Four years older than Brando, eleven years senior to James Dean, but finding stardom only just ahead of both, Montgomery Clift is invariably bracketed with them—the leader of the great trio of the beautiful and doomed who emerged from the Actors Studio in New York City to transform the postwar face of screen acting with their individual and collective intensity. He died too soon to recover from his failures and too late to become a mythic icon like Dean or Marilyn Monroe, but to examine his all-too-short filmography is to be reminded of his achievements that have been all too often buried beneath the rubble of his ruined life.

Only cast in serious dramas, the fragile and gifted Clift, frequently quivering with painful introspection, was the screen's great outsider, misfit, or victim during the 1950s—the ultimately rejected fortune hunter of The Heiress...