Long before Montgomery Clift became an "overnight" movie sensation in two awesome films released nearly back-to-back in 1948, Fred Zinnemann's The Search (which earned Clift a Best Actor Oscar nomination) and Howard Hawks' Red River (which immediately became celebrated as one of the great movie Westerns), people around Broadway knew it would only be a matter of time until the actor - with his lean, lanky frame and his almost illegally handsome looks - would become a movie star. He could hardly miss. Since he'd been a pup, he'd had major focus from Broadway's bigwigs, starting out playing juveniles and, as the years ticked by, doing increasingly important roles in major plays with the likes of Fredric March, Tallulah Bankhead, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. One actor from those days told me, "My heart always sank whenever I'd be on an audition and Monty would show up, because inevitably he'd get the role. He was a golden boy. He had that indefinable "it"; Movie moguls starting pitching for his services early on.

When William Wyler was casting Mrs. Miniver at MGM in the summer of 1941, he tried to tempt the 20-year-old Clift into playing the role of Greer Garson's son, an RAF pilot. Clift was interested -until he found out he'd have to sign a seven-year contract with the studio. That he wouldn't do. "Besides," he later told his pal Roddy McDowall, "I figured why start out in a supporting role when chances were good I'd get the opportunity to make my first movie in a starring role." Which he did, spectacularly, seven years later. (He also finally worked with Wyler in 1949, costarring in The Heiress, one of the Clift films that will have its TCM premiere this month, as we put Montgomery C. in our December spotlight.)

It started as quite a remarkable career - great fame, smart choices of material, brilliant work with a dazzling array of directors, including George Stevens, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Elia Kazan, and Joseph Mankiewicz. But things were never the same after a car accident on May 13, 1956; that not only battered him physically but started him on a downward spiral which ultimately destroyed so many of those fragile assets that had rocketed him to fame. His life turned out to be something out of a Greek tragedy, one I'll be talking about in detail as we show his movies throughout the month. All the later hoopla over Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elvis and the other great non-conformists of the movies tend to make some forget, or not realize, that after John Garfield in the 1930s, but before those other fellows in the 1950s, there was Clift; perhaps the most interesting movie rebel of them all. Join us this month and let us prove it to you.

by Robert Osborne