Montgomery Clift, Queer Star

Introduction

“I don’t want to be labeled as either a pansy or a heterosexual . Labeling is so self-limiting. We are what we do, not what we say we are.”1 Montgomery Clift challenged prescribed models of identity throughout his life and career; his legacy as a film star stands out as a continuous, creative act of transgression, defying the cultural dominancy of sexual and gender “normality.” Clift is a major figure in postwar Hollywood; his place in film history rests not only on his outstanding talent and the range of his work, but also, and arguably more, on his crucial role in the development of representations of masculinity. The first of a crop of young male actors who subverted conventions, Clift was a strikingly beautiful man, combining on-screen erotic ambiguity with real-life sexual nonconformity. He epitomized the shift from monolithically heterosexual models of virility (such as, for example , the image John Wayne projected, with whom Clift starred in Red River, 1948) to a greatly more nuanced, complicated portrayal of male identity. Clift was also a hugely talented actor, trained on stage since he was thirteen, and who collected Oscar nominations since his first screen appearance, in The Search in 1948. Worshipped by critics and audiences, he remained one of Hollywood’s most marketable leading Introduction introduction 2 men until 1956, when a devastating car accident nearly destroyed his face. Clift never recovered from the trauma, as the accident brought to a head his history of alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental fragility ; it also robbed him of his exceptional beauty, revoking his heartthrob status overnight. Visibly burdened by physical and mental pain, with part of his face paralyzed, and afflicted by spiraling ill health, Clift was turned into a tragic, disturbing figure by the press; his worsening condition was greatly sensationalized and openly held against him by an increasingly hostile Hollywood. Yet Clift continued to make films, crafting a series of unorthodox performances that have been too often overlooked; while the first phase of his career was defined by an ambivalent though palpable sexual presence, his post-1956 work shows him as a socially alienated subject, engaged in unusual and often nonsexual relationships. Montgomery Clift died in 1966, aged forty-five; the body of work he left behind consists of seventeen films and a range of male characters that, in their disruption of normative structures, are astoundingly modern. As issues of sexual and gender representation move at the core of critical inquiry, and the very concept of a fixed identity is questioned, the exploration of Clift’s subversive legacy is more topical, and more exciting, than ever. Film stars are actors who achieve a privileged, iconic status in the public imagination. More than other performers, stars generate their own discourse about themselves, in which screen appearances merge with biography and publicity. In Montgomery Clift’s case, a single event in his life not only affected his celebrity aura but also brought factual changes to his looks and health, impacting his work as an actor: the event was, of course, the 1956 car crash, which effectively gave rise to two visibly different figures, the pre- and the postaccident Clift. As a result, his career path falls almost too neatly in two separate halves, yet as Richard Dyer points out, a star’s image “is a complex totality and it does have a chronological dimension”2 (Dyer’s emphasis). Clift’s 1956 accident gives structure to his chronology by being an obvious turning point, yet it does not alter his total signification as a star: beautiful or damaged, healthy or dramatically ill, young or prematurely aged, Clift maintained an essential disruptive function, against conventions of the male, the lover, and the Hollywood leading man. His image had been replete with ambiguity from the start, since The Search and Red River introduction 3 had rocketed him to stardom in 1948; a few months later his face graced the cover of Life magazine. Such meteoric fame was largely based on his quality of dissonance, and his disorienting erotic charge. The Search cast him as a US Army engineer in postwar Germany: looking radiant and sexy in a landscape of devastation, he was not involved in a conventional romance plot but in an extraordinarily close relationship with a young boy, whom he loved and nurtured at the exclusion of any other interest. As John Wayne’s young foil in Red River...