Monty @ 100: The recent documentary "Making Montgomery Clift"

by Sean Donovan

As a kind of epilogue to our Montgomery Clift Centennial series, in which we revisited every film of his, let's discuss a curio that made the festival rounds in 2018 and 2019. The documentary Making Montgomery Clift was co-directed by Hillary Demmon and Monty’s nephew Robert Clift. Robert is very much foregrounded as a protagonist of the film as he attempts to do much of what the Film Experience team has been attempting over the past two and half weeks: to grapple with the legacy of Montgomery Clift and bask in the immortal work he has left behind. Making Montgomery Clift is an imperfect project, and those imperfections arise out of an enormous emotional attachment to the subject that can’t hep but obscure our view of the man and his work.

Making Montgomery Clift provides an overview of the star’s life and career trajectory, the highlights and lowlights that have been gestured to in posts throughout this series: Clift’s struggles with alcohol and pills, his queer sexuality, the traumatic car accident that transformed his career, his reputation as a difficult diva of a movie star, etc. But the film also does the invaluable work of tracing the discourse of our pop culture knowledge of Clift himself: when and how the legend of Monty Clift was written...

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Monty @ 100: John Huston's "Freud"

by Daniel Walber

Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) is an odd movie to categorize. It has the moody pessimism of the late ‘60s and the earnest hero-worship of a biopic from the ‘40s. It’s Montgomery Clift’s second-to-last film, but it doesn’t have the “end of an era” energy of its immediate predecessors, The Misfits and Judgment at Nuremberg. In terms of Oscar history, it feels perhaps most significant as Jerry Goldsmith’s first nominated score. And practically no one has seen it.

But I’m here to tell you that’s a shame, because Clift was perfect for Freud. I’ve realized this over the course of the past couple of weeks, reading everyone else’s fabulous Monty @ 100 coverage. Freud is, in a sense, the ultimate fusion of two essential parts of Clift’s star persona: the heartthrob and the priest...

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