Mr. Clift's Wild Ride

He told himself he was only doing it for Bessie Mae. Ever since they first worked together six years before on A Place in the Sun, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth (Bessie Mae) Taylor had been close friends, and now Taylor's second marriage to Michael Wilding was on the verge of collapse. So, in light of the circumstances and the fact that he had hardly worked at all since 1954, Monty said yes to Dore Schary, MGM, and Raintree County. Neither Monty nor Elizabeth thought much of the script, but they did think it might prove as popular as the 1948 book on which it was based. MGM was feeding a lot of money into the production (legend has it that Clift had accepted the role of John Shawnessey for $300,000, then declined it, requesting just $250,000 and telling MGM to take the extra $50,000 and "make a better movie"). Raintree County was Dore Schary's pet project - his Gone With the Wind - before he was ousted as MGM Head of Production in November 1956.

Monty and Bessie Mae start their day in makeup.

Roughly halfway through the shoot, on the eve of the production's move from studio shooting at MGM Studios in Culver City, California, to location shooting in Danville, Kentucky, Taylor held a small dinner party at her home in Beverly Hills. Wanting to back out of the party, an exhausted and hung over Clift nevertheless made the drive to the Taylor/Wilding house. "The dinner was subdued," said party guest Kevin McCarthy. Also in attendance were Rock Hudson and his future wife, Phyllis Gates. Clift told McCarthy he wanted to leave early and asked McCarthy to drive ahead, leading the way down the hill to Sunset Boulevard since Clift wasn't familiar with winding roads of the foothills where Taylor lived. According to McCarthy, Clift only had one glass of wine at the party, so drunk driving was not the apparent culprit of the gruesome wreck on that night in May 1956 when Montgomery Clift wrapped his car around a telephone pole and nearly killed himself. On the way down the hill,  McCarthy lost sight of Clift's headlights in the rearview mirror and went back to find Monty's car looking like this:

McCarthy raced back to Elizabeth Taylor's house, "shaking like a leaf," telling all that there had been a "terrible accident." Right away Taylor and others rushed to help. According to McCarthy, when they got to the site of the accident, they found Monty "curled under the dashboard, his face torn away - a bloody pulp." He wasn't dead, as McCarthy feared, but he was choking. Two of his teeth had lodged in his throat, and he couldn't breathe. McCarthy continued," I'll never forget what Liz did. She stuck her fingers down his throat and she pulled out those teeth." Clift survived the crash - physically anyway. The damage done to his body was bad; the damage to his face profound. As Patricia Bosworth writes in her excellent biography of Clift, he suffered from "heavy lacerations on the left side of his face. His nose was broken...jaw on both sides crushed...severe cerebral concussion... [but] no plastic surgery [was performed]. The biggest reconstruction was his teeth." In addition, the left side of his face was partially paralyzed. MGM, rather than shut down the production, decided to postpone the shoot until Clift was ready to continue. Nine weeks passed before Clift returned to the set.  

When the time came for Montgomery Clift to return to work, he wasn't ready. He'd returned to the production too soon and suffered constant pain. Some blamed MGM for forcing his hand, yet Clift wanted to complete the film, feeling not only a deep sense of responsibility to the cast and crew of Raintree County but also to himself. To Clift it suddenly seemed that his whole reputation was at stake. Location filming was a struggle. There were reports of him running naked down the streets of Danville, Kentucky. Clift's already prodigious alcohol intake increased, spilling over to the film set for the first time in his career.

Monty before the accident (left) and after (right)

All this made filming difficult at best. Clift became withdrawn on set and, except for Taylor, kept mostly to himself. Friend (and lover, according to the fan mags of the day), torch singer Libby Holman, came to visit, hoping to help ease his pain. But the most help he received came from the pills he took to get through his day. Clift had become a hot mess. Insecure about his talent and unsure if he would have a career in films, the pills and booze accelerated at an alarming rate. Director Edward Dmytryk, who knew of Monty's pill intake, snuck into his hotel room and found pills of every kind, needles, and syringes. Another time the director found Clift passed out, dead drunk with a cigarette burnt down to his fingers. Finally, Clift's diet was exceedingly poor, as he often ate so-called blue-rare, or practically uncooked steak, slathered with pepper and butter.

