With this context in mind, I see Red River as a parable about the struggle between the two generations for the control of business and society in the post-war world.   Clift’s caring and listening leadership style resonated much more with returning military men than Wayne’s deaf and inflexible approach, as it does also in the film with Wayne’s cattle drovers.   In Japan and Germany, of course, the generation before had made a mess of things, and so there were greater opportunities in the post-war period for the next generation to take immediate charge.

The best actors of Hollywood films for three decades did a lot of their best work with Hawks.  Grant and Bogart, pre-eminently, but also Cagney, Edward G Robinson, Hepburn (whom he introduced to screwball comedy), Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire, Carole Lombard (who first showed her formidable power and comic range in Twentieth Century), and Montgomery Clift – a refined actor on the brink of being dismissed as overdelicate when Hawks gave him the second lead in Red River and offered tips on movement and gesture.  For example, “the business”, as Hawks’s biographer Todd McCarthy relates, “of putting a strand of wheat in his mouth”; also “rubbing the side of his nose while in thought”.  All the dynamic contest of that movie is there in the contrast between the voices of John Wayne and Clift, the loud monotone of command and the distinct but quiet utterance that suggests a reserve of conscience.  All this Hawks must have heard at once and measured against the story when he saw the actors read for their parts.” (page 17, The Guardian Review, 2011-01-15)

It is hard to believe that someone who had been the leading male actor on the New York  stage for a decade before he made his first film should have needed tips on movement and gesture, even from someone as great as Howard Hawks.  Once again, Monty’s intelligence, contribution and agency seem belittled and minimized. Why is this, I wonder?

And, while we are wondering about his reception, why has Monty’s home city’s leading cultural magazine, The New Yorker, never published an article about him in its history?

Posts about Montgomery Clift can be found here.

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Montgomery Clift is one of the silver screen’s greatest actors.  I have written before about his intensely-naturalistic speaking style, with its pauses and false starts and mid-sentence hesitations and apparently improvised modifications on-the-fly.    To speak as he did, in so many films, showed that this speaking style was probably not an artefact of all the screenwriters involved, especially when so few other actors in these or other films of the time spoke like that, but instead evidence of his own great intelligence and superb ear for speech.

Amy Lawrence has now written a fascinating book on his screen acting across his career, analyzing in detail what he did and how, and how he achieved his effects.  By studying his own, hand-annotated personal copies of film scripts, for example, she is able to identify his particular contributions to the scripts and the dialogue of the films he acted in, and is able to demonstrate the artistry and diligence behind his naturalistic speech.   And to show it, in many cases, as his personal artistry, as he worked to revise and rewrite dialog that was often originally stilted or unnatural.

By careful exegesis, Lawrence is also able to debunk some myths.   Clift’s shambling, addled performance as a courtroom witness in the late Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), for example, is usually presented as evidence of the drug and alcohol addictions he is supposed to have succumbed to following his near-fatal car accident in May 1956.  This accident destroyed his face and left him in pain, taking pain-killers and drinking.   But, as Lawrence demonstrates, his court-room appearance in the 1961 film shows many of the same personal characteristics and mannerisms of his court-room appearance in A Place in the Sun, filmed in 1951 - “tightening his fists, flexing his fingers, pushing against the armrests with his elbows” [Lawrence, p. 212].   Clearly, the origin of Clift’s witness-box performance is not drugs, but acting chops.  Speaking of the character played by Clift in Nuremberg, she says:

Peterson’s gestures are emphatic, not neurotic, but combined with his broken syntax and repetition of sentence fragments, Clift clearly suggests in his performance that the character is not in control of himself.  But the actor is.  When we see the recurrence of these gestures across time and roles, before and after the accident, it seems reasonable to call them choices characteristic of the performer.  Clift is not a mess; he plays one.” [Lawrence, p. 213]

Lawrence also notices how Clift, throughout his career, often acts with his back to the camera, either fully or partially.  These episodes usually signal that he is engaged in some intense, interior, psychological reaction to some event or person, as if he could better tell us what he is thinking by not showing us his face.   That he would even try to do something so counter-intuitive, let alone that he usually succeeds, demonstrates the great actor Clift was.

