Content area
Full text
What the fuck did they want, these men who needed the company of others to make a life, as he needed a woman to make babies?
-Nick Tosches, Dino
I always plays to de common folk. -------Dean Martin
It was casting time for The Young Lions. Brando wouldn't hesitate given this chance to dye his hair white and do a German
accent. And while no one would hire Monty Clift after his facially disfiguring car wreck, Brando convinced the studio that the other, slightly
older, kid from Omaha was the right man. No one could play a more sensitive tough than Monty, like the artist-bugler-boxer Prewitt mistaken for the enemy, gunned down by his own men in the Pearl Harbor dawn; or the way, as the sensitive cowboy Matt Dunson,
he got a rise out of his demented empire builder father, John Wayne, by kicking over a tin cup, sloshing the coffee into the dust to show his disgust.
Clift knew that Lions director Edward Dymytrk was searching for someone to play a key supporting role-as Frank Sinatra had in From Here To
Eternity-yet he was stunned to hear it was "Jerry Lewis's partner in shlock." Clift softened, nauseated when he saw
Martin's competition pander to the crowd on Broadway. Lucky for Monty that he did he let it go: the two men
not only became friends; it was Dean who put the man with the wired jaw to bed when he had the chloral hydrate and alcohol wobblies.
Ignorant of Brando's intervention on his behalf, Monty told Dean that Marion's fifty takes per scene were getting on his nerves more and more and he vowed to walk off the set if he tried
ONE MORE TIME to have his German soldier die with arms spread wide to "echo the crucifixion."
Clift, wasted with self-recrimination at forty-five. Martin, an actor for whom one run through of a scene almost always sufficed.
Dean got a chuckle out of Monty with his response. "It should be awful good with so many takes." Then the future flashed before him.
"I guess there are directors who want us to do the same scene over and over again too." "Sure, lots. Some of the best."
"I guess I...