the misfits movie review 1961

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Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, and “The Misfits”

It will require a filmgoer of immensely sterner aesthetic discipline than I possess to consider “The Misfits” on its artistic merits alone, for its double identity—as a major new film and as an honest-to-goodness news story—is complex and nearly indivisible. It is, of course, the last movie made by Clark Gable, who died almost immediately after completing work in what appears to have been an exhausting role. It is Arthur Miller’s first screenplay, written as a serious vehicle for his wife, Marilyn Monroe, who divorced him as soon as it was completed. Its director, John Huston, and its other principals—Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter—have all attained a level of accomplishment that inspires hopeful curiosity about any film in which they have a part. All these circumstances make it easy for me to report that “The Misfits” is almost continuously absorbing, and all the more painful for me to have to add that it strikes me as a dramatic failure of considerable dimensions.

“The Misfits” was filmed in Nevada, mostly outdoors, and concerns itself with a young, hopeless, and frightened divorcée who contracts a tentative alliance with a middle-aged vagabond cowboy. All is felicity until she accompanies her paramour and two footloose cronies on a business expedition to capture wild mustangs, which are to be turned over to a dog-meat factory. The cruelty of this seedy operation reawakens all her terrors of a world that has treated her most shabbily, and the violence of her innocent reaction to it causes the three men to understand the self-delusions that have sustained their highly prized concept of personal freedom. This inadequate summary will at least indicate that Mr. Miller has been entirely earnest in his intentions, and that “The Misfits” contains plenty of good, chewy dramatic opportunities for its fortunate players.

The casting of the film is almost impeccable. In a part literally made for her, Miss Monroe displays a gentleness and a tired, childlike grace that are appropriate and moving and, very evidently, a reflection of herself. If she is not consistently an actress here, she is an actress at moments, notably in one scene of sad, sensual alcoholic collapse. Mr. Gable underplays his aging frontiersman with a professional awareness of his own attractiveness and of his own limitations; my only reservation is that he is almost too visibly at peace with himself as a person to be always convincing in the part of a sentimental failure. Montgomery Clift, as a young bronc rider, and Eli Wallach, as a confused, threadbare ex-bomber pilot, are admirable, particularly in several passages of comedy, and Thelma Ritter does fine as a cheerful middle-aged bat. Mr. Huston’s direction is at least deft, and his scenes of the mustang roundup, which is accomplished by airplane and flat-bed truck, are stirring and even horrifying.

It must be clear by now that all my severe doubts about “The Misfits” center on Arthur Miller’s screenplay, which seems to me obtrusively symbolic and so sentimental as to be unintelligent. Let it be admitted that hearts of pure gold (which are what all the principals in the story own) are difficult for a dramatist to set beating with a thud that sounds human, but this is a handicap Mr. Miller has chosen for himself. I wish he had not attempted to pose his valid dramatic questions about the survival of personal goodness in an increasingly cynical and unlovely society in the person of a fallen child and three true-blue buckaroos under a big desert sky, for this romanticism makes his answers false and fundamentally uninteresting. What must ensue is some embarrassingly high-flown dialogue (“We’re all blind bombardiers,” says the guilt-smitten former pilot. “I can’t make a landing and I can’t get up to God”) and a landscape peopled with caricatures. When, at the end of the picture, Mr. Gable’s rueful cowboy, the last of the Western giants, ropes and wrestles down the last free stallion and then cuts it loose, we realize with disappointment that we have been on the Plains of Allegory all along and that the drumming of hooves does not obscure the clack of the author’s typewriter. ♦

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‘The Misfits,’ Marilyn Monroe’s final film, is bleak perfection

“The Misfits” is one of those screamingly hopeless films that only occurs when the stars magically align. Said stars (Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift) are all shown on their last legs; within two days after the shoot wrapped up, Clark Gable would suffer a massive heart attack and die within the week; Monroe would die about a year later from a drug overdose; Clift, too, would die in 1966 after a lifetime struggle with substance abuse. Scripted by Arthur Miller (Monroe’s soon-to-be-ex-husband) and directed by John Huston (who spent much of the shoot drunk, asleep or gambling himself into crippling debt), Miller and Huston make a work which traps, in a brief instant, pathetically dying embers. Now, I’m not talking “pathetic” in a pejorative sense; after all, Webster’s tells me “pathetic” not only means “pitifully inferior or inadequate,” but also “having the capacity to move one to compassionate pity”; “marked by sorrow or melancholy”; and just plain “sad.” “The Misfits” is all of these.