I had only one, very small quibble with Lawrence’s book.  She describes (on page 63) the scene in The Big Lift (1950) when Clift’s character, about to receive an award for helping in the Berlin airlift, turns and sees for the first time that the official award-giver is a beautiful woman.   Lawrence does not describe Clift’s eyes as he suddenly sees this woman:  his pupils dilate widely as an expression of his character’s plain delight. We know of course, that the actor Clift must have practiced and rehearsed this dilation until he could undertake it at will.   But knowing this fact increases our admiration for his acting skills, since it shows the dedication and diligence he brought to the task.

Clift’s acting art was artless, and like all artlessness, took immense preparation, intelligence, practice, and persistence to achieve.

Reference:

Amy Lawrence [2010]: The Passion of Montgomery Clift. Berkeley, CA, USA:  University of California Press.

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News today that an amateur art-historian, Barbara Webb, has identified the location which pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais used as background for his 1851 painting of the drowned Ophelia.  The location is on the Hogsmill River at Old Malden in south London.   It’s a long way from Elsinore.

The after-life of this image has been immense, at least in the English-speaking world.  For instance, a print of the painting appears on the wall of the room rented by George Eastman, the humble protagonist of George Stevens’ 1951 movie, A Place in the Sun, a film of Theodore Dreiser’s  novel, An American Tragedy.  I took the presence of the print on Eastman’s wall not only as prophecy of the tragedy to come, but also as a reference to Hamlet, since Eastman, as he is played by Montgomery Clift,  is undecided between his two lovers and the two very different fates which his involvement with them entails.

Technorati Tags: John Everett Millais, Ophelia, Hamlet, Montgomery Clift

It may seem like an exaggeration, but with The New World cinema has reached its culmination, its apotheosis. It is both ancient and modern, cinema at its purest and most organic, its simplest and most refined, made with much the same tools as were available in the infancy of the form a century ago to the Lumières, to Griffith and Murnau. Barring a few adjustments for modernity – colour, sound, developments in editing, a hyper-cine-literate audience – it could conceivably have been made 80 years ago (like Murnau and Flaherty’s Tabu). This is why, I believe, when all the middlebrow Oscar-dross of our time has eroded away to its constituent molecules of celluloid, The New World will stand tall, isolated and magnificent, like Kubrick’s black monolith. Anything else that survives from now till then will by comparison probably resemble 2001′s grunting apes. To quote, simultaneously, Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and primitivist auteur Sam Fuller – whose 1957 western Run of the Arrow is a sort of thematic inbred bastard cousin of The New World – Malick is seeking “in a word: emotion!”

Malick’s mantra for The New World was “natural light, no cranes, no big rigs, handheld”. In other words, barebones, stripped-to-the-chassis, organic plein-air film-making. The second unit was despatched to gather beautiful and captivating visual ephemera – including breathtaking images of the film’s two lovers before a real lightning storm at sundown, and pennants of ducks quacking their way though the magic-hour’s crepuscular golden light – while soundmen taped riotous birdsong, forest murmurs and the hiss and babble of water in motion. And the handheld shots in Virginia are, in fact, just one half of an overarching visual scheme; in bold contrast, the English scenes (where the landscape is sculpted and tamed, where life is governed by rites and rituals as baffling and ornate as those of the Indians), the camera is almost always locked down or running, tamed, on tracks.

And then there is the editing. Malick extrudes his movies from the film-bins in the editing suite, “finding” as much of the movie there as he does on location. I’ve seen three separate edits (the 150 minute pre-release version that knocked me out, the 135 release cut (25 of those 30 viewings), and the Blu-Ray director’s cut of 172 minutes) and all strike distinct and equally wondrous variations on the same themes, yet seem radically different to one another at a gut level. This clearly suggests that Malick’s editing has nothing in common with the frame-fucking visual aesthetics of Tony Scott, as has been suggested by more than one fool. In fact, it has more in common with Godard’s jump-cuts, which once seemed so radical and disorienting but which have been absorbed and are now part of the common, comprehensible rubric of the form. Far from being meaningless or self-indulgent, there is insight, a mini-revelation, a deepening of meaning, or just a blessed surprise in almost every one of Malick’s cuts, which cleave in style to this rich filmic inheritance, whereas Scott is a creature of violent eye-ache, and little else.

