Movie: The Search with Montgomery Clift

[Lance]

I happened to be watching TCM the other night when MGM's film, The Search came on. The 1948 film also features Aline MacMahon, Jarmila Novotna (the soprano), Wendell Corey, and Ivan Jandl (as the little boy).

"In post World War II Germany, a small boy, who survived Auschwitz, wanders alone - feral, mute and terrified. He finds a makeshift home with a big-hearted GI (Montgomery Clift), while the mother he does not remember searches desperately for him. Starring a then-unknown Montgomery Clift in his movie debut, directed in a near-documentary style by Fred Zinnemann and filmed in the ragged, rubble-strewn skeleton of Nuremberg, The Search vividly captures the horrifying human cost of war. This milestone of filmmaking won two 1948 Academy Awards, Best Motion Picture Store, and a special award to Ivan Jandl for his haunting performance as the lost child."

I have an enormous interest in anything World War II and this is an especially touching story. How horrible war is at anytime, but what happened then was atrocious. We also get to hear a little singing by Jarmila Novotna ... a stunning voice heard within this film.

"An absorbing and gratifying emotional drama."
--Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

[Belle]

I've seen this film - some years ago!! It remained in my memory because it was so unusual. This would have been the same year (1948) that Clift made "Red River" in the role of Matthew Garth for Howard Hawks and really set off his career big time.

In his excellent biography of Howard Hawks, Todd McCarthy talks about how Hawks gave Clift some of the mannerism which he adopted in "Red River"; touching his nose with a finger whilst talking being just one of these. In fact, in later films which were not westerns Clift doesn't go anywhere near this kind of 'business' on screen. In "Rio Bravo" Hawks has Ricky Nelson do exactly the same thing - a kind of reference back to "Red River" (and the fact that Hawks was trying to disguise the fact that Nelson couldn't act at all!), including it's theme song being sung in "Rio Bravo" by Nelson and Dean Martin.