Edward Dmytryk (1957)
Raintree County is famous because, during the making of it, Montgomery Clift had the serious car crash which changed his face – or is supposed to have changed his face. Amy Lawrence suggests in The Passion of Montgomery Clift that it had already changed considerably in the three years between the release of From Here to Eternity and the accident:
‘… Early publicity photos for Raintree County are often hard to distinguish from those taken after the accident … As one biographer wrote, the “physical damage [to Clift’s face] is barely discernible on screen but any child could see he looks a good ten years older”. Comparing stills from before and after May 12, 1956, we see that, in Clift’s case, age is inseparable from injury.’
One of the publicity photos to which Lawrence alludes appears in her book but I’m not sure how much it bears out her thesis. Clift – smoking a cigarette and with the pallor of his face accentuated by the darkness under his eyes and his five o’clock shadow – looks ill but he doesn’t look as old as he does on screen. As far as the film is concerned (as Lawrence also notes, his first movie in colour), he’s much too old anyway to play its youthfully idealistic hero John Shawnessy. Clift was thirty-five at the time of the car crash (Raintree County was released in cinemas more than eighteen months later). At the start of the picture, John is leaving school – and it’s hardly as if the action leaps forward many years for most of what follows. It’s only in the last scenes, when John Shawnessy is a sadder-and-wiser man approaching middle age, that Clift looks anything like right: from the very beginning, his John Shawnessy exudes a misery that suggests clairvoyance of the troubled times that lie ahead of him.
There are moments when Clift’s thinness makes him seem young – not so much in the big scene when John competes in a running race as in the way he nips up and down high, wide staircases. But there’s never any lightness of heart to match this lightness of step. Once John is fighting in the Civil War and Clift has grown a beard, his quick movement has the unsettling quality you sometimes notice in winos (as they suddenly, dartingly, change direction in the street). The combination of his skill and his unhappy presence makes Clift compelling to watch, but compelling in the wrong way. His intensity feels involuntary, inescapable. You see it in his first scene when John exchanges graduation gifts with his sweetheart Nell. (Eva Marie Saint also looks too mature in the early stages but settles down to give a skilfully self-effacing performance.) Nell gives John an illustrated history of the place they both come from – Raintree County, Indiana – and chatters about the pictures and the maps and statistics the book contains. Clift examines it with a raptness that seems preternaturally grief-stricken.
Raintree County was adapted, by Millard Kaufman, from a 1947 novel of the same name by Ross Lockridge, Jr. It’s epic only in length (nearly three hours) and lurches between the intimate and the spectacular without being convincing in either mode. The story involves racial themes sufficiently prominent to qualify a big popular film of the 1950s as ‘brave’, inherited insanity, suicide – and the legend of Johnny Appleseed (the pioneer nurseryman who introduced apple trees to Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, including the quasi-mystical rain tree of the title, which John Shawnessy keeps searching for). This is a garish concoction and Edward Dmytryk treats the material with too much respect. The early sequences in particular are bafflingly slow – the hushed, deliberate tempo implies that something deep is being revealed but the only thing that seems to be revealed is Montgomery Clift’s unhappiness. Nat King Cole can’t do much with the title song, which he seems to be making it up as it goes along under the opening titles. The look of the film, at this distance in time, makes it even more of an oddity: the palette has shrunk to various shades of pink, occasionally darkening into unintended sepia.
There are plenty of good actors in Raintree County, although you might not guess it from what the likes of Agnes Moorehead (as Clift’s mother) and Nigel Patrick do here. (The actors who aren’t much cop anyway include DeForest (Dr ‘Bones’ McCoy) Kelley, who appears briefly as a Southern officer.) Patrick’s character – ‘Professor’ Jeremiah Webster Stiles – is, however, pretty impossible. At the start, the actor is working so hard to be eccentric and epigrammatic, he’s murder to watch and listen to. I kept thinking George Sanders should be playing the Professor but then he starts saying the odd thing that’s meant to be sincere, which would have been outside Sanders’ comfort zone. Peter Ustinov might have managed this but then the Professor reveals a sexual side to his character too. This is the kind of narrative where the key characters keep turning up no matter how improbable the circumstances: during the Civil War action, the Professor has reinvented himself as a war correspondent. By the end, I’d almost got to like his, and Nigel Patrick’s, staying power.
Lee Marvin (as a rough diamond) and Rod Taylor (a thoroughgoing heel) acquit themselves well enough but the player that keeps you watching Raintree County is Elizabeth Taylor, as the doomed Southern belle Susanna whom John Shawnessy falls in love with and marries. She’s more than enjoyably flirty in the early sequences, which include a perfect example of Taylor’s instinctual brilliance as a screen actress. A firecracker goes off in a crowd and alarms Susanna. In the course of her ‘Oh!’, Taylor magically moves from a natural reaction to the character’s trying to create an effect. Later on, she has a long monologue in which Susanna explains to John what really happened on the night her New Orleans family home burned down. As in her big scene in Suddenly, Last Summer, Elizabeth Taylor throws herself into protracted and preposterous explanation with such genuine passion that she transcends what she’s given to say. I still didn’t understand what did happen on the night of the fire but Taylor makes it worth hearing about. Worth noting too that, in spite of Susanna’s troubled mind and the traumas that causes in the lives of John Shawnessy and their bum-faced young son, Montgomery Clift is, in his scenes with Taylor, much more natural and relatively at ease. You want to thank her for that as much as for her own richly entertaining performance.
31 August 2011
