In partnership with The Film Foundation, iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese's exclusive monthly contribution to the TCM newsletter Now Playing in February 2022.
This month, TCM is paying tribute to two unusual movie stars. Montgomery Clift and Gene Tierney were born just a month apart in the year 1920. Clift was a Midwesterner and Tierney was born and raised in Connecticut. Both came from wealth, neither went to college.
Tierney studied acting in New York with Benno Schneider, who later coached actors and actresses at Columbia. Clift started in summer theatre, made his Broadway debut in 1935, appeared in Elia Kazan’s all-star production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, and later became a member of Robert Lewis’ group at the Actors’ Studio. Tierney signed with Fox and made her film debut in 1940. Clift, who made his debut eight years later as John Wayne’s co-star in Red River, never signed with any of the majors.
Success and praise came early for both, Clift in particular; Tierney was more hemmed in by the studio system. Both worked with great directors—Fritz Lang, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Josef von Sternberg, Ernest Lubitsch, John Stahl, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Otto Preminger for Tierney; Howard Hawks, Fred Zinnemann, William Wyler, George Stevens, Alfred Hitchcock, Vittorio de Sica, John Huston, Mankiewicz and Kazan for Clift. Both actors were extremely fragile. Clift was a heavy drinker prone to depression. Tierney struggled with manic depression. In 1956, Clift was in a car accident on his way home from Elizabeth Taylor’s house—his severely damaged and heavily reconstructed face was never the same, and his pain was chronic. In 1955, Tierney checked herself into a clinic and went through multiple rounds of shock therapy; two years later she opened the window of her mother’s Manhattan apartment and walked out onto the ledge. She spent most of the following year in Menninger Clinic in Kansas.
Both were subsequently viewed as “liabilities” in the business. Clift died at the age of 46, Tierney made very few acting appearances before she died at the age of 70. The immediate assumption nowadays would be that Montgomery Clift and Gene Tierney were “destroyed” as actors by “the system,” and there’s no doubt that the grind of the movie business took a heavy toll, heavier on some than others. And there’s no doubt that as a man, Clift had more leeway than Tierney (he also had the benefit of starting later, when the system itself was about to fall apart).
But isn’t it also the case that emotional fragility was probably one of the common factors that drew both Tierney and Clift into acting in the first place, as a refuge and a means of expression? Both of them are like extremely sensitive emotional geiger counters, subtly registering everything and everyone in their path. When they’re at their very best—as Tierney is in Laura, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Whirlpool, the three pictures that comprise her tribute, and as Clift is in Red River, I Confess, From Here to Eternity and Wild River, the titles in his four film salute—they’re electrifying.
