The Passion of Montgomery Clift (review)

In the introduction to Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer explains that star images have histories that surpass the life span of the star and that the star text is continuously produced after the star has stopped working. With The Passion of Montgomery Clift, Amy Lawrence takes up a study examining the creation of Montgomery Clift both as an object of Clift’s self-production and as a production of fan desire. The idea for this project stemmed from general thoughts about how fans remember films and assimilate them into their daily lives; Lawrence was drawn to Clift because of a single charged moment of performance in I Confess (1953). Montgomery Clift’s fans function as a key point of analysis throughout the book, but the dual focus on how fans and stars produce star images resonates strongly with Dyer’s point about star histories. Lawrence traces the subject and the image of Montgomery Clift both from a historically specific perspective (how Clift was perceived during his life and how Clift was working to fashion his own image and persona) and from the perspective of how these images get remade in light of new information about Clift and at different points in time with newer fans. However, this ambitious approach toward various star narratives is not the only resonance with Dyer’s book. Both works evoke religious language in their titles, and though Lawrence notes the ironic tone that Dyer takes with the title Heavenly Bodies, she is sincerely interested in considering how fans appropriate religious language to talk about stars, something that Lawrence claims represents a “disjunction between ethereal imagery and earthly biography” (4).

Although the book proceeds chronologically and addresses the milestones in Clift’s early years and Hollywood career, The Passion of Montgomery Clift is not merely a biography. The book draws on biographic information throughout, but Lawrence is more concerned with how fans make use of biographic material than with verifying facts of Clift’s life. Lawrence carefully draws from the 1970s biographies of Clift by LaGuardia and Bosworth,¹ noting the tones of each biography, their respective sympathies (especially in relation to Clift’s sexual relationships), and the noteworthy differences between the two, but she does not overemphasize extraneous information or trivia about his life. Her historical research is focused on Clift’s on-set behavior, which is documented in a combination of primary archival research and secondary sources. The book is carefully researched, but the strength in her argument about the quality of Clift’s acting and her statement about the perceived shifts in its quality arises from the combination of research and compelling visual and aural analysis.

The chronological structure determines that the book culminates with Montgomery Clift’s critical failures, but the close film analysis that accompanies each one of Clift’s films serves a recuperative function. Lawrence repeatedly warns against the fan practice of collapsing the actor into the character that he plays, concisely stating, “Biography does not trump labor” (142). She argues that the tendency of fans to see characters and films as biographical fuels the perception that Clift’s acting deteriorated after his accident in 1956. To challenge this assumption, Lawrence uses comparative visual analysis to contrast Clift’s performances at different points in his career (pre- and postaccident). One particularly clear example of this approach is in her comparison between the courtroom sequences of Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and A Place in the Sun (1951) (212–17). Previous discussions of Clift’s performance in Nuremberg have claimed that his trembling and sweating indicated that he was struggling with alcohol withdrawal. Through close analysis of each performance, Lawrence contends that Clift’s specific movements and gestures in Nuremberg are voluntary and conscious, based on their similarity to his movements in the courtroom scene in A Place in the Sun. Ultimately, the warnings about collapsing biography and labor create a tension with the overarching points about how fans compose star biographies, especially in the second half of the book. By focusing on the labor of acting...