The Misfits

This is, first and foremost, a film which, for several reasons—and despite its very subject matter and what John Huston may have intended it to be—will go down in history as a cursed work. Firstly, because it was Clark Gable’s final film (he died of a heart attack aged 59, days before filming was completed); a year and a half later, in August 1962, Marilyn Monroe died aged 36; just four years and three films later, in 1966, Montgomery Clift, aged 45, also died. Monroe and Clift will go down in cinema history as two of the figures most tormented by the Hollywood star system and by the tangled web of prejudices, illusions and anxieties that permeated Western culture at the time.

Of course, The Misfits did not have to be read this way over time; yet it is inevitable that it has been interpreted in this way over the last 60 years. Not least because the script deliberately contributes to this—heavy, stifling for the actors, and increasingly inconsistent as the film progresses—which Arthur Miller devised from a short story he had written years earlier, in 1957. It is as though, throughout the entire narrative, the characters do nothing but seek the answer to a question that Miller puts into Roslyn’s (Marilyn Monroe) mouth at the end of the film: ‘How do you find your way in the dark?’

The problem with the film, I believe, is the overemphasis on dialogue, the all too obvious desire to write for an actress in the throes of a romantic crisis amidst her own, more or less permanent, personal crisis—especially when the screenwriter is her husband (who is about to cease being so). Apart from the impressive cinematography by Russell Metty (who, amongst others, worked with Orson Welles) and Huston’s very solid direction, it is a pity that the film ultimately ends up being much more about the script than the cinematography, and more Miller than Huston. At the time, May Tinee—pseudonym of the Chicago Tribune’s resident critic—rightly wrote that ‘this film proves once again that the stage and the screen are different media and require distinct writing techniques.’ Even more scathing, she concluded: ‘Arthur Miller seems to be striving to say something, just like all his characters, but the message doesn’t come across.’ [1]

Much of the dialogue in the film’s opening scenes seems deliberately (and somewhat patronisingly) written to address Marilyn and challenge the stereotypes that have been attributed to her all her life. The ‘dumb blonde’ who turns out, after all, to be clear-headed and increasingly self-determined, who has ‘the gift of life’ (as Guido [Eli Wallach] tells her) but is unable to understand men (that is, to form stable relationships with them). Digressions on how husbands and wives forget to teach each other things; or the idea that ‘they’re all dying a little at a time’, reflections on loneliness and sadness (‘I think you’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met’, Gay/Clark Gable tells her)... Arthur Miller filled the dialogue with reflections on life and death, on taking the lives of people and animals, in a tone that, in hindsight, has often been regarded as prescient. Once again, it was the personal tragedies of Marilyn and Gable himself—and even Clift—that gave added meaning to a script that would otherwise probably not have gone down in history.

Monroe’s role—one of the very few in a dramatic film and, of these, the only one truly written for her—allows her to deliver an absolutely consistent performance in the first half of the film, the part in which the story and the characters are not only credible but in which, contrary to the Chicago Tribune’s criticism, the message is effectively conveyed. Marilyn appears to us, at that moment, and despite all the designer dresses and the heavy make-up she wears, as a woman in transition towards maturity who deliberately rejects the persona Hollywood had constructed for her—that of the ‘dumb blonde’ (which everyone now seems to recognise she was able to portray so skilfully)—whose photographs (of Marilyn Monroe herself in several of her previous roles) Roslyn sticks behind the door of a cupboard in the house she now shares with Gaylord (referred to as Gay throughout the film), the cowboy in the midst of an identity crisis played by Clark Gable. The actress, who had begun her career in 1950 in an iconic Huston film (The Asphalt Jungle), was always full of praise for the director’s work.

In the second half of the film, however—which is notable almost solely for its fantastic black-and-white cinematography—Monroe is forced to spout contrived lines that Miller puts into her mouth, portraying a sort of moral and psychological ‘truth’ which, according to biographies, the playwright sought to imbue in the woman whose personal drama he would later draw upon in his subsequent works. [2] The only other female character—a lucid and good-humoured woman played by the extraordinary Thelma Ritter—disappears in this second half of the film, leaving Monroe surrounded by three magnificent actors (Gable, Clift and the powerful Eli Wallach), each grappling with tormented, stubborn and needy characters that Miller has sketched in such broad strokes that they rarely seem convincing. With Roslyn left to play the role of the narrative’s moral centre, any of the male actors could have fared better than she did, which leaves us (me, at least) with the bitter realisation that this was the actress’s final role. [3] For it to be her last, it would have been preferable had it been any of the fantastic comic roles she patiently, yet chaotically, managed to craft in Bus Stop (1956), Some Like It Hot (1959), or even The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).

[1] “The Misfits is talkative and lengthy”. (1961, 2 February). Chicago Tribune.
[2] Miller, A. (1964). After the Fall [Play].
Miller, A. (1987). Timebends: A Life. Grove Press.
[3] Monroe left behind unfinished footage from Something’s Got to Give (Cukor, 1962). Production was suspended by 20th Century Studios, which dismissed the actress, tried unsuccessfully to replace her with Lee Remick, and eventually reached an agreement with Monroe to resume filming. The actress, however, died a few days later.