MONTGOMERY CLIFT (October 17, 6am)--In 1979, The Clash released a two-record set called London Calling. I was a fan of their music, and I loved the album instantly. There was a song on side 2 called "The Right Profile," and when I studied the lyrics, I was moved to realize that it was about Montgomery Clift (years later, REM recorded their own song about Clift--"Monty Got a Raw Deal"--on Automatic for the People). At the time, everyone was still talking about James Dean and Marilyn Monroe: there was a never-ending supply of new books, songs (like Elton John's "Candle in the Wind") and movies (like September 30, 1955 by James Bridges) about both of them. Clift was remembered and beloved, but he was a more complicated figure. He lived longer than either Monroe or Dean, and he had many more shadings and subtleties than some of the greatest icons--Clift's performances are extraordinarily delicate, and he was actually able to convey the sense of a thought or an emotion forming in his characters and passing through them. Clift was one of the rare actors who could make confusion, sadness, melancholy and even depression not just interesting, but dynamic. In 1956, during the filming of Raintree County, he smashed his car into a telephone pole on the way home from a dinner at the home of Elizabeth Taylor, his co-star and close friend. His jaw and his nose were broken, one of the most beautiful faces in movies became imperfect and oddly asymmetrical, and Clift was in constant pain, which he treated with alcohol and pills. According to his biographers, he became unpredictable in public and his acting, while still very sensitive, took on a whole other troubling dimension: there was the drama of the film and the character, and then there was the visible drama of simply being Montgomery Clift. The Clash song included all of these details and it was actually named for the damaged side of Clift's face, but it was also a tribute to an actor who worked to articulate the pain he was feeling and transform it into genuine art.

TCM's six-film tribute leaves out some of the greatest highlights of Clift's career, including his first picture--Howard Hawks' great Red River-- as well as A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity, Suddenly Last Summer and one of his greatest, Kazan's Wild River. But the six pictures chosen give an accurate sense of the span of Clift's time onscreen. The Search and The Big Lift are both semi-documentary films shot in post-war Europe, and it's interesting that Clift fit so perfectly into that moment in time--the ruined landscapes, the desperation and helplessness, the feeling of regeneration on the horizon. Hitchcock's I Confess is a film about a priest who unwillingly shields a murderer because he will not violate the sanctity of the confessional (Hitchcock and Clift did not see eye to eye: Hitchcock required his actors to make certain moves and gestures so that his shots would cut together, while for Clift emotional truth came first--a classic conflict). Raintree County, a Civil War epic and a pretty good picture, is also included, and the tribute ends, fittingly, with Clift's last film, a spy picture called The Defector. He was dead before it was released, of a heart attack, at the age of 46. Montgomery Clift was a brilliant actor and, I think, one of the most unusual presences in the history of movies.

by Martin Scorsese