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2. Irruption in Hollywood: The Beautiful Boy
- Wayne State University Press
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two Irruption in Hollywood The Beautiful Boy Queerness as Sexual Ambiguity and Erotic Spectacle: Red River and The Heiress More than any other film starring Montgomery Clift, Red River has attracted retrospective critical attention. Casting the twenty-sixyear -old Clift against an especially brutish John Wayne, this epic western depicts a classic yet deceptively simple tale of masculine struggle. Red River has been hailed as a key intervention in screen representations of male identity and Clift’s role as Matthew “Matt” Garth as a template for his disturbance of gender patterns. Steven Cohan highlights the suggestive qualities of Red River’s dominant narrative, the opposition between the radically different masculinities Clift and Wayne represent : “the highly charged context between the soft boy and the hard man in Red River dramatizes such a shift in the mainstream culture’s demands upon masculinity.”1 According to Amy Lawrence, in Red River “Clift’s Matt stands toe-to-toe with John Wayne, insisting that Wayne and the western genre give way and revise their traditional definitions of manliness to accommodate Clift.”2 Barry Keith Grant points to the film’s visual construction of a different masculinity, effected not only through the striking physical contrast between Clift and Wayne, but chapter 2 34 also by the close-ups of Clift’s face in soft focus, a type of shot “usually reserved for enhancing the glamour of female stars.”3 Brett Farmer reads the film as a subversive homosexual parable, resonating “with the type of gay fantasmatic scenario . . . in which the ‘tyranny’ of patrocentrism is refused and an ‘alternative’ order of identification and desire is instated in its place.”4 Such claims testify to the enduring power of Red River, which aptly showcases Clift’s blend of sexual ambiguity and gender disruption through a narrative resting on generational conflict and homosocial desire. Perhaps more than any other factor, Clift’s irruption in the utterly traditional, “virile” western canon, against Wayne’s hypermasculine presence, has ensured the film’s status as a definitive example of Clift’s subversive function. At the same time, Red River bears the unmistakable authorial mark of its director, Howard Hawks, whose oeuvre resonates with the interrogation of tropes of masculinity , often focusing on close relationships between men. From A Girl in Every Port (1928) to The Big Sky (1952), to El Dorado (1967), Hawks’s films foreground the same intensely homosocial narrative, described by the director himself as “a love story between two men.”5 It is significant that Red River is usually seen as the beginning of Clift’s career, although it is not his first appearance on screen. While being indeed the first film he made, it was shot in 1946 yet only released in 1948, a few months after The Search had come out. A legal dispute between Howard Hawks and Howard Hughes, who claimed Hawks had stolen the plot from his own The Outlaw (1943), prevented Red River to reach the screen first. However, it is easy to see how the film may be used as the starting point for a study of Clift: apart from showing him at the youngest he ever was on screen, the film encapsulates his nascent persona and marks his full impact on audience and critics. While The Search had received superlative reviews, and gained Clift his first Academy Award nomination, Red River is the film that shot him to stardom; as Sidney Skolsky wrote, with Red River Clift “became a popular idol overnight.”6 There are obvious implications in Clift’s stunning impact in Red River: it signals an unusually condensed screen presence, an exceptional amount of meanings traceable to his role and performance. Clift’s portrayal of Matt encapsulates key traits of his star image, powerful and distinctive if just beginning to unravel; these traits will evolve and gain in complexity through Clift’s career, or occasionally mutate. [44.223.94.103] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:55 GMT) Irruption in Hollywood 35 The shock of Clift’s presence in Red River rests partly on his erotic selfdisplay , on his open spectacle of sexually ambivalent masculinity. This erotic quality will become a huge part of Clift’s persona, but it will be largely absent in his last films. Casting himself as a willing object of desire, in Red River Clift articulates a sexuality that defies categories and a contradictory, subversive relation to the masculine system in which he is placed; these subjective positions, variously expressed, will define him till...