“She was a self-destroying babe in the woods, absentmindedly combing back her hair with a pistol.”
~ Arthur Miller on Marilyn 

John Huston took a troubled superstar and an ageing one out into the Nevada desert and conjured black and white magic with The Misfits, a piece of cinema for the ages – it would be the last film both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable would complete. The source material came from Monroe’s then estranged husband Arthur Miller, and the cast was perfectly filled out with Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach and the always remarkable Thelma Ritter. Miller and Monroe had been married in 1956 and Miller wrote the part of the tender hearted divorcée for Marilyn and had the script sent to John Huston who agreed to direct, 10 years after Marilyn’s breakthrough role in his The Asphalt Jungle. 

Roslyn (Marilyn Monroe) is in Reno for a quickie divorce when her landlady Isabelle (Thelma Ritter) introduces her to a couple of cowboys in Gay (Clark Gable) and Guido (Eli Wallach). Roslyn is attracted to Gay and before long they are living in Guido’s unfinished home and carousing with Guido and Isabelle. A trip to a rodeo sees gay meet up with his pal Perce (Montgomery Clift) and Roslyn finds herself the centre of the attentions of all three of her new friends. Guido convinces them to go on a round up in the desert to capture wild horses, and the four of them set out to the high plains of Nevada, only for Roslyn to confront the stark reality of what catching the misfit horses will mean.

John Huston and Arthur Miller wanted Marilyn to stretch her acting chops beyond light comedy and nothing about The Misfits involves comedy. There is some lightness of tone when the gang loosen up with booze, but it serves as an escape from the melancholic heart of the piece. Miller had divined the central tragedy in Monroe’s life – to be always underestimated because of her stunning beauty – and he’d seen up close her need to be taken seriously, Christ she’d married an intellectual like him for starters. He’d also held her hand through her association with Lee and Paula Strasberg, the renowned Actors Studio couple who were much in the spotlight because of their students like Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Montgomery Clift. Paula Strasberg made herself as essential to Monroe as booze and pills and disrupted every film set the actress worked on. She got away with it because Marilyn always got what she wanted.

‘She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for acceptance.’ ~ Elia Kazan

Miller was more or less handed Marilyn by his close friend Elia Kazan in 1951, after she’d been one of Kazan’s many lovers, and the pair started an affair before Marilyn found a relationship and then marriage in the arms of Yankees slugger Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio was possessive and abusive towards Marilyn and their marriage flamed out after 9 months and she went running to Miller for solace and direction. Marilyn tried to reinvent herself as a bookish, serious minded individual, and Miller wrote this piece as a gift to his wife, a serious role that brought the contradictions in Marilyn to the surface - a bright woman, full of life, ground down by the lazy, clichéd assumptions around the way she looked. With Miller she was reading Dostoevsky and studying Stanislavski and working with the legendary actor’s actor Laurence Olivier – who, like most men, became besotted with her.

Casting Clark Gable as the ageing cowboy was a stroke of genius. He’d been recycling his old macho image during the late 1950s in a series of Raoul Walsh adventure films that oozed colour and action but were the antithesis of what Huston offered. Gable playing the decaying alpha male struggling with the spectre of undefined loss, who was no longer able to guarantee he’d get the girl by virtue of indisputable masculinity, was a canny use of the history now etched into his handsome craggy features, adding an ineffable sadness. Adding to the sombre tone at the heart of the film was the decision to shoot in Black and White with brilliant technician Russell Metty, an inspired choice. Gable is superb as Gay, and heartbreaking when he makes a last attempt to prove his manly worth by pointlessly recapturing the horse Perce released for Roslyn, only to then let it go himself.

The supporting cast are also flawless. Eli Wallach is at his leering, twitchy best in trying to edge his ways into Roslyn’s good graces, only to be beaten to the punch by Gay. Thelma Ritter is wonderful as the drole realist Isabelle, and steals every scene she’s in. Montgomery Clift is a great contrast for the masculinity Gable offers, a more sensitive type in tune with the empathetic, tender hearted side of Roslyn and Clift makes the troubled, drifting soul Perce represents both memorable and authentic, but he is sexless compared to Gay and no competition there. Perce is damaged goods, on the outside as shown by his bandaged head, and on the inside as shown with his heartbreaking phone call to his mother - and Gable's magnificent drunken scene shows he's just as damaged on the inside until alcohol opens that closed book. The score by Alex North is beautifully realised and his time as a student of Aaron Copland shines through in the lyrical nature of the stunning soundtrack.

