‘Golden Age’ cinema’s three greatest acting performances, according to Clint Eastwood: “Do your own thing”
‘Golden Age’ Hollywood had a noticeable and largely uniform style of acting, but by the time Clint Eastwood arrived on the scene in the early 1950s, the landscape had irrevocably changed.
When you watch movies from the era, you can’t help but notice that the majority of stars perform in the same way: the performances are more theatrical than natural, most of the principal cast members speak in a similar cadence, and emotion was conveyed more through gestures and physicality than subtlety.
Until Marlon Brando came along, at least, and turned the entire profession on its head. He wasn’t the first method actor, and he wasn’t the first to fully immerse himself in a character for the sake of a picture, either, but he was unlike anything the industry had ever seen, and his shadow still looms large today.
Naturally, everyone wanted to be like Brando. Eastwood, who made his screen debut in 1955’s Revenge of the Creature, which was released less than eight minutes after the former’s seminal, influential, and transformative turn in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, bemoaned the ripple effect it had on cinema.
“I came into acting in the period where everybody was imitating Marlon Brando. Everybody,” he snarled. “Even when they were playing brain surgeons, they’d still be acting like Brando was when he was playing a fighter. To me, one performance doesn’t deserve imitating like that. It’s degrading to imitate somebody. Do your own thing.”
He’s got a point, and it’s one that some of today’s biggest stars wholeheartedly agree with as Brando’s influence refuses to wane. While you wouldn’t have caught Cary Grant, James Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, or any of the rest ripping him off, Eastwood pointed to three performances from the era that definitely didn’t, and lingered in his mind as the greatest he’d ever seen.
“I don’t think that Montgomery Clift, when he did The Search, imitated anybody else,” the four-time Academy Award winner offered. “I don’t think that Oskar Werner, when he did The Last Ten Days, was imitative of anybody else, or Albert Finney, when he did Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was imitative. The great performances you can think of, at least, that I think are great over the last two or three decades, were all people who had a certain individuality, and that was it.”
Not the most obvious candidates, but by name-dropping a trio of turns between 1948 and 1960, Eastwood was giving himself a decent ‘Golden Age’ spread. Clift was Oscar-nominated for Fred Zinnemann’s World War II drama, but it’s a lot easier to understand why the other two were remained untainted in a post-Brando world.
After all, The Last Ten Days was a co-production between Austria and West Germany that depicted the final days of the Third Reich, and made history as the first post-World War II film released in the country to feature Adolf Hitler as a main character, while Finney’s titanic turn as Arthur Seaton anchored an otherwise unglamorous British kitchen sink drama. They were still made in the ‘Golden Age’, though, and if anything, you wouldn’t have expected the embodiment of Americana to cast his gaze so far and wide.
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