With Libby Holman during break in filming Raintree County

When Raintree County was released in December 1957, movie audiences were fascinated with the before and after looks of Montgomery Clift. While movie critics were not particularly kind to the film, it did make a lot of money, though not enough to turn a profit. MGM's books showed a nearly $500,000 loss, due to the movie's costly $6 million (50 million in 2015 dollars) production. Rotten Tomatoes posts a dreadful 11% rating (an average from nine critics' reviews), and a much better 6.4 ranking appears on IMDB.  I find much to recommend, however, in its music, costumes, production design, and supporting players, including Lee Marvin, who is especially good as the braggart, Flash Perkins, and Nigel Patrick as the morally suspect Professor. Elizabeth Taylor received the first of four Oscar nominations in a row for Best Actress (losing to Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve), but her work here is middling; Eva Marie Saint's Nell is goody-goody bore; And Clift's John Shawnessey leaves much to be desired. It may be his most pedestrian performance, though 1959's Lonelyhearts runs a close second.

I find Raintree an intriguing failure, effective at times. I first saw it in the 1970s and have revisited it several times since then. It was only the third or fourth movie of Clift's I saw after A Place in the Sun and Red River. Some movies remind me of a very particular time and place - not of the film, but of  what I was experiencing in my own life. The 1970s was a time of discovery for me of all things cinematic. Acting, especially Method acting, held my interest. I wanted to be an actor, and even though I ultimately didn't pursue that career, when I revisit Raintree County, I am reminded of a time when I was experiencing legendary acting like Montgomery Clift's for the first time. When I see Raintree County, I can almost recapture that feeling of when my world was ripe with possibilities, and my future was an expanded horizon waiting to be explored.

By the time Raintree County was playing around the country, Montgomery Clift had discovered that he still did have a life in the movies. The Young Lions with Method rival Marlon Brando came out in April 1958, and he worked with his beloved Bessie Mae again in 1959's Suddenly, Last Summer. Nevertheless, Clift's acting had taken on a hesitant quality. His voice, too, was affected by the 1956 car crash and seemed to waver sometimes. Other times his "new" face and voice would work to his advantage, such as when he played a victim of Nazi experiments in 1961's Judgement at Nuremberg (a performance resulting in the last of four Oscar nominations, which he should have won for) - and in John Huston's The Misfits as the busted up rodeo rider Perce Howland.

Liquor and drug intake quickly took a toll on Clift's body, mind, and spirit. It also lessened his bankability as fewer and fewer producers were willing to take him on. One of the last to do so was Huston again for his movie and box office dud, Freud, released in 1962. The shooting of that film was a disaster. Clift suffered from cataracts and had difficulty remembering his lines. Huston and Clift had many disagreements on set due to differences of interpretation. The film effectively ended his career.

Montgomery Clift's last film, 1966's The Defector, was a low-budget spy film. He took the part only to prove to investors in the upcoming film adaptation of Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye - in which in would be reunited with Elizabeth Taylor as well as his bete noir John Huston - that he could get though it and was healthy enough to work. But before production began, Clift died in his sleep of a heart attack at age 45 on July 23, 1966. He was replaced by Marlon Brando.

The cult of Montgomery Clift is not as strong as James Dean's or Marilyn Monroe's. His achievements as an actor have been overshadowed by more forceful personalities like Brando. It takes a strong film with mass appeal for multiple generations to endure after a performer has died. Clift made many good films and even some great ones (Red River, A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity), but none of his films seem to resonate today like Marlon Brando in The Godfather or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or East of Eden. But the cult of Clift may be gearing up for a comeback as HBO has a biopic in the works, which may help the world rediscover one of the 20th Century's most vulnerable, refined, lonely, romantic, and singular talents. I hope so.

Sources:    Wikipedia Page on Raintree County and Montgomery Clift
                 The Films of Montgomery Clift by Judith M.Kass
                 Montgomery Clift, A Biography by Patricia Bosworth
                 IMDB on Raintree County
                 Rotten Tomatoes
                 Images courtesy of the Internet