The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

Clift refused the old terms of Hollywood stardom. He would agree only to single-film contracts, and he took wildly different roles to demonstrate his variegated gifts. Over the first three years of his career, he played a well-meaning Boy Scout of a soldier (The Search), a rebellious and sexually ambiguous cowboy (Red River), a fortune-hunting cad on the prowl in nineteenth-century New York (The Heiress), and a romantic Air Force sergeant (The Big Lift). Little unites these roles beyond Clift’s magnetism, a charisma enabled by his mastery of what Stanislavski called “public solitude,” the art of appearing unaware of the gaze of the audience or movie camera. In 1951, Clift disappeared into the role of George Eastman in A Place in the Sun. Eastman is a young man on the make, lying his way from his working-class roots into the upper crust of American society and then murdering his way into staying there. Clift’s portrait of Eastman is so compelling because it is so compassionate; he refuses to judge his character or to foreshadow the darkness that lies within him. There’s nothing diabolical at first about Eastman’s charm as he manages to seduce Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, and us. Yet Clift and director George Stevens articulate Eastman’s arc so clearly that by the time he commits murder, it feels inevitable. It’s a magnificent performance, the crowning achievement of the three years that established Clift as the greatest actor of his generation, an inspiration to count...