John Huston (1961)

An expedition by the principal characters into the Nevada Desert, to capture then sell wild mustangs, is at the heart of The Misfits.  The mustangs are described by the aging cowboy Gay Langland (Clark Gable) as ‘misfit horses’ and the trio trying to round them up are misfits too – or, perhaps, ‘ex-fits’:  Gay and his friend Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift) have been left behind by the decline of cowboy culture; Gay’s other friend Guido (Eli Wallach), who piloted a fighter plane in World War II, is stuck in a job as a car mechanic in Reno.  The attempted roping of the mustangs is the most arresting part of, and makes for a powerful climax to, John Huston’s film.  This is partly because of the stark beauty of the monochrome images created by Huston and his cameraman Russell Metty – the dark horses and the men struggling with them in the white expanse of desert.  It’s also because the episode is shocking, at least to a twenty-first century viewer who expects that no-animals-were-harmed in the making of a film.  These horses are visibly and audibly frightened.

There’s a kind of correspondence between this upsetting evidence of the horses’ distress and the reality of what was happening, or about to happen, to the stars of the picture.   Clark Gable, who insisted on doing some of his own, physically demanding stunts, suffered a heart attack two days after filming ended in early November 1960 and was dead within a fortnight:  The Misfits was released on what would have been his sixtieth birthday.  Montgomery Clift was already in a bad way when he made this film, although he had two more important performances still ahead of him (in Judgment at Nuremberg and Freud) before he died, aged forty-five, in 1966.  The fourth member of the group in the Nevada Desert, the one woman accompanying the three men, is the recently divorced Roslyn Taber.  She is played by Marilyn Monroe, whose marriage to Arthur Miller, who wrote The Misfits, was disintegrating as shooting began.  Monroe died in August 1962 and this was her last completed film.  Thank goodness for the compensating biography of Eli Wallach, who survived to be ninety-eight (he died in 2014) and whose marriage to Anne Jackson lasted sixty-six years.

It’s to these off-screen facts of life and death that The Misfits owes its, by now, mythic status.  John Huston, as quoted by Gerald Pratley in The Cinema of John Huston (1977), saw the characters in Arthur Miller’s story as:

‘… the holdouts, as it were, against the stamped-out, factory-made article.  The ones who were in revolt against this movement, but who didn’t know it themselves, were pursued and harried and put-down the way the horses were …’

Miller’s writing of these people, however, is characteristically (that is to say unintentionally) condescending; and their – or their creator’s – verboseness sounds ridiculous in the vastness of the desert landscape.  The misfits are small and pitiable, or would be if the screen personalities interpreting them didn’t make them bigger.  (Miller’s treatment of his dramatis personae is more exposed in the performance of Eli Wallach, a good actor but not a star, and in minor characters like Thelma Ritter’s Isabelle Steers, who disappears abruptly and conveniently from the story – so that Isabelle isn’t involved in the desert expedition.)   The presence of Monroe, Gable and Clift – what they mean to the viewer through other performances and from what we know, or think we know, about their own lives – gives The Misfits an unarguable heft.  There’s a pent-up pressure under Miller’s words and the performances that draws you in.  Alex North’s ambitious, impassioned score expresses something of this, even if it feels too big for the actual story on the screen.

Marilyn Monroe seems wan and preoccupied in her early scenes.   According to Huston, ‘sometimes she would hardly know where she was’, let alone know her lines, and the sequence in which Isabelle is coaching Roslyn on what she needs to say at her upcoming divorce hearing is particularly painful to watch.  As Roslyn starts to enjoy life with Gay and Guido, Monroe seems more with it – although it’s hard to tell if this is thanks to Huston’s clever shaping in the editing room.  There’s a particular moment – Roslyn repeatedly jumps from a step outside Gay’s house and back up again – where the actress, as well as the character, looks to be really enjoying herself.  Although one doesn’t associate Clark Gable with Westerns (you can count on the fingers of one hand the number listed in his Wikipedia filmography), his magnitude as a Hollywood star is enough to make his superannuated cowboy Gay Langland seem iconic.  Gable didn’t have great range as an actor but his wary quality here is compelling.  Montgomery Clift is a surprisingly introspective choice to play a rodeo performer (albeit an unsuccessful one) but he’s appealingly different from the other men in the story – you can understand why Roslyn is, for a time, drawn to him.  Clift’s playing of Perce’s phone call to his mother, in his first scene in the film, is the finest piece of acting in The Misfits.

25 June 2015