The Young Lions
Edward Dmytryk (1958)
This gripping, underrated film features a performance by Montgomery Clift that is one of his greatest and one from Marlon Brando that has great things in it. Adapted by Edward Anhalt from a 1948 novel by Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions is the story of three soldiers’ Second World War. They are a German, Christian Diestl (Brando), and two Americans, the WASP Michael (Mike) Whiteacre (Dean Martin) and the Jew Noah Ackerman (Clift). Before enlisting, Christian works as a ski instructor in the Bavarian Alps, Mike has a successful show business career in Broadway musicals and Noah is a store clerk, newly arrived in New York. He meets Mike when they attend the same US army draft board. The Young Lions is remarkable in many respects – not least that Noah Ackerman survives the War and, in the last scene of the movie, returns to his wife and young daughter in New York. This is nearly incredible, given that things ended badly for most of the men Clift played on screen and that his presence, by this stage in his career, seems freighted with tragedy. This is the only movie in which he and Brando both appeared and I knew they had only one moment on screen together, with one of them dead. I’d always assumed it was Clift who’d died and Brando who survived.
Christian Diestl’s ski pupil in the opening scene is Mike Whiteacre’s girlfriend Margaret (Barbara Rush). She’s on an Alpine holiday without Mike and agrees to go on a New Year’s Eve date with Christian. Brando is amazing and very entertaining (I like him doing accents) in these early scenes – the shift from self-satisfied humour on the ski slopes to an uncertain conversation with Margaret outside the hall where New Year (1939) is being celebrated, is dazzling. Christian tells Margaret the life of a ski instructor is no fun out of season and shocks her in expressing the hope that Hitler will change Germany for the better. (The supposedly cute child at the New Year gathering, who wears a swastika sash, is no less startling.) After enlisting, Christian is bored by police duty in Paris and asks his army superior, Captain Hardenberg (Maximilian Schell), for a transfer: he wants to see action. Christian is about to have some leave anyway and Hardenberg first sends him on an errand, to deliver a present to the captain’s wife in Germany, while Christian is back there. Later on, he and the captain are fighting together in North Africa, where Hardenberg is grievously injured. When Christian returns to Germany, he visits the captain’s wife again.
It will be clear enough from this that some of the plotting of The Young Lions is less than convincing. Christian and Mike’s connection through Margaret is a mechanical contrivance; the pair of visits to Hardenberg’s wife are designed to contrast the material comfort in which she lives in the early stages of the War and the hard times she and Germany have fallen on several years later. Moreover, the captain’s wife, as played by May Britt, is glamorously vampish in too obvious a way. But Brando is splendid in all these scenes – as he is also as Christian watches a boy on crutches on a bomb site, and in several sequences involving another German soldier, Brandt (Parley Baer), who has a French mistress in Paris and who introduces Christian to another French girl there, Françoise (Liliane Montevecchi). Again, Brando’s transitions – from cocky confidence to quiet humiliation when Françoise speaks her mind on their first meeting – are extraordinary. What stops his portrait of Christian Diestl being fully satisfying is the fault of the script rather than the actor. Christian’s disillusionment with Germany’s war aims is protracted; he has to come to a bad end because he’s adopted a wrong cause. Brando’s dying fall is brilliant: as he was to prove again in The Godfather, both when Don Corleone is shot in the street and when he eventually dies in his orange grove, nobody comes down quite like he does.
In his early scenes, Montgomery Clift looks so odd – injured and old – that he’s uncomfortable to watch. (This and Lonelyhearts, also released in 1958, were the first two films that he made after Raintree County.) But his artistry and the nobility of the character that he creates dispel that discomfort pretty quickly; Clift’s performance is, almost continuously, emotionally overwhelming. (It’s one of which the actor himself was particularly proud.) Noah Ackerman meets, and falls in love with, Hope Plowman (Hope Lange), at a party at Mike Whiteacre’s home. Clift plays Noah’s uncertain courtship of Hope exquisitely. After they’re married, when Noah’s been called up and leaves their apartment early one morning for boot camp, his low, unobtrusive wave goodbye to his wife is beautifully expressive. At boot camp, Noah is on the receiving end of the other soldiers’ anti-Semitism; Mike is his only friend and defender there. This is one of the most powerful parts of The Young Lions – partly because it’s startling to see men who are fighting against Nazism taking it out on a Jew and partly because it’s tough to watch Clift, skinny and vulnerable-looking as he is, taking punishment in the fights with his tormentors that Noah Ackerman, with his sense of honour and almost pesky stubbornness, is determined to endure. There’s a shot of Noah’s injured face being patched up by a medic which, as Amy Lawrence says in The Passion of Montgomery Clift, is ‘terrifying’. Although Noah’s love of books, which the other soldiers exploit as a means of bullying him, seems to come out of nowhere, Clift’s development of the character makes it just about credible: he creates Noah’s intelligence so subtly. (Noah seems almost simple-minded at the start of the film but Clift suggests this is partly because of his lack of social experience.)
