Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s

Gregory Camp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s theorises the connections between film acting and film music using the films of the 1950s as case studies.

Closely examining performances of such actors as James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Marilyn Monroe, and films of directors like Elia Kazan, Douglas Sirk, and Alfred Hitchcock, this volume provides a comprehensive view of how screen performance has been musicalised, including examination of the role of music in relation to the creation of cinematic performances and the perception of an actor's performance. The book also explores the idea of music as a temporal vector which mirrors the temporal vector of actors' voices and movements, ultimately demonstrating how acting and music go together to create a forward axis of time in the films of the 1950s.

This is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers of musicology, film music and film studies more generally.

1 Musicalising Montgomery Clift

A fondness for Montgomery Clift is often regarded as a type of fandom that separates the casual 1950s film fan from the true connoisseur. One might say that the masses are distracted from Clift’s genius by the showier talents of Monroe, Brando, and Dean, which overshadow Clift’s more subdued and subtle style. As other chapters will show, the big names were often just as subtle in their acting and musical profiles as any others, yet Clift has a mystique of niche obsession that the others lack. Clift was the first of this group to ‘hit’, appearing in Red River and The Search in 1948. His performances were noted early on as somehow different from those of his predecessors. Clift’s willingness to show himself off as a regular guy in the Stanley Kubrick photo series discussed in the Introduction is one indication of his difference from other actors. Clift was New York rather than Hollywood, rumpled rather than pressed, average rather than extraordinary. Unlike earlier classically trained actors, who usually found their characters with makeup, costume, and movement (working from the outside in), Clift and other ‘Method’ actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando (to be discussed in subsequent chapters) worked from the inside out, starting with character psychology. Many of Clift’s performances are mirrored by scores that also work from the inside out, accepting the challenge to musicalise the newly sensitive and sensuous model of mid-century American masculinity that Clift presented.¹ Clift’s positioning among other male stars is largely due to his physicality, subdued yet powerful, soft yet present, solid yet vulnerable, and, especially, extraordinarily beautiful. As critic David Lancaster puts it, ‘in all, there is something magical about him; with one glance, one crinkle of those over-refined lips, he can take an audience captive’.²

Clift’s films were often scored by more subtle means than the expressionistic angst of Rosenman’s scores for James Dean, North’s or Bernstein’s outré jazz-influenced scores for Brando, or Monroe’s flashy diegetic musical performances, emphasising Clift’s unique physical and emotional qualities. While one might think that an actor as self-effacing as Clift would become lost in the complex narrative tapestry of a film like From Here to Eternity (1953), the careful use of source music to underscore his character, army bugler Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, helps to place Clift at the centre of the narrative. In A Place in the Sun (1951), Clift portrays troubled drifter George Eastman in a performance that gave Franz Waxman the chance to compose a score in an idiom between late Romanticism and early Modernism, bringing out the romantic motivations of the character as he tries to push against a hostile world. Kenyon Hopkins’ subdued, languorous score for Wild River (1960) reflects Clift as the sensitive centre of a turbulent, emotional film. In The Heiress (1949), Aaron Copland attempts to contrast the enigmatic and troubling character of Morris Townsend with music that plays into his dissembling. When matched with Clift’s physical and vocal performances, these scores demonstrate the richness and variety of Hollywood film scoring beyond the standard ‘classical’ model of mood music and leitmotivs, and offer a new perspective on musical characterisation. Drawing from Vivian Sobchack’s four-part framework for interpreting the body of the actor and the character, I will enrich her physical theorisation with music in order to show how film scores can embody actors’ and characters’ psychologies and physicalities.³ As a performer who was extremely skilled at using his body and for whom music was written that picks up on this embodiment, Clift offers an ideal test case for this method of analysing the scoring of an actor.

The early twenty-first century has seen a striking surge of scholarly interest in Clift. Most of the work has focussed on his homosexuality and how it influenced his performances and their reception, often positing pre- and post-car accident phases.⁴ In ‘Montgomery Clift: Hollywood Pseudohomosexual’, Tison Pugh and Barry Sandler coin the label ‘pseudohomosexual’, after Barbara Ehrenreich, for queer male stars, the term suggesting ‘the ways in which some men fail to convincingly embody normative sexuality and display characteristics that cast them with gendered suspicion’.⁵ Pugh and Sandler note that Clift rarely appeared as a romantic leading man, and when he did, his character usually met with a tragic end. Other ‘pseudohomosexual’ queer stars of the 1950s and 1960s like Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, and Farley Granger used other ways to obliquely stage their homosexuality – Perkins and Granger playing troubled young men and Hudson often hiding it in plain sight. ‘In the closeted world of the 1950s, society demanded that homosexuals perform pseudohomosexuality, yet at times these performances could only go so far. Pseudohomosexuality protects yet constrains, and these tensions are similarly evident in Clift’s films’.⁶ Amy Lawrence broadens the view of Clift as homosexual to take in all aspects of his star persona in The Passion of Montgomery Clift.⁷ In a tour de force of critical close reading, Lawrence goes through each film and its reception in great detail, exploring how Clift’s work in his films both contributes to and undercuts the star persona created by the studios and by the press. Elisabetta Girelli, in her monograph Montgomery Clift: Queer Star, also explores Clift’s entire oeuvre, this time through the lens of queer theory.⁸ Girelli returns to Clift in ‘In Your Face: Montgomery Clift Comes Out as Crip in The Young Lions’, in which she uses Clift’s post-accident persona to explore the intersections between queer theory and disability studies.⁹ A 2018 documentary, Making Montgomery Clift, uses private sound recordings and family archives to look again at Clift, arguing against the usual narrative of slow decline and tragedy and positing instead that Clift led a happy and fulfilled life as a gay man (as much as that was possible in the mid-twentieth century).¹⁰ Whence comes this reappraisal, when other mid-twentieth-century stars who had equally interesting careers, such as John Garfield and Dick Powell, are still under-studied and little known to contemporary audiences? The magnetism of Clift’s acting surely plays a large part, along with the allegedly tragic narrative of his career (bright early success, disastrous car accident, and a long sad decline). The two biographies of Clift that were released in the late 1970s, by Patricia Bosworth and Robert Laguardia, take this basic narrative as their starting point, and until the recent studies mentioned above, this tragic narrative dominated both fan and critical discourse around Clift.¹¹

