Reeling Backward: Lonelyhearts (1958)

An odd but touching look at journalism and empathy, with Montgomery Clift playing a writer struggling with the morality of his role as an advice columnist to the lovelorn.

Montgomery Clift was a real oddball movie actor who set the stage for James Dean and other Method actors — though he didn’t like that term — with his organic, highly emotive style of performance. Today we can point to him as someone who truly changed the face of cinema.

Clift, who lived hard (and closeted) and died young, practically seems to melt onscreen in “Lonelyhearts,” playing Adam White, a noble but increasingly disillusioned journalist tasked with writing an advice column for the lovelorn. The other newsroom denizens see the gig as a joke pandering to losers, but Adam refuses to condescend to them and grows depressed sharing their pain.

His cynical editor, William Shrike (Robert Ryan), thinks he’s fraud masquerading as a promising young do-gooder, and gives him the assignment in the hopes of breaking his virtue. He’s half right, in that he succeeds in bringing about White’s moral downfall but it was from an authentic height — rendering his story even more tragic.

The movie, which is now out in a nice remastered Blu-ray issue from Kino Lorber, also is notable for featuring the first film performance of Maureen Stapleton, who earned an Oscar nomination playing an emotionally fractured wife who reaches out to the columnist.

The film, directed by Vincent J. Donehue from a screenplay by Dore Schare (“Boys Town”), was based on the 1933 novel by Nathanael West, “Miss Lonelyhearts.” I’m guessing United Artists dropped the “Miss” so as to avoid feminizing Clift in what is a fairly Y-chromosome-heavy story. A previous 1933 film adaptation, “Advice to the Lovelorn,” took a similar tact.

The term “Miss Lonelyhearts” has entered pop culture all on its own. Real newspapers started advice columns using that (presumably uncopyrighted) term — some still exist to this day. The book was loosely adapted into a play in 1957 by Howard Teichmann that closed after just 12 performances, but sparked interest for this film.

(There was also a 1983 TV movie starring Eric Roberts and an opera in 2006.)

It’s shot in a film noir style with lots of moody shadows and slanted light; cinematographer John Alton (“Elmer Gantry”) was a master of the aesthetic. The moral ambiguity of its story and character shadings also slide right in with the film noir style.

In some ways it’s a whodunit detective story, with Clift playing a man forced to reckon with his own dark past and current temptations.

As the story opens, White is practically a saintly paladin, a young wannabe writer who can’t even drink alcohol because it turns his stomach. He dreams of working at The Chronicle, the big tabloid in the unnamed city where he lives, and happens to befriend Shrike’s wife, Florence (Myrna Loy), at a local bar. She promises to introduce him to her husband.

Upon meeting, Shrike challenges White to compose a story on the spot about his predicament, which he does — including mentioning his anger at the shabby way Shrike treats his wife, dropping acid jokes about her only cozying up to Adam in search of an affair. Impressed with his moxie, but also convinced White is secretly as black-hearted as he, Shrike tells him to show up the next morning for work.

There isn’t a ton of newsroom scenes in the movie, the denizens more or less limited to two older ink-stained wretches in the features department, Goldsmith (Mike Kellin) and Gates (Jackie Coogan), who’d wanted the Miss Lonelyhearts column for himself. (Shrike tells him he’s too important writing movie reviews.) They mostly exist as a sort of cut-down Greek chorus.

Early on we learn that Shrike and his wife have been in a poisonous relationship for many years because she cheated on him with a younger man (hence the suspicion toward White). He can’t seem to forgive her — despite his own, numerous affairs — and seems to prefer needling Florence and making her life hell rather than letting her go. It seems to be the main fount of his own cynicism and need to bring everyone down to his level.

White has his own relationship with Justy Sargeant (Dolores Hart), who takes care of her father and passel of rambunctious teen brothers. It’s a little unclear if she and Adam are actually engaged or just in a tacitly agreed-upon pre-marriage commitment. They certainly canoodle and talk as if they’re a sure thing.

White’s big secret is that his father (Onslow Stevens) has been in prison for 25 years for murdering his mother and her lover when he caught them in bed. He’s caught in his own web of moral ambiguity, only finding out about the deed when he was a teen living in an orphanage.

He harbors little overt anger toward his dad, visiting him meekly in prison, since he was just 3 years old when the murder occurred and doesn’t remember his mother. Part of him feels that he, too, is stained by his parent’s transgressions — his mother’s adultery and his father’s taking of life.

Shrike and the other newspapermen tease him for becoming so personally involved in the sad and angry letters he receives. But White sees too much of himself, and his family, in these terrible letters to laugh them off.

Sensing an opportunity to win his own game, Shrike challenges White to personally visit one of his lonelyhearts authors to see if their story is as true as they say. He does this, leading to a meeting with Fay Doyle (Maureen Stapleton), a working-class wife to a man (Frank Maxwell) who returned from the war crippled and impotent.

As it happened, Fay had spotted White and Shrike at their bar and put two and two together, and uses the meeting as a pretext to seduce the handsome young White. Ashamed, he resists her efforts to continue the affair, which eventually leads to some angry confrontations involving both her and her husband.

For a 1958 film, “Lonelyhearts” is notable for its frank depiction and discussion of adultery, leaving in no uncertain terms not just what has transpired but the sense of despair and longing that motivate it.

It’s another compelling performance from Clift, playing a sensitive beta-male type, the sort of example of manhood that was not exactly celebrated in the he-man 1950s. Clift seems physically very small, often depicted sitting while the towering 6-foot-4 Robert Ryan peers down at him with disdain.

Clift is repeatedly referenced as being a young man in the story, though he was 38 when the movie came out. Despite his boyish looks, it’s a bit of a stretch for the character, though he convinced me as being a naif.

“Lonelyhearts” is, like its star, somewhat of an odd thing, but a touching movie that comments a little bit on the world of journalism and especially on the nature of empathy. It exists now almost like a photo negative of its era, with the strong commanding man as the moral weakling and the shrimpy empath as the true hero.

Would that the real world were so.