Thoughts on The Misfits

  

    Last year I watched a video by the film criticism YouTube page Be Kind Rewind looking at the 1961 John Huston film The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, and Eli Wallach. I hadn't seen the movie until last night, and I liked how Izzy (the creator behind Be Kind Rewind) discussed how the film was written by Arthur Miller, famed playwright and Marilyn Monroe's then-husband, and how Marilyn Monroe was torn between wanting to be taken more seriously as an actress, with training from The Actors Studio in her pocket, while still being pigeonholed into the breathy, sexy dumb blonde persona she would become immortalized by. 

    And that she thought that Miller would have her best interests at heart in crafting an intelligent character for her to play, but unlike the original novel version, the film version makes her character Roslyn feel more like her Marilyn persona, with the breathy voice and sex appeal. Like dressing Monroe in dresses without a bra to show off her bosom or the camera POV being of men looking at her behind. And changing backstory details, like Roslyn go from being formally educated in the book to being a high school dropout in the film, as if it would seem too unbelievable to viewers to see Marilyn Monroe as a college graduate. 

    It does feel unfair, because Marilyn Monroe was really good in the film, and adapted well to the naturalistic, Method style of acting, with small details like blowing hair out of her eyes or looking resigned and tired, or sounding more like an actual person than a sex doll persona. It's a shame that she didn't live much longer past 1962, because I felt like the 1960s era with more film adaptations of plays featuring Method actors would have suited her well, whether if she worked with Mike Nichols on a film version of a play, or worked with Nicholas Ray in a film noir. I liked how The Misfits' cast felt like a mix between the Old Hollywood screen stars (Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift) with the character actor types like Thelma Ritter and Eli Wallach, and Monroe is kind of caught in the middle as a glamorous 1950s star who was close with Actors' Studio founder Lee Strasberg and his daughter Susan, and straddling the line between Old and New Hollywood. 

    The plot of the film is that Monroe plays a woman named Roslyn, who comes to Reno, Nevada for a quickie divorce, planning to stay a few weeks until the divorce is finalized. She hangs out with a ragtag group like aging cowboy Clark Gable, mechanic Eli Wallach, and rodeo rider Montgomery Clift. She looks to them as an escape, only to find that none of these men truly respect her, and are wrapped up in the machismo of capturing wild horses to sell to be slaughtered into dog food, and they just see her as a sex object and a hysterical woman when she's angry. She frequently rebuffs Wallach's advances, and is patronized by Gable, being referred to as a "little lady." 

    It's a modern-day Western that just feels sad and melancholic to watch, it has this downbeat feeling of a bunch of people who seem lost, especially with the men trying to keep up this patriarchal culture that just beats them down instead. Capturing the horses with lassos just makes them look like greedy brutes, leading to Monroe's screaming rant in the desert about them being killers, saying they're not happy unless they kill something. While I'm not into how the scene is filmed (she's filmed from a far distance in the desert and can be nearly incoherent while screaming), I agreed that the men all felt like losers, and that she was much better off without them, and the finale did vindicate her feelings in a more triumphant way.

    I really liked this film, and I loved the black and white cinematography, the way Monroe was really working to prove she could act in a more naturalistic way, and how she came off more as an actual person with some tousled "messiness" (not so much, as this was still a Hollywood film and she was a gorgeous person). I liked how she and Ritter worked off of each other (they had both been in All About Eve, but no scenes together), I was preferring those early scenes to the rodeo scenes or the more masculine Western parts of the film, where I was losing some interest. While the film's production did have a lot of drama to it, I'm glad this was her finished last film to go out on, as her actual unfinished film, Something's Got to Give, just looked like a bad romantic comedy that ended up getting reworked into a different forgettable romcom. This was more of a standout Western that was more mature for its time, and a standout showcase for Marilyn Monroe's natural talent and charisma to shine through in a complex character.