Clift’s four bodies

The documentary Making Montgomery Clift notably foregrounds Clift’s acting craft, using its filmic format to show excerpts from his script notes alongside completed scenes and emphasising the intense study he undertook to prepare for his roles. Directors Robert Clift (the actor’s nephew) and Hilary Demmon look at Clift the working actor, not just Clift the star persona or Clift as symbol for queer identity, setting their film apart from many other Clift studies. This focus on the actor as a person doing a job is shared by film scholar Vivian Sobchack, whose semiotic map in her essay ‘Being on the Screen’ of how screen performance works phenomenologically forms the theoretical basis for this chapter. Her model, placed onto a semiotic square, can be used to chart the place of the music in films as it relates to acting, allowing us to take in a more complex view of the interactions between acting and music. The semiotic square was developed by semiotician Algirdas Greimas as a method to deconstruct binaries.¹² A dyad X vs. Y is problematised by adding not-X and not-Y to the system, and these four points are then graphed in a square (Figure 1.1). When placed within the square, concepts can be shown to move around and develop within the space, rather than simply standing at two poles of a dichotomy. A semiotic square allows us to see how Sobchack’s four conceptual bodies are interconnected and nested, simultaneously as oppositions and as reflections of each other (Figure 1.2).¹³

Figure 1.1 Semiotic square.

Figure 1.2 The actor’s four bodies (from Sobchack 2014).

Sobchack starts with the actor’s body, the raw material from which his subjectivity is formed. She calls this the ‘pre-personal’ body.¹⁴ The pre-personal body is purely anatomical, not placed within a society or with any sort of characterisation on- or off-screen. Sobchack explains that the pre-personal body ‘provides the general kinaesthetic possibilities for, and particular habituated background of, “any” body’s physical comportment, the rhythm of their breathing and gait, the grain of their voice—all of which are open to various internal and external forms of physical and cultural amendment but not to complete effacement’.¹⁵ Clift’s pre-personal body notably suffered a blow after his 1956 car accident. His face had to be stitched back into place and he never looked quite the same afterwards, the accident also exacerbating what was already a serious drinking problem. A scar on Clift’s throat from a childhood illness is prominently seen in films throughout his career. This physical imperfection made Clift seem all the more beautiful, and the actor was skilled at using his pre-personal body to help flesh out his characterisations. The pre-personal body cannot truly ‘act’ on its own, however, let alone take on a character. First, the raw material requires subjectivity. This is the actor’s personal body (in the upper left corner of the semiotic square), who he is in the here and now, ‘Montgomery Clift’ the human being. This body is ‘consciously sensing and sensed’, ‘circumscribed and differentiated from the flesh of the world and others’.¹⁶ The personal body is of course influenced by the pre-personal: the physical ‘look’ of a body naturally has an effect on how it sets itself apart from other people’s subjective bodies.

When the actor takes on a character, we see his impersonated body (lower right corner of the semiotic square). Sometimes, an actor may make some physical change so that this body literally appears to be different when he is in character, from subtle makeup to extreme changes of the type Daniel Day-Lewis and Robert De Niro are famous for. But Clift uses his actorly skill to take on an impersonated body without obvious physical changes: he is able to ‘select and mobilise the capacities, qualities, and affects of both [his] Prepersonal and Personal bodies’.¹⁷ Finally, there is the personified body (upper right corner of the square). The actor has no real control over this body, as it is an abstraction. This is the ‘star’ persona that audiences want to see larger than life on the big screen, and which they might confuse for the real personal body. This is the ‘metamorphised and reified body of [the actor’s] overall cinematic accumulation’.¹⁸ In Clift’s case, the contrast was especially loaded, as the personified body supposedly belonged to a heterosexual man, while the actual subjective personal body was that of a homosexual (or bisexual, depending on whom you ask). As with many other closeted actors throughout the history of cinema, this discord between personal and personified bodies led to the abuse of the pre-personal body through ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Musicalising Montgomery Clift
• 2 Kazan, Brando, and Mélomania
• 3 Hitchcock’s time vectors of acting and music
• 4 Day, Monroe, and gendered music
• 5 Dissonance and consonance in James Dean’s films
• 6 Waters, Poitier, music, and race
• 7 Musical characterisation in the melodramas of Sirk and Minnelli
• Conclusion
• References
• Index