Montgomery Clift reportedly said that he had voted for Marlon Brando in the Oscars. Brando was the favorite and yet the Lifetime Achiev..., err, the Best Actor was Humphrey Bogart! As it is on film, Clift's work in A Place in the Sun is arguably still underrated in comparison to Brando's Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire --even though the latter is still somewhat underrated in comparison to Vivien Leigh's Blanche, by some viewers at least. Both male performances are in the same league, share the same level of intensity and commitment; both are groundbreaking and utterly original, classics in the better sense possible. Neither of them, Brando or Clift, were better than the other one; they were so different from any other actor around, though to each other they were different and similar at the same time. And at the same time, one can say, they both changed cinema acting forever.
Clift's George Eastman was so internalised, in all manners conceivable, it (like Brando's brute) singlehandedly showed the new way to anyone who cared to pay attention. And yet again as Brando's, it is a pure perfect sheer genius untouchable piece of a job. He is the leading man, the antihero, and he carries the whole movie on his shoulders. Every one of his scenes is brilliant, and he has many more than Brando in Streetcar (if that counts, too). Clift's own 1951 revolution may not have been any showy in comparison, any violent to the common uneducated eye --a murderer pushed by his circumstance, not a insensitive bully whose every act is almost or about to be a murder--, but may certainly be the kind of unsung point from which even Brando himself learned which direction to go to in the years that followed. Both guys were a real pioneering team, whether they wanted it or not.
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