The Misfits ***** (1961, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter) – Classic Movie Review 1365

Director John Huston’s and playwright/screenwriter Arthur Miller’s 1961 modern-day Western is brilliantly strange and striking. It focuses on the lives of a quartet of loveable losers (‘the misfits’), who embark on a chase for symbolic horses against a background of the dying West.

They turn out to be among the screen’s most memorable characters: an over-the-hill Nevada cowboy (Clark Gable) perhaps inappropriately called Gay Langland, his old Hispanic sidekick Guido (Eli Wallach), a sexy blonde just-divorced ex-stripper named Roslyn Taber (Marilyn Monroe) and the damaged rodeo drifter Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift).

After Roslyn divorces Ray (Kevin McCarthy) in a shotgun divorce in Reno, she and her older, sassier confidante Isabelle Steers (Thelma Ritter) meet widower Guido, who introduces her to Gay and they all move out to the country to Guido’s uncompleted house. There Roslyn tentatively begins to build a home with Gay, and they start to fall in love.

Guido returns, and takes Roslyn and Gay on a road trip to round up wild mustangs (also ‘the misfits’). They pick up rodeo-rocked bull-rider Perce to serve as an extra pair of hands. But when Roslyn learns that Gay, Guido and Perce are going after the wild horses to sell them to turn them into dog food, she’s mighty upset and kicks up big time. Finally, Roslyn’s simple-minded good nature forces the men to confront their failures and outmoded lifestyle.

Monroe, who was married to the author who loomed on set all the time, was apparently in the grip of despair during filming, and caused endless delays in the shooting and couldn’t remember her lines. Somehow none of this shows on screen, in her miraculous, seamless-seeming performance, her best ever.

Gable allegedly precipitated his fatal heart attack a week before filming ended by performing his own stunts. And a gay, alcoholic Clift was haunted by his near-fatal car crash and his troubles with his sexuality, not helped by Huston’s macho attitudes.

But it’s life’s haunting ghosts that now give the movie its unique, melancholic allure. The gloomy performances rivet the gaze, particularly that of Gable, who really is truly remarkable in his old age here. Russell Metty’s black-and-white cinematography startles and often amazes, and the music score by Alex North entrances. But it’s the iconic appearances that really make the movie.

Even in this extraordinary company Wallach and Ritter effortlessly more than hold their own in the most striking of performances. Once again, Wallach may not be very Hispanic but he is very good. James Barton, Estelle Winwood, Kevin McCarthy, Philip Mitchell and Denis Shaw co-star, but don’t really have very much to do.

Eli Wallach died on 24 June 2014 aged 98. Wallach, who won a Tony Award in 1951 for playing Alvaro in Tennessee Williams’s original production of The Rose Tattoo, made his movie debut as a cotton-gin owner trying to seduce a virgin in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956) and carried on working well into his nineties.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1365

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