The layering of sound also partakes of the full gamut of historical precedent and technical possibility, with Malick inhaling the past then exhaling the future of sound design. Along with Kubrick and Scorsese, he remains an American master of the voiceover. In The New World, the three main characters all share their thoughts with us, often when the speaker is out of shot, in low murmurs and incantatory tones (the voiceovers often sound like silent movie title-cards), until they feel like a unified single voice. Plenty of people hate this about Malick, and resort to the conventional line about voiceovers being the last resort of lazy film-makers. Many also dislike the structure of The New World, which is adapted from Wagner: ascend, ascend, ascend, ascend.

That is how The New World works, on an ever upwardly moving scale towards the climactic moment of release, when the movie ends on a bird skittering out of a tall tree in the edenic forest with a frrrrrp-sound of beating wings – fade to black. If you allow it, if you lower your resistance, The New World is not a movie you simply watch – it is a movie that happens to you, overwhelms you, like the weather, or true love. Malick took his time with this, his one true masterpiece, and so should you. As everything else rots away, it will abide.

My only disagreement with Patterson in this article is his dislike of Malick’s movie about war, The Thin Red Line, which is also one of the great films of all time, and certainly the greatest film about war.  Of course, the film moves slowly at times - fighting is perhaps 90% waiting around.  And, of course, there are close-up shots of nature (as indeed in all Malick’s films) – soldiers are often lying as close to dirt and grass and insects as Malick’s camera gets.  

Patterson  is not alone in praising The New World.  When the film was released in 2006, the indefatigable Mark Cousins, writing in Prospect Magazine (Issue 120, 22 March 2006), also declared it a masterpiece:

Terrence Malick’s The New World is a retelling of the settlement of America and the John Smith/Pocahontas romance, so you’d expect it to be only secondarily about England. Much of the glorious first half of the film is like a prayer to the swamplands of Virginia. But in the second half the story follows Pocahontas and her husband John Rolfe to the English court of James I. England is portrayed as a world of gateways. Nearly every scene is framed by one, or features a character passing through one. For Malick, England is obsessed by the idea of home, of arriving, of framing nature as something to be seen from inside looking out. This is an art and garden historian’s view of England, and it works brilliantly in The New World. But it’s not only the English bits of this film which seem to say something about England. The New World is the most romantic film I have ever seen, constantly externalising mental states, enraptured by the rush of feeling caused by nature and by love, intoxicated by sensation. It is not in any way a state of the nation film, at least not of the English nation. But it is a masterpiece nevertheless, one of the most thoughtful films ever made, and many of its thoughts derive from England.

 

Technorati Tags: Terence Malick, The New World, Mark Cousins, The New World

The TV series led me, however,  to read another book about this platoon, written by its commanding officer Lt. Nathaniel Fick (played in the series by actor Stark Sands).    The book is superb!    Fick writes extremely well, intelligently and evocatively, of his training and his battle experiences.  His prose style is direct and uncluttered, without being a parody of itself (as is, say, Hemingway’s).  His writing is remarkably smooth, gliding along, and this aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing, on one of her good days.   Fick clearly has a firm moral centre (perhaps an outcome of his Jesuit high school education), evident from his initial decision to apply to the military while still an undergraduate classics major at Dartmouth.     Having felt a similarly-strong desire as an undergraduate to experience life at the hot gates, I empathized immensely with his description of himself at that time.   Fick’s moral grounding is shown throughout the book, not only in the decisions he takes in battle, and his reflections on these decisions, but also in the way he refrains from naming those of his commanding officers whom he does not respect.    He also shows enormous loyalty to the men he commanded.

