The Misfits (1961)

Film: The Misfits (1961)
Stars: Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, Eli Wallach
Director: John Huston
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Marilyn Monroe-click here to learn more about Ms. Monroe (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Few films have productions as steeped in lore as The Misfits.  If you study film history at all, The Misfits shows up in a lot of texts about this era.  It was, as we'll discuss below, the final film of two Hollywood legends.  It also had pretty much everyone on the set at each other's throats, from Clark Gable & John Huston quarreling throughout the shoot (weirdly in the first & only film that they ever made together) to Marilyn Monroe & screenwriter Arthur Miller's marriage falling apart on the set of the movie they were making together to of course the continued "slow suicide" of Montgomery Clift after his car accident.  Pretty much everyone on the set suffered from some form of alcohol abuse, and production delays abounded.  But what of the film itself?  I have weirdly, despite having read about this movie for most of my life (and having written in college a 120-page paper about American cinema in the 1960's), never actually gotten around to seeing it, and if I was going to do a month devoted to Marilyn Monroe, there was no way I wasn't going to plug this gap in my film-watching.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Misfits is a little hard to explain in a conventional way, but let's give it a shot.  The picture starts with Roslyn (Monroe) getting a divorce in Reno from her husband for emotional neglect (her husband is played by Oscar nominee Kevin McCarthy in a truly 1-minute cameo, if not less).  She is staying with a local landlord named Isabelle (Ritter), and being as she's played by Marilyn Monroe, Roslyn quickly gets attention from the men of the town, including two cowboys: Gay (Gable), a rough-and-tumble guy and his driver best friend Guido (Wallach).  Roslyn & Gay move in together in Guido's house, even though it's not entirely clear that they are romantically linked (it's treated in many ways throughout the movie not as a love story, but more as a father getting a chance to raise the surrogate daughter that he gave up for his cowboy ways), though Guido clearly lusts after Roslyn.  At a rodeo, they meet Perce (Clift), a dumb rider who nearly kills himself and decides to join up with Roslyn, Gay, and Guido as they wrangle mustangs in the desert.  Slowly, Roslyn understands the cruelty of these men's lives as she sees them basically track and nearly murder a bunch of wild mustangs.  She calls them out on it, and in the dark with Perce she frees them, angering Gay.  Guido, still obsessed with her, tries to make a move but she says he's heartless, and it turns out she's right-he encourages Gay to leave her, but instead, after an extended shoot where he tries to tame a stallion, he lets them loose, driving off into the sunset with Roslyn, their future uncertain but knowing they love each other.

The Misfits is a strange film.  Honestly-I didn't really know what to expect considering its place in film lore and its position in the early 1960's, when even westerns that would be conventional like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would challenge some of the assumptions we have about heroes and villains.  It's more avant-garde than you'd think.  While yes, at its center this is the story of one man (Gable) struggling with modernity, aided in that struggle by a beautiful woman (Monroe)-basically the plot of most westerns-we also realize that it's Monroe's Roslyn who was right the whole time, not just about him needing to give up this life, but that perhaps this life wasn't necessary to begin with.  The film is brutally violent in scenes (the mustang wrangling is disturbing, particularly since with John Huston in the director's chair, there's no assurance those horses weren't injured at some point), and sex permeates the movie.  Aside from a scene where Monroe is topless (you see her from the back), you have Eli Wallach's Guido lusting after Monroe in a way that I don't remember seeing in a movie like this, at least not very often.  It feels carnal, and is a big payoff for the later scene where Monroe tells him off.

Because honestly-this movie is fantastic.  You can quibble over whether certain sequences go too long, or whether it's too much mood, but I loved it.  The script is tight-Miller was writing it as he went along, but it doesn't show as his vision comes together in the end.  The direction is glorious-Huston enjoys the action sequences the most (and they're thrilling if also gut-wrenching), and the score is divine.  Best of all is the acting.  Wallach, as I mentioned, is out-of-this-world good; if this movie hadn't been considered a disappointment at the box office, it's easy to see him getting an Oscar nomination.  Ritter is great as ever; there's this weird, odd scene in the center of the movie where she opines about the husband who left her for her best friend, and everyone is confused about why she's happy to see them, but it works.  Ritter's face & gestures indicate an understanding of love, even love that's lost or mistreated, that I found so moving.  And then there's Clift, who finds an authenticity in his rodeo clown that feels genuine.  Clift occasionally feels like he's about to forget his lines (and indeed, that might have been the case-if I had to pick a weakest link in the cast, he'd be it though he's still solid), but at least he picked a character where that is convincing.

Gable & Monroe are sensational in the leads.  Even with the box office disappointment, I'm kind of stunned Gable didn't get a posthumous Oscar nomination for this-it might be the best performance he's ever given (give or take Rhett Butler), and I like Gable in a lot of movies.  As he's worn down, you find a man who has long since lost his youth & his reason for even existing, but he keeps on living, and has to find a way to acknowledge that he's still living.  It's so profound, and while Gable is an A+ movie star at his best, I didn't really know he was this good of an actor.  The same has to be said for Monroe.  This could be another dumb blonde where men do crazy things to sleep with her, but it's not.  She finds something there in this lost soul, a woman who has something to say but doesn't understand how to get it out.  Monroe, deeply introverted in real life, rarely played such characters onscreen (there are actually very few introverts in Classical Hollywood cinema), but here it suits her grandly. This is possibly Monroe's best performance too (give or take Sugar Kane), and it's a bummer she didn't think so (Monroe disliked the movie & her work in it).

The film, as I mentioned above, was the end of the road for two Hollywood legends.  Gable died 12 days after shooting of a heart attack.  He wasn't that old all-things-considered (the film would be released on his 60th birthday, a few months after shooting), but you can tell that decades of smoking & drinking had worn down the matinee idol.  Monroe, 24 years his junior, also would never complete another film.  Though she had started shooting the (yet-another-troubled-shoot) film Something's Got to Give, Monroe died before it was completed, of a drug overdose, a potentially intentional one.  We've discussed the many conspiracies surrounding Monroe's death before (click the link if Hollywood true crime is your jam), but in the light of just watching The Misfits, it feels especially tragic, and adds a sense of anguish to the final scenes of Gable & Monroe driving off into the sunset that John Huston never could have intended.  Here we have two of the true legends of cinema, uniting for the only time, in some of their best ever work, and soon to die tragically young.

That ends our month devoted to Marilyn Monroe, the quintessential sex symbol in a year-long series devoted to cinematic sex symbols.  As we'll see in July, though, we aren't entirely abandoning Marilyn-her legacy will be felt next month, both in terms of heightened, sexualized glamour...and unfortunately, even more tragedy.