Books: Sunny Boy

MONTGOMERY CLIFT by Patricia Bosworth Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 438 pages; $12.95

Before there was Pacino, or De Niro, or Nicholson—before there were James Dean and Marlon Brando even —there was Montgomery Clift. Bursting onto the screen in Red River and The Search (both 1948), Clift set the standard for a whole generation of actors. He was intense and hypnotically alive. His lines seemed to come not from the script but from the gut, and he seemed dangerously unpredictable, like a high-tension wire torn from its moorings. For the better part of a decade, Clift was the star producers sought first....

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