Monty @ 100: Friendship, Tragedy and "Raintree County"

by Cláudio Alves

Montgomery Clift's legacy is as defined by tragedy as it is by acting glory. Robert Lewis, his teacher at the famed Actors Studio, would famously describe Monty's downfall as "the longest suicide in Hollywood history". Until now, this centennial celebration has mostly avoided gossip and the dark shadow of doom clouding over the actor's biography. However, as we arrive at his ninth feature, the context of what was happening off-screen is too important to be dismissed…

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Monty @ 100: Stardom's Peak in "From Here To Eternity"

by Nathaniel R

Calling your picture From Here To Eternity, even if that's the name of the book its based on, is a major flex and a tempting of fate. How to live up to the title? 1950s and 1960s movies did this frequently, of course, in their battle against the looming threat of television. Screens got bigger and wider and the studio system was, if already mortally wounded, still working hard at making their movie stars iconic. Titles like Giant, The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Greatest Show on Earth, frequently dared to proclaim their epic-ness, and if the titles weren't size-conscious, why not add an exclamation point a la Oliver!, Hello, Dolly!, Viva Zapata! or I Want To Live!  In this lust for enormous movies, From Here To Eternity stands out, not just for living up to its promise and being eminently swoon-worthy but for its relative modesty -- capturing something grandiose merely by inhabiting the sealed world and social lives of soldiers and their women on the brink of cataclysmic change. It might have been mere soap opera without the skillful direction of Fred Zinneman and the simple fact that the stars themselves were monumental.

Chief among them was Montgomery Clift, scoring his third Best Actor nomination with his eighth film...

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The Furniture: Suddenly, Last Summer and the Dawn of Creation

As a special side dish to our ongoing Montgomery Clift Centennial celebration, The Furniture (our series on Production Design) is looking at one of his most fascinating pictures...

by Daniel Walber

Saint Sebastian had to be martyred twice. Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn) tells his story with a certain vicious pride, lending her own Sebastian a supernatural authority. The saint was shot full of arrows but survived, miracuously, only to be beaten to death with cudgels. The first death has been depicted by countless artists, a hauntingly beautiful and frequently homoerotic image. The second, meanwhile, is unspeakably violent and ugly. It’s almost forgotten, a brutal footnote to a transcendent aesthetic.

Mrs. Venable’s Sebastian, however, gets it in reverse. As is revealed at the end of Suddenly, Last Summer, he was torn limb from limb under the white hot sun of Cabeza de Lobo. And for what crime? In accordance with the aging Hays Code, it appears to be his homosexuality. But beneath this ultra-thin surface lingers something much darker...

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Monty @ 100: The influential peak of "A Place in the Sun"

We're watching all 17 of Montgomery Clift's films for his centennial. Here's Juan Carlos...

After starring in The Search, Red River, The Heiress, and The Big Lift, all but one of them either a critical or commercial success, Montgomery Clift reached an even great peak in 1951 with George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun. It was the adaptation of a novel and play, both called An American Tragedy, that were in turn inspired by the real-life murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in 1906. The story, already made into a 1931 pre-Code drama as An American Tragedy, took on a life of its own in its 1951 form. A Place in the Sun's now classic tale of doomed romance and class divide proved a crucial success in the careers of all of its key players, winning six Oscars in a tight battle for Best Picture with An American in Paris. 

Shelley Winters stripped herself of the bombshell packaging that the studio system had placed on her and in turn earned her first Academy Award nomination. For Elizabeth Taylor, the film was a key act in her transition from juvenile star to legendary adult star. Meanwhile, the film gave director George Stevens his first Oscar on his second nomination. For Clift, this film, coupled with Marlon Brando’s smolderingly threatening work in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire released the same year, put The Method into the mainstream leading to an inevitable shift in acting styles in American cinema...

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Almost There: Burl Ives in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

by Cláudio Alves

In 1958, Burl Ives won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Some cinephiles would, understandably, assume that the great honor came to him as a reward for his legendary turn as Big Daddy in the silver screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It wasn't so, however. Burl Ives did indeed win his Oscar for playing the impassioned patriarch of some portentous American clan, but it was for a story set in the arid landscapes of the Far West rather than the humid heat of Mississippi. The winning movie was William Wyler's The Big Country, a sublime epic of its genre whose taste for cruelty is only matched by the lushness of its score. It's not a well-remembered flick despite its quality, and, while great, Ives' supporting turn pales in comparison to what he did as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that same cinematic year...

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