InFifa's Tony Janssens introduces Rebels with a Cause: from Monty to Jack, or when rock 'n' roll entered the movies…

After a very successful season of travelling to the future, Infifa's next season is a journey to an illustrious past, presenting a quintet of films showcasing five actors whose talents have changed cinema and who genuinely influenced the way actors today approach their craft. Intensity and originality they all have in common, the films themselves still burn the screen, and the characters they played have become part of cinematic folklore.

It's only apt to start with a clash of cultures and acting styles, the conflict between the patriarch and his adopted son, the old order and the new one, between the majestic power of the 6 foot 5 John Wayne and the quiet concentration of the 5 foot 10 Montgomery Clift, the latter's David against the former's Goliath, as seen by legendary director Howard Hawks. The epic Red River is not just one of the great westerns, based on a novel about the biggest cattle drive in history, but a genuine American classic without special effects, just great acting, fantastic stunt work, the artistry of moviemaking, and absolutely magnificent on the big screen, the only place where one should see it.

Clift's Matthew Garth is the first member of the band.

Like Clift, Marlon Brando was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and he, like Clift, started his career as a stage actor, a surface he eventually deemed too restrictive to contain him. He already made his film debut as a paraplegic war victim in The Men, yet after playing the brutish lead 855 times on stage he reprised the role when its director Elia Kazan turned A Streetcar Named Desireinto a film, where Brando left his indelible mark. Some might say that the screen creates a remoteness, certainly in 1951 when the censors would tone down the savagery and the sexuality, but Kazan's direction and the psychologically discordant energy he created on set turns the film into some of the most extraordinary ensemble acting ever caught on camera.

It is Brando's ferocious Stanley Kowalski who's the second member of the band.

James Dean was 23, already a self-destructive neurotic, when he was allowed to play a teenager groping for some kind of identity and for genuine affection from his parents. Much imitated , never eclipsed, his portrayal is electrifying, as if made up on the spot. Some of Rebel without a Cause, the way the older generation is treated, appears to us now as a distortion that contemporary movies continue to redress, but James Dean in this film is so unconventional, so enduring, so agile, nearly balletic in his movements, it really is no surprise his legacy lives on and he remains a symbol of the restless generation. Of course, tragedy enhanced that reputation.

Dean’s Jim Starkis the third member of the band.

We jump more than a decade to our next film, with an already well established star in the title role. Arguably Paul Newman is the least chameleonic of this quintet, yet the biggest star, during the sixties and seventies the most popular actor, no matter that the quality of a majority of films he starred in was second-rate. In Cool Hand Luke the egg eating "failure to communicate", who, unlike those fifty hard-boiled eggs, refuses to crack, has a sensual, earthy beauty about him that finds its way into the ripe, soft colours of this rather rhapsodic film, enlivened by a superb troupe of character actors.

Newman’s Luke Jackson is the fourth member of the band.

The final film of the season is the least known, least heralded one. Written by Robert Towne, whose next screenplay would be Chinatown, The Last Detail is self-effacingly directed by Hal Ashby, with his use of dissolves and rapid cutting showing the passage of time extremely effective, and with such a soft touch that, to paraphrase Ashby's best known film, it's almost as if he wasn't 'being there'. However, the standout is Jack Nicholson, who gives one of his finest intuitive performances, very different from previous roles and the blueprint for the ones that would follow shortly afterwards, in Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, parts that would turn him into the touchstone for every American actor of the next generation.

Nicholson’s Billy 'badass' Buddusky is the fifth and final member of the band.

A season of five fabulous films, screening from Nov 2023 - Mar 2024, directed by five American directors and starring five American actors whose names have become a permanence of our moviegoing experience.

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