by Eric Blume
We’re celebrating actor Montgomery Clift’s centennial here at TFE with a staff-wide observance of every single one of his films. I’m the lucky bastard who gets to launch this exciting series with his first released film, 1948’s The Search.
Director Fred Zinnemann crafted a film that holds up surprisingly well at age 72. Sure, you have to muddle through some stilted expository voice-over and some now-dated narrative conventions, but this film’s emotional power still taps primal feelings and has an incredible payoff. It’s a Hollywood film through and through, but Zinnemann shows extraordinary restraint and intelligence, keeping his focus on his young actor, and the American cheerleading to a minimum...
The Oscar-winning story follows a nine-year old boy, arriving from Auschwitz in a train with hundreds of other children, during the Allied occupation of Germany. So massively traumatized by his experience, the boy doesn’t even remember his own name and is practically mute. Zinneman was nominated for his direction and the child actor Ivan Jandl won a Special Juvenile Academy Award, and deservedly so: it’s a heart-rending performance, and he’s always front-and-center. You feel this boy’s unfathomable despair, and in his early scenes he’s feral. You see his learned instinct for survival, and that that’s all he has.
While the child’s father and sister have indeed been killed in the camps, unbeknownst to him, his mother is still very much alive. Half of the film we follow his mother’s search for her son. In the other half, our young hero chance-meets Steve, an American Army engineer stationed in Germany, and played, of course, by our Monty. Steve tries to help him find his mother, building to the moving finale.
Clift takes a half hour to arrive. But what an arrival
Montgomery Clift doesn’t appear in The Search until over 35 minutes into the picture, when it only has an hour to go. When we first see him, it’s from a distance, from the child’s point of view, as he sits in a jeep eating his lunch. But when Clift first turns his face to the camera, it's a true star-is-born moment. His beauty is indeed overwhelming. His was always a face born for the camera, effortlessly projecting intelligence, masculinity, sensitivity… all without speaking a word.
In this opening scene, where he must realistically charm this little frightened animal into his vehicle, Clift doesn’t soft-pedal. This soldier has seen many displaced kids, and he doesn’t treat this one in some special, movie-friendly way. Clift starts out with such a lived-in weariness that you believe he’s been on the ground in Germany for a while. He’s seen stuff. He’s built a resolve. He’s willing to drive away from yet another terrified child of war, but you see the moment when he realizes maybe he needs to go a little further this time. This first scene between the two actors has such a naturalistic, honest ring to it that you believe this kid would react differently to Clift than he has to all other adults. The soldier is treating him like a human being and not a vessel to be shipped about.
The Search doesn’t give Clift a huge canvas to paint: it’s a tight, contained role that’s meant mostly to serve the story as the support to Ivan Jandl. But that’s part of the miracle of Clift’s acting here: he is both an emblem of “the American soldier” of that time, but also feels like the summation of what we know about all of those soldiers as well. He seems to have taken the spirit of these men and filtered it, distilled it into this man. While we never “know” Steve at great length, Clift plays the immediacy of a soldier in this hard-to-wrap-your-head-around scenario. Clift plays Steve’s impulses to bring the kid back to the USA with him with a briskness not birthed from old Hollywood ideas of heroism. There’s no shade of “savior” in Clift’s acting: he teaches the boy English because he needs to communicate with him, and he’s willing to bring him back with him because there is simply no other option.
Clift has a remarkable scene where he sits with the boy to tell him his mother has died. Clift brings zero mawkishness to what could be a real barf-inducer of a sentimental scene. Steve has no children of his own, no ability to gauge what he “should” say, and no vocabulary that’s child-friendly.
But he’s connected to the boy, and he treats him with respect and directness. It’s a moment that’s all the more affecting because of the stripped-down approach, and Clift’s talent for clearing out the fussiness of a scene and getting right to the heart of it is on stunning display here.
Clift’s work with Jandl remains a marvel to watch. You can tell that Clift took care of this tiny, young Czech actor, and you get pleasure from his nurturing that you can just feel happened off camera as well, in the same way you could feel it with Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay in Room. As an adult actor working with an actor that young, you need to do double-duty to look out for your scene partner, leading him through technical aspects of filmmaking, while keeping them simple and honest, and directly tied to you. Clift maneuvers this with incredible sophistication, and the results are astonishing.
The studio knew the picture would be hard to market, without stars, so here's what they suggested to theater owners
In many ways, The Search embodies all of the elements that Clift honed as his career progressed, and that still draw us to him seven decades later: his steely physicality, casual magnetic sexuality, innate intelligence, bruising tenderness, and well-judged withholding.
Clift received his first Best Actor nomination for this film. It’s essential for lovers of this magnificent actor, a fine film that’s aged wonderfully, with two central performances that are touchingly in sync. Don’t miss it as we launch into Clift’s complete filmography …so many joys ahead.
NEXT: Red River (1948) Clift's first smash hit.