And Fick’s experiences demonstrate again that no organization, not even military forces,  can succeed for very long when commands are only obeyed mindlessly.   Successfully execution of commands requires intelligent dialogue between commanders and recipients, in a process of argumentation, to ensure that uttered commands are actionable, appropriate, feasible, effective, consistent, ethical and advisable.  Consequently, the most interesting features of the book for me were the descriptions of decision-making, descriptions often implicit.   Officers and non-officers, it seems, are drilled, through hours of rote learning, in the checklists and guiding principles necessary for low-level, tactical decision-making, so that these decisions can be automatic.  Only after these mindless drills are second nature are trainee officers led to reflect on the wider (strategic and ethical) aspects of decisions,  of decision-making and of actions.   I wonder to what extent such an approach would work in business, where most decision-making, even the most ordinary and tactical, is acquired through direct experience and not usually taught as drills.  Mainly this is because we lack codification of low-level decision-making, although strong fmcg companies such as Mars or Unilever come closest to codification of tactical decision-making.

Fick’s frequent frustrations with the commands issued to him seem to arise because these commands often ignore basic tactical constraints (such as the area of impact of weapons or the direction of firing of weapons), and because they often seem to be driven by a concern for appearances over substantive outcomes.   In contrast to this frustration, one of Fick’s commanding heroes is Major Richard Whitmer, whose unorthodox managerial style and keen intelligence is well described.  A military force able to accommodate such a style is to be admired, so I hope it is not a reflection on the USMC that Whitmer appears to have spent the years since the Iraq invasion running a marine recruitment office.  Next time that I’m CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I’ll actively try to recruit Whitmer and Fick, since they are both clearly superb managers.

I was also struck by how little the troops on the ground in Iraq knew of the larger, strategic picture.  Fick’s team relied on broadcasts from the BBC World Service on a personal, non-military-issue transister radio to learn what was happening as they invaded Iraq.   We who were not involved in the war also relied on the BBC, particularly Mark Urban’s fascinating daily strategic analyses on BBC TV’s Newsnight.  Were we remote viewers better informed than those in the ground in Iraq?  Quite possibly.

Nathaniel Fick now works for a defence think tank, the Center for a New American Security.  A 2006 speech he gave at the Pritzer Military Library in Chicago can be seen here.   A seminar talk to Johns Hopkins University’s series on Rethinking the Future Nature of Competition and Conflict can be found here (scroll down to 2006-01-25).  And here is Fick’s take on recent war poetry.

References:

K. Atkinson et al. [2008]: Command dialogues. In: I. Rahwan and P. Moraitis (Editors): Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2008), AAMAS 2008, Lisbon, Portugal.

Nathaniel Fick [2005]:  One Bullet Away:  The Making of a Marine Officer.  London, UK:  Phoenix.

Evan Wright [2004]:  Generation Kill. Putnam.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, Stark Sands, decision-making, Nathaniel Fick

I now learn I am not alone in this assessment of Mamet.  Adam Gopnik, in a New Yorker article about Damon Runyon, also notes Mamet’s formal, unnatural, language.   Gopnik, however, admires it, for no compelling reason that I can see.    Perhaps americantheatrespeak works OK on the stage, and people who see a lot of theatre don’t notice it when used on film.  Yet, against that, Clift was New York’s leading theatre actor before he ventured onto film.   But on film this style of speech is a disaster, as Mamet’s 2004 film Spartan demonstrates; no, Virginia, it is not the wooden acting or the unexplained gaps in the plot that make this film unwatchable, but Mamet’s stilted, wooden dialogue.   Ditto for the other films on his scalp:  House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross, etc.   Someone else seems to be writing (or de-Mametizing) the script of The Unit, although even here (unlike, say, The Wire), people rarely pause,  mumble or cross-talk. 

POSTSCRIPT:  Thinking some more about this, the issue arises because of what Gopnik calls film’s arch-naturalism.  Concepts that could work perfectly well as theatrical productions often fail on film, as, for example, the black backdrops and absurdism of Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Wittgenstein, which was irritating in the extreme.   We have a problem suspending disbelief for film, a problem we don’t usually have for the theatre.   Perhaps the cause, as some film theorists have noted, is that films are akin to dreams, and dreams don’t require us (at least, not consciously) to do work ourselves to imagine whatever is missing from the production.  We are happy to do this work when watching theatre (and when reading books and listening to the radio), but are less so for watching films or TV.

Reference:

Adam Gopnik [2009]:  “Talk it up:  Damon Runyon’s guys and dolls.”  The New Yorker, 2 March 2009, pp. 66-71.

Technorati Tags: David Mamet, Montgomery Clift