Amy Lawrence doesn’t like Clift’s performance and queries his approach to the role of Noah Ackerman:
‘Clift not only wanted to look like Kafka, he was trying “to look Jewish”. Unfortunately the actor’s explanation of his efforts comes perilously close to parroting the anti-Semitic Nazi stereotypes the film was denouncing. Asked why he had “lost twelve pounds to play the part”, Clift responded, “I wanted to look like a rodent, that’s why. Lean and slim like a rodent. Or let’s saying a rat passing for a mouse”.’
The choice of words may be unfortunate for the reason Lawrence suggests but it’s surprising that she can’t admire the physical acting that Clift achieved as a result. His movement, as Noah and other soldiers try to cross a river, under threat of enemy fire, is animal-like to an amazing degree: wriggling through the reeds at the edge of the river, Noah is a true amphibian. (This makes powerful sense in a sequence in which he saves the life of one of the men who victimised him in boot camp and who can’t swim.) And in the climactic scenes, in which Noah and Mike help to liberate a concentration camp, Clift’s cadaverous quality – the fact that he looks on the way to concentration camp gauntness himself – gives an immediacy to the traumatic effect that seeing the camp’s victims has on Noah. Amy Lawrence’s dismissal of Clift’s acting in the closing stages as ‘a series of poor choices’ is baffling. His delivery of Noah’s final ‘millions like us’ speech to Mike, about hope for the future now that the war is won, is very moving. As so often with Clift, the thoughts behind the words seem freshly minted, and to come from deep inside.
At first, Dean Martin seems too obviously cast for the role of a man who’d rather be at parties than in the armed forces. But Martin has a gift for tuning in to other actors and he and Clift connect very well; Barbara Rush too is more animated in her big scene with Martin than in her big scene with Brando. There’s a fourth major performance, from Maximilian Schell as Hardenberg – especially in the scene in which Christian tells Hardenberg he wants more action than the posting in Paris allows. Schell is very good not only at creating a character impelled by a mixture of unsentimental loyalty and brutality but at keeping you uncertain where one ends and the other begins (and, as a result, leaving you unnerved). Hope Lange is sensitive as Hope; as her father, Vaughn Taylor (probably best known for his brief appearance as Marion Crane’s boss in Psycho) weights his lines perfectly in a conversation with her. The father’s prejudices against Noah are laid out a shade too emphatically when he meets his daughter’s intended but the climax to the scene, in which Mr Plowman accepts Noah – and Montgomery Clift conveys both how thrilled Noah is at the news and how marginalised he still feels – is highly effective.
The Young Lions is nearly three hours long. Although some of the war sequences are staged powerfully, they’re disjointed; and although that disjointedness helps to get across a sense of what happens in war being crazy and random, your eventual impression is that Edward Dmytryk had to cut a good deal of material and that the remainder has sometimes been clumsily reassembled. This disorganised quality is made worse by the overly tidy plotting of the story. Yet what Dmytryk gets going between the actors – and sustains – is admirable and absorbing, even if (as often happens) the point a scene is designed to make is relatively crude. Shaw’s novel, according to Wikipedia, runs to 689 pages so adapting it for the screen was no mean feat of compression by Edward Anhalt (even if not such a feat as was required – and more satisfyingly achieved – by Daniel Taradash with From Here to Eternity). Although some of Anhalt’s dialogue is overwritten, much of it is supple and dynamic. It’s also occasionally funny. I enjoyed the reluctant soldier Mike Whiteacre’s moment of political foresight:
‘Look, I’ve read all the books. I know that in 10 years we’ll be bosom friends with the Germans and the Japanese. Then I’ll be pretty annoyed that I was killed.’
19 February 2013