The double gaze of Montgomery Clift | Culture | EUROtoday

When I used to be very younger, my mom and my aunt took me to Zaragoza to put on the mantle of the Virgin of the Pilar, however the one factor they managed was for me to kiss behind the altarpiece the column that helps the picture alongside which thousands and thousands of kisses had preceded me till leaving a deep notch within the marble. As a reward for my good habits through the journey, at my insistence on the verge of tears, I managed to spend the await the departure time of the sheep practice to return to Valencia watching the white movie, appropriate for all audiences, titled The misplaced angelswhich was proven within the Argensola cinema, during which Montgomery Clift performed a Yankee soldier who saved a toddler misplaced within the rubble of post-war Berlin to return him to civilization as a metaphor for peace. It’s not that he was a really good boy, however in that film I used to be struck by the hypnotic gaze of this actor, who may specific hatred and tenderness, anguish and pleasure with a single magnetic glaze of his grey eyes with out talking.

From a terrace of a home within the city you possibly can see half a display screen of the summer time cinema positioned within the demolished backyard of a scorching springs resort. I used to be nonetheless a young person when, crouching there at nighttime below the celebrities, I watched the half film A spot within the solar. I bear in mind the scene during which Montgomery Clift, escaping from a celebration held within the halls of a terrific businessman’s mansion, the place he felt like an upstart, had taken refuge in a billiard room and was adopted there by Liz Taylor, the tycoon’s daughter, to ascertain a courtship of seduction. Both actors, she with a drink in her hand, he enjoying caroms with the cue, walked across the pool desk and generally one of many two would disappear from the half display screen and his picture can be misplaced within the darkness and solely his voice would stay within the night time air. This seduction led the protagonist to commit against the law that landed him within the fuel chamber. I have never been capable of overlook the way in which Monty set his eyes on his spouse, Shelley Winters, earlier than murdering her.

The incontrovertible fact that I may solely see half the display screen pressured me to think about what was taking place on the opposite half. This is how I discovered that the most effective factor in life is that which belongs solely to you and can’t be seen. This is how I managed to reconstruct Glenn Ford’s full slap to Gilda and the striptease morbid act that Rita Hayworth carried out by taking off just one glove. This is how I noticed Esther Williams launch into Mermaid faculty to a pool that did not exist. On the opposite hand, from mattress on these summer time nights I acknowledged the dubbed voices of the actors completely, I knew what was taking place to Gregory Peck with Audrey Hepburn in Rome or Bogart’s issues with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca; It gave that means to these moans, shootings, voices, screams. I knew that the protagonists have been kissing on the mouth due to the howls that the viewers gave, whose depth was proportional to the length and depth. Among all Monty was my favourite actor, at the moment he was the one competing for first place with Marlon Brando. In Hollywood, when the ladies met at a gathering, they felt a double attraction: Brando gave off an animal magnetism, but it surely was sufficient for Monty to only look.

In these moments when, as a child, you dream, mendacity in your again along with your fingers behind your head, about what you may be like if you develop up, I questioned if I’d be prepared to provide every little thing in trade for someday a tuxedo that will match me in addition to Montgomery Clift did when he did within the film. The heiress await Olivia de Havilland on the foot of the steps, or I may blow that contact of silence with the trumpet as he did in From right here to eternity. It was in Malibu after a celebration at Liz Taylor’s mansion, this time an actual occasion with all her pals, within the early hours of May 12, 1956, when the automotive accident occurred that broke her face and Monty’s eyes went darkish. I used to be on the high. At first he consoled himself by considering that each one the gods extracted from the ruins had damaged noses, break up mouths, and shattered jaws. And they have been nonetheless gods. It was not like that on this case. Immediately got here the medication, nembutal, alcohol, the abyss, hell. A plastic surgeon operated on his face for a number of periods to revive his soul. I at all times thought that his soul was misplaced among the many rubble of post-war Berlin that I noticed after kissing the Virgen del Pilar or in that pool corridor the place he allowed himself to be courted by Liz Taylor that I noticed with solely half a display screen. Somewhere in my unconscious Montgomery Clift will need to have left an indelible mark of that look with which he may specific all of the convulsions of the spirit.