A bold documentary counters the movie legend that he was a tortured, self-hating homosexual.
It has taken four years for the 2018 documentary Making Montgomery Clift, now showing at Film Forum, to be released. It comes at the right moment — when celebrity gossip is accepted as newsworthy but needs to be exposed for its distraction from economic collapse, political corruption, and cultural decay.
Making Montgomery Clift confronts those aspects of media dishonesty. Made before the media trend of sexual proselytizing, the doc sees double, both penetrating the late movie star’s mystique and rehabilitating the great actor’s reputation.
The film is co-directed by Robert Anderson Clift (Monty’s nephew) and Hillary Demmon; their efforts include many hours of revealing recorded phone calls, written communications, and only a few film clips. The result, which uses assorted data as proof of Clift’s legacy, is more than the usual series of starstruck talking-head reminiscences.
Clift and Demmon take on the distractions initiated by Hollywood gossip and seemingly validated by Patricia Bosworth’s 1978 biography, a bestseller that contributed to later media portrayals of the actor as haunted and depressed about being homosexual. It is the making of this unfair legend that provides the innuendo in the movie’s title. It points out the malicious, salacious intent and the misplaced sympathy that have been mistaken for insight.
Genuine revelations come from family disclosures. Monty, born Edward, had his most steadfast defender in his brother Brooks, who preserved family materials, most significantly the trove of tape recordings kept by their father, who had WWII experience as an advance man for European liberation, working in the Counter Intelligence Corps for the War Department. (“Old spy habits must die hard.”)
This tech-based family secrecy parallels Monty’s movie career; it furthers the mission of substantiating Monty as a singular Hollywood figure, not only extraordinarily handsome but the product of a conscientious background.
Brooks, whose facial and vocal patterns strikingly resemble those of his famous movie-star sibling, provides a ghostly analog to his brother’s artistic boldness and integrity. Among the family archives are candid recordings of Brooks’s frank “discussions of love” with their father, alongside other diary-like, not always flattering, phone conversations.
This material makes the doc intensely personal and authentic, as if Brooks and Monty were fighting shoulder to shoulder against the whole media machine, the Monty Clift gossip industry. We’re vouchsafed Brooks’s notes to Bosworth: “Need to consider the man as the devoted artist he was, rather than as such a psychological mess. . . . Need more of his philosophy of growth, limits and the devotion to the creation of art.” (Later, we’re shown the brothers’ side-by-side tombstones.)
Details about Clift’s working methods underscore his impressive film performances, which helped redefine the culture’s perception of masculine sensitivity: His insistence on a quartz mouthpiece for the trumpet-playing character Prewitt in From Here to Eternity proved him meticulous about authenticity. His famous characterization as a castrated war prisoner in Judgment at Nuremberg is juxtaposed with precise, hand-scrawled script notes confirming that his on-screen fluency and apparent spontaneity owed to painstaking technical proficiency. It corrects the fallacy that Clift’s performance poured out of his “terror and uncured suffering.”
Clift’s emotional authenticity distinguished his performances in The Search and A Place in the Sun, which — during the same era as Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, and James Dean — revealed more facets to being a man than previous movie stereotypes had. That was also the promise of his unfulfilled projects The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Reflections in a Golden Eye — he died at age 41 before completing them.
Making Montgomery Clift applies the revelation of his art to the facts of Clift’s life. Gossip about Clift’s emotionally tormented, drug-addicted, alcoholic self-loathing is corrected by an intimate black confidant, Lorenzo James, who asserts, “Monty’s personal life didn’t bother him as much as people thought it did. He really wasn’t that much closeted.”
James’s testimony provides the doc’s definitive statement, warning gossipmongers, “You’re digging into something that you don’t have to dig for. He didn’t hate himself. Throw it out the window.” What matters most are the images of beautiful sensitivity that Montgomery Cliff left on the screen. Those touchstones don’t distract from mankind’s ongoing ethical struggle.
