Recent divorcée Roslyn Taber (Marilyn Monroe) and her divorce-enabling friend Isabelle Steers (Thelma Ritter) run into Gay Langland (Clark Gable), an aging and bitterly nostalgic he-man cowboy, and Guido (Eli Wallach), a lost widower. The men immediately start competing for her. Though neither of them exhibit any qualities she’s interested in, she moves in to Guido’s empty house with Gay. After numerous nights of drinking, they head to a rodeo, picking up Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift), a brain-damaged and alcoholic rodeo rider, along the way. The three men decide to work together on a scheme to capture wild mustangs and sell them for dog food. Since Roslyn has a strong dislike of murdering animals, and dying in general, their plan is not going to go over well with her.
Gable was drinking and smoking himself to death. John Huston was seeking death through all manner of vices, though the most visible during production was booze and gambling, And they were amateurs next to Clift and Monroe where depression, drugs, and alcohol had them already sliding into the grave. But the old men had a head start, so it was Gable who died first, less than two weeks after finishing the production. Monroe would follow in a year and a half without finishing another picture. Clift lasted five years when what Robert Lewis called the “longest suicide in history” finally took him out at age 45. Somehow Huston outlived them all, though as a sickly man filled with thoughts of mortality.
And I shouldn’t leave out screenwriter Arthur Miller. Death wasn’t calling to him, but he was immersed in anger (perhaps petty) as his marriage to Monroe fell apart. He had started writing the script for her, but changed it along the way to be an attack on her.
This isn’t random trivia about the making of The Misfits. This is the movie. It’s anger and loss and death. There are no characters, but simply actors acting as themselves. And the many messages are what those actors, and more, the writer and director, would rant about before passing out.
Gable realized he’d made few good movies in his career and put in few good performances (points for self knowledge) and thought this was his chance to act. But acting was never a skill he processed. His character comes off as exactly what Gable was: a fading star who’d survived on equally fading charisma, who was in poor health and looked older than he was. (Gable was in his late ‘50s, looked like he was in his late ‘60s, and was supposed to be playing a guy in his mid ‘40s). Monroe came in with hope and fear and ended with a better understanding of the film than Gable. She hated it and her performance, though she’s by far the best of the three top-billed cast members. Of course she also hated that Miller was plastering both her personal life, and his prejudiced view of her across the screen. Clift doesn’t act. He’d long lost the ability to even try to do that. Pain and pills, a broken face, and desperation was all he had, and that’s what he displayed. He didn’t play a character, just his very sad self.
Well, at least both Monroe’s and Clift’s deteriorated mental states fit the picture. And as kindred souls, they were also the only ones that unreservedly got along. Their scenes together are the best in the film, not because they show the characters, but because they record two real broken people trying to support each other, but with no illusions that things will work out.
Wallach and Ritter do their job as the only people involved who were coherent and functional.
I don’t know what happened on that set, but there are plenty of stories to choose from. Everyone bends the truth and sees with their own eyes. So, was Monroe hospitalized due to her excessive drug use and spiraling anxiety, or was it a ploy by Huston to give himself time to deal with the exorbitant gambling debts he’d built up? Was Gable a calm gentleman who was patient with both Monroe’s and Huston’s delaying shooting on a daily basis, or did that drive him into a frenzy that partly led to his heart attack? And did Gable respect and work well with Clift, or was the threat he was heard to make toward Clift more indicative of his feelings? Was Monroe happy to work with her old friend Wallach or was she trying to get his scenes cut so he wouldn’t upstage her? Did Gable and Wallach enjoy playful banter or were they constantly picking at each other? Did Gable and Huston compete to see who had the most testosterone, or… There’s no “or” on that one; they were in a playground competition. What is certain is that behind the scenes it was a mess, and that mess is splattered all over the film stock.
Damn, it’s surprising the result isn’t worse.
It’s not that The Misfits is a bad film as much as it isn’t a film at all. It’s just broken people displaying their failings. The plot doesn’t make much sense, nor do the characters, nor does much of anything, if taken as a movie. As the document of deteriorating lives, it is successful.
Without wildly changing the whole story (something that wasn’t going to happen since Gable had final call on the script and he liked it as it was), the film was in bad shape even before the morbid cast was assembled. Miller wrote it as if for the stage, not the screen, and outside of the two scenes with horses, it could be transformed into a play changing almost nothing. The stilted lines are only occasionally part of conversations. Instead, each character caries out monologues, stating, over and over, their philosophies of life. Don’t look for subtlety. You want to know Gay’s thoughts on freedom or Guido’s on marriage or Roslyn’s on morality? Have no fear, each will have at least two speeches covering those topics. Strangely, with all that philosophizing, it all comes to nothing, or maybe not so surprising. The mustang roundup isn’t half bad if they’d just turned down the symbolism five or six notches and not have multiple characters explaining the message as if it wasn’t abundantly clear. The unearned ending muddies the waters even more. The studio and Huston wanted to do some needed reshoots when they saw what they had, but Gable said “no” and his contract backed him up.
Every character is annoying in some way, but then hanging with sick, lost people often is aggravating. And sick lost people saying the lines of an angry man is a rough way to spend two hours. For portions of the story (I assume written when Miller was still seeing Monroe as his goddess), Roslyn is a manic pixie dream girl, before that was a thing. She dances and hugs trees and brings life to those who see her, all in a way no real human would. I tend to think the film would have been better if it had swerved into this mode full time; at least the constant pontificating on life would have fit. But then she shifts to insecure, nagging, and neurotic. She’s easier to take than Gay, who whines and whines about manliness. “The rules had changed,” he must say a dozen times, and he just wants to be a he-man cowboy. Was this important to Miller? I don’t know, but it was important to Huston (and to some extent to Gable) who did see himself as a manly-man in a world where rules were stopping him from conquering the wilderness. I’ve heard people say they dislike Guido the most because he gets angry when the others don’t. I’ve also heard Guido most reflects Miller’s mental state. I can’t say. Eli Wallach is only acting, unlike his co-stars, but he’s full on method acting, so perhaps he’s too deep into his character as well.
Monroe is luminous, because she was luminous. Clift comes off as kind and noble, and also mangled and mentally damaged, because he was. The rest is best not to dwell on. There’s no narrative film here to watch, just a jumble or real world fears and a premonition of death. But that’s interesting in a different way. If you wish to study the decline and death of actual people, The Misfits is helpful source material.
