Judy Garland @ 100: "Judgment at Nuremberg"

Team Experience is revisiting nine Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Christopher James on the star's second Oscar nomination.

Judy Garland received a Supporting Actress nomination in 1961 for her three scene performance in "Judgment at Nuremberg."

With a career that spanned over three decades, there were many points in which Judy Garland had to reinvent her image, intentionally or unintentionally. The other articles in this centennial celebration have examined Judy as the child star, the musical superstar and the complicated movie star. In conjunction with Claudio’s piece on A Star is Born, this later period of Garland’s career sought to deflect from her personal life through focusing on her powerful dramatic chops. Stanley Kramer’s Judgment in Nuremberg cast Garland in a new light… a supporting actress. However, her role as Irene Hoffman, a woman imprisoned as a teen for violating “racial pollution” law, is not short on fireworks. Garland delivers an impressive and affecting performance in just three short scenes. It's hard to argue against that year's winner (Rita Moreno for West Side Story), but Garland more than earns her Oscar nomination, the second and final of her career...

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Linking on Empty

• Washington Post reviews a new book on Elizabeth Taylor & Montgomery Clift's friendship
• TFE <--- in case you missed it we discussed every one of Clift's films for his centennial this past fall
• Vulture To say we're thrilled to hear that Todd Haynes will be reuniting with Julianne Moore for his next film, is an understatement. It's a psychodrama called May December in which Natalie Portman will play an actress who is playing Moore's character in a movie based on her scandalous love affair.
• IndieWire Why Brooke Smith is running an Emmy campaign on her own without the studio's blessing (I mean she has a point about paying your dues. But we know from years of experience and category fraud that Hollywood cares very little about non-leads.

Queer horror, Jane Campion's latest, Harrison Ford, fav musicals, Sex and the City, and more after the jump...

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Gay Best Friend: Sebastian Venable in "Suddenly Last Summer" (1959)

 a series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope

Alas, this is most we see of our dearly departed subject of Gay Best Friend this week, Sebastian Venable.Not all gay best friends get a lot of screen time, but they always know how to make an impression. Admittedly, I’m broadening the definition of the trope a bit with this latest entry. Sebastian Venable’s face is never seen. However, he is the coded mystery and the spectre that looms over the entirety of Suddenly Last Summer. The word “coded” is used both strongly and loosely. Gore Vidal’s adaptation of the Tennesse Williams play does everything but say the word “gay” to communicate that Sebastian prefers the company of other men. You’d be hard pressed to find a gayer movie from 1959 (though the Best Picture winner, Ben-Hur, could give it a run for its money).

What makes Sebastian Venable, a man who is talked about and not seen, a candidate for Gay Best Friend?

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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: Unexpected ending with "The Defector"

by Nathaniel R

Sadly, we now reach the finale of the Montgomery Clift filmography. The shroud of sadness and tragedy that hung over Clift's second act in motion pictures (Raintree County through Freud) have often obscured the quality of some of the films. Despite the broken souls and grim reaper feeling exuded by The Misfits and Judgment at Nuremberg in particular -- it's part of their subject matter, after all -- Clift's acting prowess was actually on the rise again.

His declining health and addictions interfered. After Freud there was another four year intermission from the silver screen as there'd been just after From Here to Eternity. With 1966's The Defector the curtain raised again and filming went smoothly for a change. But no third act came. Both Clift (then 45) and his director Raoul Lévy (then just 44) died that year, Clift of a heart attack shortly before the movie's release and Levy, shortly after, by his own hand...

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