Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

His co-star Burt Lancaster revealed that he was so nervous about being out-acted by Clift that he was shaking during their first scene together in the movie. Edward Montgomery Clift (October 17 1920 – July 23 1966) was an American film and stage actor. The film's success at the box office brought numerous awards for screenwriting and directing but none for Clift himself.

Examples include the social climber in George Stevens's A Place in the Sun the anguiMontgomery Cliftd Catholic priest in Hitchcock's I Confess the doomed regular soldier Robert E. Lee Prewitt in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity and the Jewish GI bullied by antisemites in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions.