Montgomery clift gay
THIS YEAR I’ve reviewed half a dozen of the ten or so films that I saw in June at the Provincetown International Film Festival—not officially an LGBT film festival, but hey, it’s P’town, so a fair number G&LR-worthy films were on hand. Here&#;s the third of six:
Directed by Robert Anderson Clift and Hillary Demmon
(Hillary Demmon also directs.) For this is a filmmaker who wants to make an argument as he sets out to prove that everything you thought you knew about his uncle is false. To this finish, he doesn’t merely tell the Montgomery Clift story with a different spin but takes up the major sources—especially two biographies—which are responsible for the widely held common image, extracting specific quotations and proving their falsehood. For example, he shows how, when Clift was arrested in New York Noun for cruising men, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper arbitrarily turned “men” into “boys,” which eventually showed up as a charge of “pederasty” in Patricia Bosworth’s Montgomery Clift: A Biography, a total falsehood.
So, myth
Fans waited for two hours outside St. James’ Church on Madison Avenue to say goodbye to Montgomery Clift. Giant bouquets of flowers, including some from Elizabeth Taylor, flanked his coffin at the simple service in New York City, where his family, close friends, and celebrities verb Lauren Bacall bowed their heads in prayer.
In the decades since Monty’s death in , his life has been viewed as another great Hollywood tragedy. Certainly, the impairment of the four-time Oscar nominee at 45 is terrible, but it’s not his whole story. “The thing about Monty was he wasn’t anything love people thought he was,” said Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on TV’s The Adventures of Superman. “He loved to possess fun. He had a great sense of humor. As a person, he was nearer to Jerry Lewis on screen than he was to Montgomery Clift.”
Monty also wasn’t as tortured as his myth has suggested. “Most people think of him as a self-loathing homosexual who destroyed his life from guilt over being gay. That is a big misconception,” Charles Casillo, author of Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story of Their Intima sy of Twist Film Festival Clift was bi, or maybe gay—a reality that should be tangential when considering his work, but in Clift's case, it's at the heart of it. Unlike Dean, who died a tragic death in the traditional sense (a car crash), Clift died a tragic death in the homophobic sense, in that he passed in the '60s while being unashamed of his same-sex attractions. This lack of shame has haunted his biography ever since. Making Montgomery Clift, a c
The popular narrative around Montgomery Clift is that he was the "slowest suicide in demonstrate business." Clift, who died unexpectedly at 45 from a heart attack, was one of the original method actors of Hollywood, often lumped in with James Dean and Marlon Brando. I tend to wince at proclamations of greatness, especially when discussing long-dead male method actors, but by all accounts, Clift was one of America's greatest. He had a way of making text feel prefer it originated from his body, not a writer far off screen, which was due to him being an incredible Stanislavski-trained actor, and also an actor who made up many of his lines.
He kept his tormented sexuality a secret from most everyone he knew &#; making discreet trips to Ogunquit, Maine, where gay men could have trysts without being noticed, then to Fire Island, which was a well-known gay getaway. He had a taste for S&M homosexual activity. Minuscule was published about his homosexual affairs, and he was fiercely determined to keep that aspect of himself under wraps. In he had his first regular male lover, who was a fellow actor. In he was arrested on 42nd Street in New York for soliciting, but his film studio intervened to ensure that the charge was dropped without publicity.
Montgomery (Monty) Clift&#;s mother, &#;Sunny,&#; was herself the minor of southern aristocrats, but had been given up for adoption. She married a rich stock broker and spent her li