Monroe is Roslyn Taber, an ex-stripper filing for divorce, who ends up in Reno, Nevada with four equally lost sad-sacks at the end of their ropes: the aging cowboy Gay Langland (Clark Gable, in his final film role); former World War II flying ace Guido Racanelli (Eli Wallach, “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly”); a has-been rodeo rider (Montgomery Clift); and a lonely divorcee, Roslyn’s only friend (Thelma Ritter of “Rear Window” fame). They strike up a business capturing wild horses.

“The Misfits,” written in the typically obvious, highbrow declamatoriness of Arthur Miller (but the actors escape him), is crazy to watch, namely because it constitutes one of the rare instances where a film’s subtext is the text. Knowing the behind-the-scenes horrors of its making enhances the viewing experience. It is like one long, sleepless journey into darkness. “The Misfits” is just one long howl of misery that gains in desperation the more it rolls on — the slacker, the lonelier.

“The Misfits” comes out at the tail-end of the classic Hollywood era (1961), and it shows. The photographers who drifted on and off the set (Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson, Henri Cartier-Bresson) showed off Monroe, Clift, Gable in all their un-Glamour, in a starkly honest look that would have been unthinkable in the studios’ heyday. Everyone has the hang-dog look of tiredness. The players (even Eli Wallach, who still glows from his sexed-up turn in Elia Kazan’s “Baby Doll”) are all made to look bloated or grotesque or basically dead. The editing is odd and erratic, but these glitches actually contribute to its depth. At one point, Monroe’s lips go out of sync with her voice. At another, Monroe’s close-up is interrupted by a blurry soft focus. She has none of the leering, near-pornographic dazzle of her 1950s promotional photos. Here, the camera looks as if it were just crying, doing a terrible job at wiping away its tears, overwhelmed by the state of Marilyn.

Monroe’s melancholy is not just some passive by-product of her mental and physical state; it is an intentional actor-driven melancholy, which shows her remarkable skill at rendering the lonely divorcée who goes to Nevada to drink and drift and die. Her spaced-out husk, perking of bust, and nanosecond weird smiles are all consciously worked out; she does this miserable business only in front of men who expect it of her, then relaxes in front of Thelma Ritter, her only friend. Ritter banters with Monroe with liveliness, but the former is soon ejected from the film’s narrative, leaving Monroe to size up these pathetic men by herself.

The Marilyn performance is so brave precisely because, despite the odds, she survives. She trips over her words, but she survives. Her dress slips off her bare shoulder, as she collapses onto a drunk heap of Clark Gable bellowing “GAYLOOORD” while slamming a car over and over again in punk desperation — and still, she survives.

What’s unusual is that the men do not hunger after Monroe in the typical wolf-whistle, ha-ha way of her more famous, earlier work (“Some Like it Hot,” “Seven Year Itch”). Obviously, the men chase after her — but they do so with the energy of someone half-heartedly trying to turn the lights off without climbing out of bed.

The actors indulge themselves in some grotesque bits of business: Eli Wallach randomly stacks up planks of wood in a drunken early-morning stupor, Gable slams his car until his hand bleeds, Monroe paddle-balls and seduces without being aware of it, Clift confesses to Monroe whilst lying in her lap as if she were his priest, mommy, bae and therapist all rolled into one. Clift is especially a sad case; he doesn’t even seem to be aware there are cameras around him. He is so out of the picture, he is so never in a scene, it becomes painful to keep returning to his gaunt face, his empty eyes.

No actor in the ensemble seems to be aware of the other’s existence. Eli Wallach is a purposeless and disturbed ex-pilot veteran, musing that when he dropped bombs (and maybe the Bomb), he felt nothing: “I can’t make a landing, and I can’t get up to God, neither…help me.”  The only person who could possibly change this profound life-hating pessimism is Thelma Ritter, who as usual (c.f., “Rear Window,” “Pickup on South Street”) is the most fun — and who too quickly leaves the picture, just before things get really sad. Otherwise, the “Misfits” ensemble speaks way past each other, never burrowing “inside” the Scene. We don’t see characters interacting with characters; we see stars talking back to stars, confusing their fake life on the page with their real life off the set.

