Monty @ 100: The Italian misadventure of "Terminal Station"

by Cláudio Alves

Some movies are more fascinating than they are engaging, working better as a discussion topic than as cinema. Such pictures tend to find their home in writings about film history or critical academia, living on as curious artifacts that thrive on the page while failing on screen. Montgomery Clift's seventh feature, the only time he ever worked with celebrated Italian auteur Vittorio De Sica, is one of such films. Perhaps more accurately, it's two of them…

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The Furniture: Suddenly, Last Summer and the Dawn of Creation

As a special side dish to our ongoing Montgomery Clift Centennial celebration, The Furniture (our series on Production Design) is looking at one of his most fascinating pictures...

by Daniel Walber

Saint Sebastian had to be martyred twice. Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn) tells his story with a certain vicious pride, lending her own Sebastian a supernatural authority. The saint was shot full of arrows but survived, miracuously, only to be beaten to death with cudgels. The first death has been depicted by countless artists, a hauntingly beautiful and frequently homoerotic image. The second, meanwhile, is unspeakably violent and ugly. It’s almost forgotten, a brutal footnote to a transcendent aesthetic.

Mrs. Venable’s Sebastian, however, gets it in reverse. As is revealed at the end of Suddenly, Last Summer, he was torn limb from limb under the white hot sun of Cabeza de Lobo. And for what crime? In accordance with the aging Hays Code, it appears to be his homosexuality. But beneath this ultra-thin surface lingers something much darker...

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Monty @ 100: A Hitchcock detour with "I, Confess"

We're watching every Montgomery Clift film for his Centennial. Here's Jason Adams

And so we come to Montgomery Clift's sixth film, and that accursed number of the devil seems appropriate given I speak of Alfred Hitchcock's I, Confess. The Master of Suspense's 1953 drama had the actor slipping into the world's most form-fitting cassock to play a Quebecois priest suspected of murder most foul. The twist in this whodunit is he didn't dun it, but knows who did dun because the guilty party confessed the crime in confessional. A fact Monty's character of Father Logan can't share with the prosecution, given ye damned sacramental seal of confession. It's a trap! Call it The Father Who Knew Too Much and then call it a day.

The marriage of Monty and Hitch was a well-documented rocky ride...

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Monty @ 100: The influential peak of "A Place in the Sun"

We're watching all 17 of Montgomery Clift's films for his centennial. Here's Juan Carlos...

After starring in The Search, Red River, The Heiress, and The Big Lift, all but one of them either a critical or commercial success, Montgomery Clift reached an even great peak in 1951 with George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun. It was the adaptation of a novel and play, both called An American Tragedy, that were in turn inspired by the real-life murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in 1906. The story, already made into a 1931 pre-Code drama as An American Tragedy, took on a life of its own in its 1951 form. A Place in the Sun's now classic tale of doomed romance and class divide proved a crucial success in the careers of all of its key players, winning six Oscars in a tight battle for Best Picture with An American in Paris. 

Shelley Winters stripped herself of the bombshell packaging that the studio system had placed on her and in turn earned her first Academy Award nomination. For Elizabeth Taylor, the film was a key act in her transition from juvenile star to legendary adult star. Meanwhile, the film gave director George Stevens his first Oscar on his second nomination. For Clift, this film, coupled with Marlon Brando’s smolderingly threatening work in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire released the same year, put The Method into the mainstream leading to an inevitable shift in acting styles in American cinema...

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Monty @ 100: "The Big Lift" Or, what Monty did instead of "Sunset Blvd"

We're watching ALL 17 of Montgomery Clift's films for his Centennial. Here's returning contributor David Upton with episode 4.

Just two years after his debut in The Search, Montgomery Clift returned to post-war Europe. The Big Lift, released in 1950, was just two years removed from the true story it centres on, the Berlin airlift of 1948. One of the first major crises of the Cold War, the airlift was needed thanks to the Soviet blockade of the part of the city under the control of Western allies. Berlin is a city in ruin, populated by a people torn apart and living amongst rubble. Into this, director George Seaton’s film casts a watchful Monty and the exuberant Paul Douglas as a pair of Air Force sergeants, Danny MacCullough and Hank Kowalski.

Future AMPAS president Seaton, best known for 1947’s whimsical Christmas fantasy Miracle on 34th Street, goes hard on the verité factor, casting all supporting military characters with real Air Force personnel...

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