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CHRONICLING "THE ULTIMATE MOTION PICTURE"
By Gia Kourlas
Although not nearly as shockingly cerebral now as it must have seemed to audiences in 1961, THE MISFITS is still quite a bizarre movie. Directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller as a serious acting vehicle for his then-wife, Marilyn Monroe, the black-and-white film is centered around a quartet of social misfits in lonely and expansive Nevada. Monroe portrays Roslyn Taber, a newly divorced woman who becomes romantically involved with a cowboy named Gay Langland (Clark Gable). But while she is as glamorous as ever, Monroe plays Roslyn as fragile and hardly less tormented than the actress must have been herself at the time. While not a surprise -- if anyone knew her intimately, it was Miller, the East Coast intellect -- THE MISFITS shows off Monroe's range like no previous role.
But despite wonderful performances by Gable, Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and the invincible Thelma Ritter, the final product has always been overshadowed by the baggage of its stars. It was both Monroe's and Gable's final film. Though she survived an overdose during the course of shooting and was able to finish the movie, as the world knows, one year later Monroe succeeded in committing suicide. Gable, seemingly spry at 59, died soon after the film was completed of a fatal heart attack, blamed on his own insistence on performing all the dangerous horse stunts himself. Clift, who plays Perce, a cowboy with a penchant for the rodeo, also died unexpectedly of coronary artery disease not long after the film was released.
The story is less an entertaining western than a cerebral exploration of what happens when a group of discontents fall in love with the same insecure woman. Monroe's acting is superb. Huston transforms her stunning looks into something less sexy than vulnerable, and her characterization of Roslyn is full of haunting depth and subtlety.
Gail Levin, director of GREAT PERFORMANCES' MAKING THE MISFITS, always realized Huston's film was undervalued. Her insightful documentary, which records the cinematic process with candor and humor, includes interviews with Miller, actors Eli Wallach and Kevin McCarthy, and crew members as well as something extra-special: the photographers of Magnum Photos, which covered the shooting on an exclusive basis. "THE MISFITS, honestly, has been a film I've just loved forever," Levin says. "One day, while I was in the Museum of Modern Art, I happened upon a film book on the making of THE MISFITS with all the Magnum photographs. The great passion of my life is photography, and I'm always trying to figure out ways in which one can do photographic subjects on film. It's not easy."
Levin had no knowledge of Magnum's extensive involvement with the project before her discovery of the book, but what surprised her the most was that she was the first director to jump on the provocative behind-the-scenes tale. "That was auspicious somehow, because it felt like it was mine to do," she says. "I love the notion of being able to approach the creative process on several levels, including the points of view of these photographers. THE MISFITS is a great film that wasn't received in that way, but I think it's so extraordinarily modern and courageous...."
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CHRONICLING "THE ULTIMATE MOTION PICTURE"
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For all its emotional power, THE MISFITS, as Levin's film proves, was not at all easy to produce. "It was an anxious set," recalls Lee Jones Schoenburg of Magnum Special Projects. "There was a tremendous amount of tension. First of all, everybody would get there, it was 110 in the shade, and sit around ... Marilyn wouldn't show and wouldn't show, and [we wondered] would it get called off or not? By the time things got going, all sorts of decisions had to be made about scenes to cut and drop." Oddly, neither Huston nor anyone else admonished the unstable Monroe for her constant tardiness (at the time, even though she was married to Miller, she was having an affair with Yves Montand). "That's astonishing because it was John Huston, after all," Levin says. "Okay, Arthur Miller is crumbling in the corner. We understand that he is so emasculated and lost that he can probably do very little about it. He's the writer, not the director. But Huston, in his funny way, was very nonconfrontational. You would think he would be very aggressively expecting her to be on time, but he was rather benign! He too felt you can't rush her, you can't push her -- what's it going to get me to do this? Nothing. It will upset her, so let's just play this thing out."
Not surprisingly, the most poignant recollections come courtesy of Miller, whom Levin did not know before approaching him to participate in the documentary. "We had a lunch, and he said, 'I won't talk about Marilyn,' and I said, 'Fine,' " Levin recalls. "I think he trusted that it wasn't going to be gossipy. I've watched it with him, and I think he was quite pleased. At the very end of that lunch, he said, 'This is a film that should get made, this is a story that should get told.' And that was everything to me, because as much as we put films into the hands of their directors, this is truly Arthur Miller's film to me."
THE MISFITS began as a short story Miller published in ESQUIRE in 1957; he discovered Reno, ironically, while divorcing his first wife in order to marry Monroe. His personal reaction to the landscape is the backdrop for the film, and consequently, THE MISFITS hardly resembles a conventional western. "The casting of Gable was a problem because while he was intrigued by the script, he didn't understand it," Miller notes in Levin's film. "I said, 'Well, it's an Eastern western. The preoccupation of the film is not what it usually is in a western film. It's about people trying to connect and afraid to connect.'" The plot focuses on Gable and Clift, two cowboys, and Wallach, a pilot, who team up to hunt wild horses to be sold for dog food. Roslyn accompanies them on one expedition and is horrified by what she perceives as a blatant act of cruelty. Her anguish forces the men to take a deeper look at their own behavior and motivations. "The subtext of the roping of the horses is such a powerful message -- people have to be allowed to be themselves," Levin says. "They can't be reined in and, as much as possible, happiness can be derived from that realization more than anything else."
The ending, which eerily captures Monroe and Gable in their last appearances on film, is also strangely peaceful. After Gay cuts the horses free, the pair drive off in a truck. Roslyn asks Gay, "How do we get home?" Gazing into the night, he replies, "We'll follow that star and we'll get there."
"I love that this can come around to an optimistic ending, but not be sappy and weird," Levin says. "It feels authentic -- that you can actually go through some horrendous moments with people and yet come to [the other] side is an exceptional message. I also think it's real. In life, you don't ever get that happy ending, but you get little moments where you can feel some hope.">>>>
And so it goes, while it was so true.. |