The “action” scenes have none of it; the scenes where Wallach and Gable chase after wild horses have the fun of watching paint dry — and that’s the point. An action-versed and taut director like Howard Hawks would have been disgusted by the utter lack of formal discipline of Huston’s wild-horse sequences, which hang sloppily; just take a look at John Wayne on safari in “Hatari!” (1962) to see how such a scene “should” be done. But to do the scene with Hawksian efficiency would lose the point of this haunting picture, which wants to show (through endless repetition—first a horse, then another horse, then another, then Gable, then Monroe, then another horse, then a truck…) what banality feels like. Huston shows the wild-horse chase for what it is: The last-ditch efforts of failures who whirl around in mad circles in the desert.

Yet behind the dispersive misery, there is exactly one glint of sturdiness, maybe  of hope. It is when the men, after all their hard work and physical exertion, decide to shoot the wild horses they just captured, selling their meat for a few lousy hundred bucks. Suddenly, Monroe darts off into the distance and screams at the top of her lungs, “I PITY YOU. I PITY YOU.” Obviously this is not some cheery our-team-wins, guy-gets-the-girl-or-guy moment. But after the knife-twisting anguish of the rest of the picture, Monroe here provides the exact catharsis needed to make us care again about the sanctity of human beings. The camera hangs far back in an extreme long shot, making me feel Rosalyn’s insignificance, and, contrariwise, Monroe’s strength. It’s a rare instance where Rosalyn/Monroe has privacy to herself. Huston wisely does not go in for a typically Hollywood close-up that would show her breakdown and emotional turmoil with dramatic, lurid tastelessness. The camera  cannot  go in for a close-up. To do so would completely negate the scene’s point: the breaking out of a woman from her banality. She screams: “ENOUGH.”

The dialogue in this remarkable scene (perhaps the climax of Monroe’s acting career) also predicts Monroe’s eventual suspected fate so eerily that it made my skin crawl: “You [men] are only happy when you can see something die. Why don’t you kill yourselves, and be happy?” She could just as well be talking back to Arthur Miller (and the viewing public —  us ) as she is to Gable, Wallach and Clift. It’s an amazing example of an actor taking back her agency in a narrative that, at first glance, seems to float above the actors. That’s also why its final happy ending is so weirdly successful — because it is so blatantly false, and we know better. As Guido/Wallach observed, we are just aimlessly following the luminescence of stars that are long dead — until the watchers themselves drop dead. Such is the fate of the Misfits, and the fate of those who watch and care for films like “The Misfits.”

Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Carlos Valladares is a senior double-majoring in Film and American Studies. He loves the Beatles and jazz, dogs and dance. Were he stranded on a desert island, he'd be sure to take some food— and also, copies of "A Hard Day's Night," "The Young Girls of Rochefort," "Nashville," "Killer of Sheep," and anything by Studio Ghibli. You can follow his film writings at http://letterboxd.com/cvall96/. He was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles.

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The Misfits (1961)

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The Misfits

At face value, The Misfits, is a robust, high-voltage adventure drama, vibrating with explosively emotional histrionics, conceived and executed with a refreshing disdain for superficial technical and photographic slickness in favor of an uncommonly honest and direct cinematic approach. Within this framework, however, lurks a complex mass of introspective conflicts, symbolic parallels and motivational contradictions, the nuances of which may seriously confound general audiences.

By Variety Staff

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Clark Gable essays the role of a self-sufficient Nevada cowboy, a kind of last of the great rugged individualists, a noble misfit. Into his life ambles a woman (Marilyn Monroe) possessed of an almost uncanny degree of humanitarian compassion. Their relationship matures smoothly enough until Gable goes ‘mustanging’, a ritual in which wild, ‘misfit’ mustangs are rudely roped into captivity. Revolted by what she regards as cruel and mercenary, Monroe, with the aid of yet another misfit, itinerant, disillusioned rodeo performer Montgomery Clift, strives to free the captive horses.

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The film is somewhat uneven in pace and not entirely sound in dramatic structure. Character development is choppy in several instances. The one essayed by Thelma Ritter is essentially superfluous and, in fact, abruptly abandoned in the course of the story. Eli Wallach’s character undergoes a severely sudden and faintly inconsistent transition. Even Monroe’s never comes fully into focus.

