Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,936

This is the grave of George Montgomery.

Born in 1916 in Brady, Montana, George Montgomery Letz was the youngest of 15 children of German Ukrainian immigrants to that state. Brady is a spot on the map on the high plains. It wasn’t much then either, but this was the kind of land that these immigrants took. This was a ranching family and all the children were expected to work. So George grew up riding horses and running cattle. He was actually a pretty good student, though not very serious about it. He attended the University of Montana for a year and intended to study interior design (that’s an interesting choice for a ranching kid) but dropped out. He boxed and was a handsome big guy. But the boxing could get in the way of the handsomeness.

So Letz had a better idea–go to Hollywood. This was the era of the western and he actually knew how to ride horses and do all the things that you had to do in order to work the westerns. Of course there were doubles for the big actors, but for George Montgomery, as he was immediately known since no actor was going to have the last name of Letz in the 1930s, being able to do these things naturally could give him a leg up.

It didn’t take Montgomery long at all to get some small parts. His first role came in 1935, when he was still only 18, before he even really went to Hollywood for good, in a Gene Autry film called The Singing Vagabond. It was actually shot in California, so he had clearly shown interest in this before committing. When he went back for good in 1937, he immediately got work on Conquest, a Greta Garbo film. I mean, this was two days after his arrival. It was stunt work, which was fine by him.

It didn’t take long for Montgomery to start getting small roles in westerns. Most of these were not good, the kind of pulp westerns that appear on TV stations like Grit today. A lot of them were singing westerns and starred Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. The most notable of them was the original The Lone Ranger, from 1938, where there were six characters who were possibly the title role and he was one of them, though of course he was not the actual Lone Ranger. Occasionally, he got work in non-westerns as well, such as 1940’s Young People, notable for being Shirley Temple’s last film at Fox.

In 1941, Montgomery got a promotion to starring in B movies. This started when he had a larger role in a serious film, the Dalton Trumbo-adaptation Accent on Love. That led him to get the lead in 1941’s Riders of the Purple Sage, far more famous for being used as the name of the band in the late 60s than the film himself, but he was generally given positive reviews and seen as a lesser Clark Gable, which wasn’t bad for a rising actor. He starred with Carole Landis in the Ray McCarey comedy Cadet Girl in 1941 and then with Ann Rutherford in the Archie Mayo directed film Orchestra Wives in 1942, which is more famous for featuring Glenn Miller shortly before he went to war and then died.

Montgomery did not go to war. In fact, he was able to take advantage of all the bigger stars who did. When Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power signed up, Montgomery got films written for them, including Down to the Sea in Ships and Bird of Paradise, both costarring Gene Tierney. The Gable comparisons continued with his work in Coney Island, directed by Walter Lang and costarring Betty Grable, where reviewers noted that he now talked like Gable too.

Montgomery never really did rise about B-level in the movies, but he was A-level when it came to the ladies. He was a handsome fellow of course, but no doubt that’s not all of it. He hot a hot affair with Hedy Lamarr and they were engaged in 1941, though one of them called it off. Amusingly, she did more to win World War II than he did, as she was also scientifically inclined and co-invented a radio guidance system for torpedos that the military actually began to use extensively, thought not until after the war. Meanwhile, Montgomery was on a Hollywood set. After Lamarr, Montgomery started a relationship with Dinah Shore. They married in 1943 and stayed married for the next 19 years as they both negiotiated the decline in their film roles and the rise of television, her better than him.

But Montgomery was pretty good on TV too and few would star in TV better than Shore anyway. He spent much of the 50s working B westerns again, all pretty forgettable. Maybe a few of these movies are watchable, but again, this is the mediocre stuff they show on Grit. There were a few war movies too. He even directed a film called The Steel Claw, in 1961, about World War II in the Philippines, a topic about which he very much did not know from experience. He starred in it too.

But again, it was TV where a man like Montgomery would really find a home. He had his own show, Cimarron City that ran in 1958-59. He was on endless TV westerns in these years. Later, he claimed to have turned down the lead role in Gunsmoke, but evidence for this claim seems dicey. He was also in super weird films that I hope were spoofed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, such as 1967’s Hallucination Generation, which was a rant against LSD. He had no problem shooting films in apartheid South Africa, starring in 1970’s Strangers at Sunrise, as well as Satan’s Harvest, from the same year, which he also directed. He really wanted to make a war film about Vietnam that was to be called The Ho Chi Minh Trail. It did not quite happen though. Too bad, it sounds like it would have been delightfully horrible.

Montgomery also got into what many western actors did–believing they were in fact the spirit of America and the True West. Montgomery really liked carving other western actors into bronze. All you favorites–Ronald Reagan, Gene Autry, Randolph Scott, even young whippersnappers like Clint Eastwood. He also did a bronze of the Battle of Little Bighorn, romanticizing the scumbag idiot George Armstrong Custer like all these guys liked to do. I dunno, at least Montgomery actually grew up in this milieu, as opposed to most of these other poseurs. He was a talented guy though, and actually started a side business making furniture. He was known enough for this that Pledge hired him to star in their furniture cleaning ads in the 70s.

Montgomery died in 2000. He was 84 years old.

George Montgomery is buried in Highland Cemetery, Great Falls, Montana, where he is also remembered with this statue. Not sure if he designed it himself. This just half his remains though. The other half are in Cathedral City, near his home in Palm Springs.

If you would like this series to visit other western stars, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ronald Reagan is in Simi Valley, California and John Wayne is in Newport Beach, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.