power of telling the truth. He is the one who should teach Wayne his lesson at the end. The fistfight between Wayne and Clift is ridiculous. Clift is flaccid as a fighter and only five ten next to Wayne’s six four and beefy. No one goes up against John Wayne; it’s not just a question of roles or treatment or story; it’s a fact of nature. But the movie has fallen on evil days long before this. All the campsites of the cattle drive are shot on sound stages at The Goldwyn Studios, so they lack conviction, as do the frequent process shots. Once Hawks finished a film he walked away from it, even to its editing. He’d hired Dimitri Tiomkin for the score but Tiomkin offers vulgar triumphals intermixed with pone, which is quite disconsonnant with the down and dirty cowboy life shown us. The films’ interest lies in Hawks’ simple camera, one step above still photography, and his abilities with actors to make scenes happen and to train them up to their tasks, with the result that Clift is completely convincing on a horse. Once Red River was done, Clift went back to his New York actor friends and, knowing it was the last time he could dine anonymously, said, “Tomorrow I’m going to be a star. Let’s celebrate before it’s too late.” And he was right. What’s good about the movie is the location work with the huge herd of cattle on the drive, all of which did take place in Texas, and which gives the show its fascinating unpredictability. The cowboys are costumed and hatted distinctively (Hawks gave Clift Gary Cooper’s hat). Wayne, at 38, is given grey hair to play a man of 55, and when John Ford sees Red River he says, “My God, the son of a gun can act,” and Wayne is no longer teeter-tottering in B Westerns but solidly becomes the great star his presence and craft and well-justified popularity deserved.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by Howard Hawks, Harry Carey, John Wayne, Montgomery Clift: SCREEN GOD, Shelley Winters, Walter Brennan: ACTING GOD, WESTERN

 

Indiscretion Of An American Wife

04 Dec

Indiscretion Of An American Wife – directed by Vittorio Da Sica – drama of a couple of grownups having to say goodbye in a railway station. 63 minutes black and white 1954.

* * * *

De Sica has an infallible comic sense. The entire picture takes place in a railway station, and he fills the canvas with absurd wonderful vignettes and intrusions. From the twelve year old boy to the 90 year old voyeur to the band marching to hail the arrival of The President to the ridiculous woman with the packages and the poodle. All this is spread before us as counterpoint and choral context to a tragedy. Unfortunately the tragedy does not ensue, for the simple reason that the passion necessary between the two characters burns only in the male. He is played by Montgomery Clift with complete conviction and intensity. You believe he loves her. You never believe she loves him. Oh, she is discomforted, she is upset, she is apologetic, she is various things, but she is never on fire for him. Jennifer Jones is the lady. And she remains The Lady, the wife of a producer who stole her from her husband and the father of her children, Robert Walker, with the promise of making her a big star. He then cast her as hot temptresses, women with names like Pearl and Ruby, whose illicit love-skills would drive even Gregory Peck to destruction, make even the righteous Charlton Heston’s stiff neck wobble. Naturally she is not going to play the thing she was: a two-timing wife, which is what she is cast as here. What she does here is a matron in a Dior suit. She is never indiscrete. Her uncertainty as an actress is touching. But pathos is insufficient for grand passion. Here as elsewhere she acts as though in a vitrine, holding herself as precious object to be gazed at behind glass. We know there is a longer version of this film, 90 minutes, with the original title, Stazione Termini –- Terminus in English, and the right title instead of this dreadfully wrong one. This is a version which was cut for American audiences and which failed to find them. Truman Capote wrote the English dialogue.

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Posted in Directed by Vittorio De Sica, Filmed in Italy, Jennifer Jones, MATING, MIDDLE-CLASS DRAMA, Montgomery Clift: SCREEN GOD

 

Making The Misfits

08 Nov

The Making The Misfits –– directed by Gail Levin –– documentary on the last film of Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift  — 2001 black and white 2001

* * * * *

We who were alive at the time, knew a lot about what was going because Marilyn Monroe was such a photographed figure. Her genius was, in fact, for the still picture not the motion picture –– and Eli Wallach says the same. Monroe, Gable, and Clift all died before the film was released. I remember talking to Celeste Holm about it the week it opened; she’d gone to the Roxy to see it, and she said, “You could shoot moose in there.” Because the movie was a coffin? The theatre was empty when I went too. Holm said that Monroe couldn’t act. That’s probably right. In a sense Monroe was prevented from it by the script which makes of her a marshmallow saint whom everyone loves –– which means there was no inherent character defect or inner conflict in the character, nothing for her to play against, no failing to let us in. The film was remarkably photographed and produced, and the producers and their survivors talk about it. What the actors, such as Kevin McCarthy and Eli Wallach, say about their work is fascinating. John Houston was a gallant director, energetic but also lazy. He loved filming horses. The Misfits has a grainy and horizontal quality to it, and is well worth seeing. Its failure lies with Arthur Miller who wrote it; its failure lies not in its characters or situation but in its story. It would have been far more interesting if Monroe’s capacity for atrocious behavior had been an element in that story. Then you might have had something. Too late now, though. This documentary made years later seizes the world of studio filmmaking at it its richest. Scenes of the crew lying around in the hideous heat of Arizona while the demoralizing Monroe was hours late are a testament to the fortitude of the craftsmen whose skills and devotion brought the good strong films of that era before us.

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Posted in ACTION, ANIMAL LOVERS, BIO-DOCUMENTARY, Clark Gable: SCREEN GOD, Directed by John Huston, DOCUMENTARY, DRAMA, Eli Wallach, Marilyn Monroe: SCREEN GODDESS, Montgomery Clift: SCREEN GOD, Psychological Western

 
 
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