Fred Zinnemann (1948)

The film is an odd mixture of elements and styles.  Although its subject has a broader historical interest, The Search is chiefly important in film history as Montgomery Clift’s first movie (or, to be precise, the first one released:  Red River, made in 1946, arrived in cinemas six months later).  At first, it seems like dramatised documentary – with a lot of voiceover (a female English voice) explaining the plight of refugee children in Europe immediately after World War II, and images of the ruins of recently bombed cities (the exteriors were shot in Munich and Nuremberg).  These images would dominate the sequences staged within them if it weren’t for the fact that the refugee children on screen are non-professionals and can pass for the real thing.  The principal search of the title is that of a Czech mother, Hanna Malik (Jarmila Novotna), for her young son Karel (Ivan Jandl).  Mrs Malik goes from one United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) centre to another, in American-occupied Germany, looking for her son.  She is told at one such centre that Karel is dead – that he drowned with another boy when they were trying to escape from Red Cross people whom they fearfully assumed to be Nazis.  In fact, Karel survived when he swam across a river:  he was assumed to be dead because his hat was found among reeds beside the river, with no trace of its owner.  Karel has been living a hand to mouth existence in the ruins of a German city (unnamed?).   He’s eventually taken in by an American soldier called Ralph ‘Steve’ Stevenson (Clift), who gradually wins the scared, withdrawn boy’s trust and teaches him English.  Steve has a GI pal called Jerry (Wendell Corey); when Jerry’s wife (Mary Patton) and son (William Rogers) arrive, Jim, as Steve calls Karel, sees what a mother is and starts wanting his own again.  Steve tells Karel that his mother is dead.  The climax – in which mother and son are reunited – fuses the emotional uplift of the particular story with its morally improving subject matter.

The screenplay, by Richard Schweizer and David Wechsler, is clumsily unimaginative but Fred Zinnemann creates some fine sequences:  the two fugitive boys in the water; the arrival of new children at the UNRRA camp, which is staged so as to complicate and increase the emotional impact of the reunion of Karel with his mother.   What distinguishes the film, however, is the central relationship between Steve and Karel/Jim – and between Montgomery Clift and ten-year-old Ivan Jandl.   Clift wrote some of their dialogue, which is the best dialogue in the movie, and the rapport between him and the boy is highly expressive.  Ivan Jandl didn’t speak English and had to learn his lines by rote – this gives them a peculiar freshness but his physical qualities are strong too:  Jim seems like an old man in embryo.  (Sad to say, Ivan Jandl didn’t live many years more than Clift:  he died, at the age of fifty, in 1987.)  From the moment that Steve, sitting in his parked jeep eating a sandwich, sets eyes on the boy, The Search sparks to life.  Montgomery Clift has a vitality here that makes his performance unlike anything else I’ve seen from him.  There’s a delight in watching him do something he never did again and evidently enjoying it.  His flawless emotional sequencing is achieved with incisive grace – his timing of the funnier lines allows you to enjoy them both as particularly humorous and as part of a natural conversation.  His relationship with the boy has shades of the paternal, the maternal and the fraternal – with Steve the younger brother occasionally.  The emotional complexity of the character Clift creates isn’t tortured yet it still has a melancholy undertow.  You don’t find out much about Steve beyond the fact that he’ll be returning from his tour of duty to a blue collar job in Baltimore.  This may well reflect nothing more than the sketchiness of the script but it intensifies the lonely quality of Clift’s Steve, in spite of his friendship with Jerry.  In the climax to The Search, Zinnemann cuts away from Steve to concentrate on the reunion of mother and child.  The effect of this is to make the expression you’ve just seen in Clift’s eyes – delighted incredulity mixed with pain that Jim won’t be coming back with him to America – all the more powerful.  It makes you wonder what happened to Steve rather than to Mrs Malik and Karel, who are completed in their happy ending.

As Jerry, Wendell Corey is sensitive too, in a simpler but effective way.  Aline MacMahon gives a warm, likeable performance as Mrs Murray, the children’s supervisor at the UNRRA unit.  Jarmila Novotna, best known as an opera singer, has a genuine dignity as Mrs Malik, even though the character is idealised.  As a young boy who disguises his Jewishness as a member of a choir, Claude Gambier is affecting.  The British actors seem more wooden.  There’s a significant amount of dialogue not spoken in English and there are no subtitles to the film:  this is effective – it chimes, albeit as a minor chord, with the experience of the ‘displaced persons’ in The Search.

3 February 2013