50 Years On: Montgomery Clift’s 10 Best Adapted Roles

Saturday, July 23, marks fifty years since the death of Montgomery Clift, at forty-five years old. The official cause was heart attack, with other health problems and longstanding addictions undoubtedly playing a part. But given Clift’s tragic circumstances and sensitive temperament, the cause may just as likely have been debilitating spiritual anguish. As R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe put it on the band’s 1992 album Automatic for the People: “Monty Got a Raw Deal.”

Born in the Midwest in 1920, Clift was acting on Broadway by his mid-teens and spent ten years stalking the stage for some of the great playwrights of the era (Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams). His first on-screen performance, in the 1948 war drama “The Search” directed by Fred Zinnemann, scored him the first of four Oscar nominations. While he was apparently very selective about parts (and occasionally pushed to have scenes rewritten), Clift had solid taste and intuitively knew which roles and characters best suited his tenacious vulnerability – a quality that was inevitably informed by his sexuality and the need to keep it secret. His work consistently received accolades from critics and peers – “A Place in the Sun” (1951) and “From Here to Eternity” (1953) earned him Oscar nods – and he was marketed as a new-school heartthrob in the moody mold of peers Marlon Brando and James Dean during the peak years of his career.

It was only a fateful 1956 car accident, which partially disfigured his face and led to reliance on pain medication, that altered a truly magnificent movie star trajectory. (Dean had died less than a year before while behind the wheel.) While he continued to find good work with great directors, Clift took on the cast of one of his own big-screen characters as he inched inexorably toward a doomed fate. For the full story, check out Patricia Bosworth’s lauded 1978 biography, but in the meantime, we celebrate one of Hollywood’s mid-century greats with a selection of ten of Clift’s best book-based or fact-based films.

“Red River” (1948)
Screenwriters Borden Chase and Charles Schnee expanded on Chase’s 1946 Saturday Evening Post story “Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail” for this epic, Howard Hawks-directed Western. It pits the young Clift against John Wayne’s stubborn father figure during a grueling cattle drive in a classically tragic conflict that symbolically represented the tension between Wayne’s old-school acting style and Clift’s Actors Studio method.

“The Heiress” (1949)
Nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, and winning four, this William Wyler-directed domestic drama set in the mid-nineteenth century gave Clift the opportunity to show off his dark charm as a duplicitous suitor for the hand of Olivia de Havilland’s seemingly easy mark, the daughter of a wealthy doctor. Ruth and Augustus Goetz adapted the script from their own 1947 Broadway play, for which they took inspiration from Henry James’s novel, Washington Square.

“A Place in the Sun” (1951)
Clift is riveting as an ill-fated social climber who falls in love with Elizabeth Taylor’s wealthy debutante in this drama based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy. His potent mix of vulnerability, desperation, and desire scored him his second Oscar nomination. Directed by George Stevens (“Giant”), the film won six Academy Awards, including for the screenplay written by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown.

“I Confess” (1953)
Alfred Hitchcock directed this adaptation of a 1902 French play by Paul Anthelme called Our Two Consciences, in which Clift plays a Catholic priest caught in a deadly dilemma: A man admits to murder during confession and then frames him for it, leaving the holy man, who has his own secrets, unable to defend himself when he’s put on trial for the crime. Though the film plays slow for a thriller, Clift is once again perfect in the role of a vulnerable man in tragic circumstances.

“From Here to Eternity” (1953)
Reunited with Zinnemann, Clift puts on a masterful performance as the tortured Private Prewitt, an Army bugler and former boxer who refuses to put the gloves back on for his superiors in the days leading up to the Pearl Harbor bombings. The film, adapted from James Jones’s classic, National Book Award-winning 1951 debut novel by Daniel Taradash, won the best picture Oscar and seven others, while Clift earned his third acting nomination.

“Raintree County” (1957)
Clift was paired with Taylor again for this Civil War-set melodrama adapted from Ross Lockridge Jr.’s 1948 bestseller by Oscar-nominated writer Millard Kaufman (“Bad Day at Black Rock”). This time, he plays a tragically well-meaning teacher derailed by an increasingly unstable Southern woman with whom he has an affair and then a son. The Oscar-nominated film was the first of Clift’s released after his accident, which had delayed production for a few months.

“The Young Lions” (1958)
Irwin Shaw’s 1948 novel provided the source material for this World War II action drama that paired Clift with fellow Actors Studio star Marlon Brando. In a variation on his “From Here to Eternity” role, Clift plays a goodhearted Jewish American soldier who suffers anti-Semitic harassment from fellow grunts while trying to liberate the death camps and return to his wife and young daughter.

“Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959)
In this grimly shocking drama, Clift plays a psychiatric doctor whom a wealthy woman (Katharine Hepburn) is trying to manipulate into lobotomizing the mentally unstable niece (Taylor again) who witnessed her son’s gruesome death – a disturbing incident with secret undertones the mother is desperate to keep buried. Gore Vidal adapted Tennessee Williams’s semiautobiographical one-act for Oscar-winning “All About Eve” director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Taylor and Hepburn were both nominated for acting Oscars.

“Wild River” (1960)
Oscar-winning “On the Waterfront” filmmaker Elia Kazan directed Clift in this politically minded, Depression Era drama about a New Deal functionary sent from Washington to Tennessee to convince an old woman to move from her home before the TVA floods it. Clift plays the progressive-minded bureaucrat who mucks about with tradition by hiring black laborers and falls in love with the old woman’s widowed granddaughter (Lee Remick). Screenwriter Paul Osborn drew from two novels – William Bradford Huie’s Mud on the Stars (1954) and Borden Deal’s Dunbar’s Cove (1958) – for his script.

“Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961)
By the time of this heartbreaking, fact-based courtroom drama inspired by the Nazi tribunals held after World War II, Clift had become substantially debilitated by pills and alcohol. But amid an all-star cast, his relatively brief role as a mentally impaired Holocaust victim put on the stand earned him his fourth Oscar nomination, this despite the fact that his inability to memorize lines meant that director Stanley Kramer was forced to encourage him to ad-lib in character from whichever words came to mind. The powerful film earned eleven Academy Award nominations, and Abby Mann won for his screenplay.