Robert Montgomery was at his best playing the weak one in The Big House (1930), a young man who does not ask us to like him. MGM spent the thirties asking him to be an urbane gentleman beside its leading women instead.
Fi1m perspective
In The Big House (1930), Robert Montgomery is the frightened one in the cell. Wallace Beery has the noise and Chester Morris has the brains, and Montgomery's Kent Marlowe has nothing but a young man's terror of the place he has landed in. Most leading men that age would have found a way to make the terror appealing. Montgomery does not ask us to like him, and that refusal is the best thing he ever brought to a screen.
He had come from the New York stage and signed with MGM after So This Is College in 1929, and the studio's first idea of him was a well-cut suit standing beside Norma Shearer or Joan Crawford. The Big House changed that idea, though not for long; the comedies kept coming. Night Must Fall (1937) let him play Danny, a murderer with good manners, and Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) made him a boxer sent to heaven ahead of schedule. The war took him into the Navy until 1945. He came back to John Ford's They Were Expendable the same year, opposite John Wayne, and directed some of it without credit. After that he was a director more than an actor: Lady in the Lake and Ride the Pink Horse, both 1947, then the television anthology Robert Montgomery Presents from 1950 to 1957, and a last feature, The Gallant Hours, in 1960.
What he could do was hold still and let a scene come to him. Some have called it stiffness, and whether it is depends on the part. When the man is holding himself together, as Kent is, the stillness reads as fear, and Kent's fear moved us more than anything in the warmer films that followed, because Montgomery plays it without once looking to us for forgiveness. When the man is supposed to be easy company, the same quality fails him. Joe Pendleton is a soft-spoken, well-tailored man doing a Brooklyn accent that never settles, and his catchphrase, 'I'm in the pink', is repeated until it stops being character and becomes a tic. The film is good. He is the thing in it we kept noticing for the wrong reasons.
The odd turn came when he got the camera. Lady in the Lake is shot from Marlowe's eyes, so that Montgomery, who plays Marlowe, is on screen only briefly. A man who had spent eighteen years being photographed chose, the first chance he had, to point the lens the other way. Start with The Big House, where he is the weak one and does not pretend otherwise, and go to Mr. Jordan afterwards for Claude Rains rather than for him.
Biography
Robert Montgomery (born Henry Montgomery Jr.) was an American actor, director and producer. He was born on 21 May 1904 in Fishkill Landing (now Beacon), New York, and died on 27 September 1981 in New York City. He began his career on the stage in New York before signing with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Montgomery made his film debut in So This Is College (1929). He played Kent Marlowe in The Big House (1930) and appeared in numerous other films including The Divorcee (1930), Night Must Fall (1937), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and Lady in the Lake (1946), which he also directed. He served in the US Navy during the Second World War. He was the father of actress Elizabeth Montgomery.