The story is about lost souls in a sea of change and coming to terms with an overarching sense of something good being constantly just beyond their reach. Gay tells Roslyn, “You're the saddest girl I ever saw.” She replies, “I usually heard that I was happy” and he remarks, “That's because you make people happy.” It’s a telling exchange. The characters attempt to push back on the meaningless life they trudge through with booze, bonhomie and bluff, but in the end they are the misfits, longing to run free, but roped by reality and bound for a bitter end. Gay wants to run his own race and avoid the indignity of ‘working for wages’ – but ultimately he realises he can tie down a horse but he can’t tie down its spirit. Roslyn is heartbroken when she discovers the plan is to sell the horses for dog food* and howls at the desert night of the cruelty and pain that she’s inadvertently been party to all along in her naiveté.
* Not so fun fact – If American pet meat consumption in the 2020s was a country, it would rank 5^th in the world.

For all that, the film is Monroe’s, she is its heart and soul and the focus of lost souls hoping she represents an elusive future that makes sense of their past and what it lacks. Miller was essaying the modern west in existential crisis, where the old certainties of black hat/white hat have passed into folklore and the present day cowboys confront the emptiness in their psyches as well as the vastness of the terrain. Monroe inhabits the brittle Roslyn, and many of the traits and situations Miller wrote into the character surely were inspired by his wife’s singular situation. He tailored the part to her perfectly and she was note perfect in delivering a Roslyn who was both aware and appalled and thrilled at the effect she had on men, a woman who struggled to be more than the boxed in version society imposed upon her. Roslyn, like the others, is a searcher but unsure exactly of what it is she is chasing. If Gay is chasing horses as a substitute, then Roslyn is a filly he ropes and knows he needs to let her go to see if she’ll run or come back to him. Maybe that’s why the violence done to the horses resonates so fiercely with Roslyn. Monroe taps every depth in her performance, made even more indelible because of the attached history the film soon carried.

The Misfits was on a hiding to nothing upon its release in 1961. Clark Gable died of a heart attack two weeks after filming closed in November 1960 prior to the February release and Monroe and Miller had finalised their divorce a month earlier. The film is also sombre and downbeat and played against Monroe’s sex-kitten popular image. Her ability as a light comedienne was acknowledged by then, but she wanted to be taken seriously as an actress and this film proves she had what it takes. The film was out of kilter with audience expectations and came to considered ill-starred or accursed, especially after Monroe passed away without completing another film and tales of the ‘troubled shoot’ fed the furphy that the stunt exertions contributed to Gable’s heart attack, something Huston was at pains to renounce. Adding to the films tragic legacy, Clift passed away from years of alcohol and drug abuse five years later having had the rare distinction of Marilyn saying he was, ‘The only person I know who is in worse shape than I am.’ He released one more film with a meaty, starring role during his lifetime, and that was John Huston’s Freud. That production was only a year later and Clift’s deterioration was stark and its shoot made The Misfits look like a walk in the park according to Huston.

John Huston was a renaissance man, as much at home on a hunt on horseback as arguing Freudian philosophy with John Paul Sartre, and he wasn’t afraid to see film as more than entertainment, even if he'd provided brilliant entertainments along the way. With The Misfits he and Miller created art in an subversive, offhand way – smuggling a subtext of existential terror into a mainstream cowboy scenario and pulling down the curtain on the scant scraps of the American Dream that are the inheritance for a goodly part of the population - no small feat. John Huston wrangled a difficult shoot in hellish conditions, with two very difficult prima donnas in Monroe and Clift and made a classic that wasn’t right for the time. Its reputation has grown such that it is now rightly seen as timeless.

Note - To add to the sad history, according to Clift's live-in carer, The Misfits was on television the night Clift died. When asked if he wanted to watch it, Clift belated, 'Absolutely not!' They were the last words he ever said to another person.