The Misfits Review – Marilyn Monroe has a heart-wrenching sadness in John Huston’s empty western | Video

TThe 100th anniversary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, and two months back at the BFI Southbank, is the time of the re-release of her most difficult film, the western drama of John Huston and the American shepherd from 1961. the last film of both Clark Gable and Monroe and the last part of Montgomery Clift.

The Misfits was written for the screen by Monroe’s then-husband, Arthur Milleradapted from his short story of several years ago. Miller’s opaque motivation is the subtext that runs beneath this movie; with an unusual devotion or revenge, Miller made Marilyn everything. It’s the story of a lovelorn, troubled, childless soul who finds elusive happiness and freedom – flavored with frustration – with a real man after divorcing a carefree city dweller. (Monroe and Miller divorced soon after the production.) The main surprise of the title is that of course no one in the scene is wrong: they fit very well with the fixed place and each other in their loneliness, their dissatisfaction and their longing for something or something to live.

Monroe and Roslyn, a woman who has arrived in Reno, Nevada to obtain a “quickie” divorce that exists in that state. He lives with his roommate and friend Isabelle (Thelma Ritter), who teaches him what to say in a divorce. In this story, Roslyn mumbles her voice nervously, you can hear Monroe stop talking and take a breath and become neutral, just like when she talks to the screen when her work goes one way or another.

Once a free woman, Roslyn finds that three new men love her. She attracts the attention of Gaylord Langland (Clark Gable), an old, womanizing cowboy whose grown children from a previous marriage find him embarrassing. Gaylord’s wingman friend Guido (Eli Wallach) invites Gaylord, Roslyn and Isabelle to a party in the empty, half-built house in the desert where his wife died in childbirth; he simply and humbly lends to Roslyn and Gaylord to live well as husband and wife – even though he thinks of himself. Gaylord plays the conscientious husband, even planting a vegetable garden and rarely allowing his own wife to talk him out of shooting a lettuce-eating rabbit – a foreshadowing of the film’s desert setting. Then they all decide to ride in the mountains with another friend, Perce (Clift), a free-spirited, kind-hearted bronco rider, careless about his own safety, angry at his widowed mother for remarrying a man who is cutting Perce off from her inheritance, and apparently has moved in with Roslyn too.

All three are complete gentlemen, and it is in the clear plain that the four are facing their fate. Roslyn understands that their plan is to capture a few wild mustangs; they love the love of it all and probably think that captive animals should be kept and ridden. But no; too late, Roslyn realizes that these are “unfit” horses to be sold as livestock feed, wrapped with a heavy tire at the end of a rope and brutally allowed to tire themselves while running at high speed, dragging for hours. That is their terrible, dignified and symbolic future; people also, in their own way, pull tires.

As for Roslyn, her anger at the whole business brings a kind of redemption to Gable’s lonely and unemployed cowboy. Monroe’s actions are incredibly sad: the behavior and style (except for the time before the divorce) are those that are truly his own and have their sad songs, especially when he stops dead between cocktails with Isabelle of Ritter and admits that, for a short time, he misses his mother.