• Production: Seven Arts. Director John Huston; Producer Frank E. Taylor; Screenplay Arthur Miller; Camera Russell Metty; Editor George Tomasini; Music Alex North; Art Director Stephen Grimes, William Newberry
• Crew: (B&W) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1961. Running time: 124 MIN.
• With: Clark Gable Marilyn Monroe Montgomery Clift Thelma Ritter Eli Wallach

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The Misfits Reviews

With this film, signed with a script by Arthur Miller and weighed down by problems during filming, Huston creates a very dramatic portrait of lonely lives. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 15, 2020

Like so many Hollywood films, this begins wonderfully and then the life slowly leaks out. Begins well because all is fresh, no mistakes have been made, brisk technique is in command; but when it has to grow up, it sogs.

Full Review | Jul 30, 2019

Talent, controversy and accident have combined to make The Misfits an unusually interesting film if not an outstandingly good one.

Full Review | Mar 21, 2018

Gable has never done anything better on the screen, nor has Miss Monroe. Gable's acting is vibrant and lusty, hers true to the character as written by Miller.

Full Review | Jan 18, 2018

Against all odds, [Monroe] gives an extraordinary performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 18, 2015

Looks even starker and more jarringly isolated today than it did in 1961.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 14, 2015

John Huston's latter-day western exerts a doomy, morbid fascination that goes beyond what we see on the screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 12, 2015

A gripping and messy ode to the collision of genres, time periods, and personalities.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 12, 2015

Somehow the flat, arid Nevada landscape mirrors the characters' bleak existence and sets the overall mood of despair and depression.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 11, 2015

The faces of Gable, Clift and Monroe together in closeup have a Mount Rushmore look to them.

What a multiple swansong and beautiful accident The Misfits is.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 11, 2015

A problematic but provocative piece of work.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 8, 2015

A glorious, brave, imperfect portrait of flawed people yearning for freedom and respect, but pulled by the primal urges of love, lust and pride to trap themselves in cages of their own crafting.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 2, 2013

Marilyn Monroe, the Saint of Nevada Desert. When everything has been said about The Misfits, how bad the film is and all that, she still remains there, a new screen character, MM, the saint. And she haunts you, you'll not forget her.

Full Review | Jan 15, 2013

Such a fantastic acting showcase that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that a top-shelf talent like John Huston directed.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 3, 2012

The meanings of John Huston's disurbing deconstrcution of the the myth of the Old West have changed over the years due to the offscreen lives (and deaths) of the three stars: Gable, Monroe, Clift.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jun 17, 2011

Deconstructs Hollywood's cowboy myth with a mythic Hollywood cast: Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. [Blu-ray]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 16, 2011

It's clumsy at times, and amazingly lucid and potent at others.

Full Review | May 13, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 23, 2008

Monroe does some of her best work as lost, tenderhearted divorcee Roslyn Tabor -- she's still breathless and blond, but her vulnerability has an edge.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 21, 2006

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It shouts and sings with life ... explodes with love!

While filing for a divorce, beautiful ex-stripper Roslyn Taber ends up meeting aging cowboy-turned-gambler Gay Langland and former World War II aviator Guido Racanelli. The two men instantly become infatuated with Roslyn and, on a whim, the three decide to move into Guido's half-finished desert home together. When grizzled ex-rodeo rider Perce Howland arrives, the unlikely foursome strike up a business capturing wild horses.

John Huston

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Marilyn Monroe

Roslyn Taber

Clark Gable

Gay Langland

Eli Wallach

Montgomery Clift

Perce Howland

Thelma Ritter

Isabelle Steers

James Barton

Fletcher's grandfather

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Raymond Taber

Estelle Winwood

Church lady collecting money in bar

Old Cowboy (uncredited)

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A review by Wuchak

Written by wuchak on august 11, 2018.

Four lost souls in the Nevada desert wilderness

A recently divorced blonde bombshell in Reno (Marilyn Monroe) befriends three guys and stirs their passions: An aging cowboy (Clark Gable), a cynical bush pilot (Eli Wallach) and a brooding rodeo contender (Montgomery Clift). They take an excursion to capture wild mustangs for profit. Thelma Ritter is on hand as a fifth misfit in the first half.

“The Misfits” (1961) was Gable and Monroe’s final film and Clift’s last significant one. Gable passed away a few days after shooting from a heart attack while Marilyn died 18 months after its release... read the rest.

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Original Language English

Budget $4,000,000.00

Revenue $8,200,000.00

• reno, nevada
• falling in love
• bull riding
• contemporary west
• preserved film

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