Marvelous Misfits

The Misfits 1961 United Artists (124 minutes) directed by John Huston; written by Arthur Miller.

This film befits its title as a marvelous oddity. It is a movie buff’s ‘dream team’ but, unlike a sports fan’s fantasy league confection, plays like a charm.  

John Huston’s black and white Western takes place in mid-twentieth century Nevada. It casts Clark Gable, a legendary leading man of Hollywood’s golden age, with three great method actors, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach, and the great character actress Thelma Ritter. The story was written for Monroe by her soon-to-be ex-spouse, playwright Arthur Miller.

Roslyn Taber (Monroe, in the last film she finished before she died) is in Reno for her divorce. She is boarding with Isabelle Steers (Ritter) when she meets Guido (Wallach) and his cowboy friend Gay Langland (Gable, in the last film he made).

Roslyn is not sure as to what to do with her life after her divorce. Isabelle, Guido and Gay persuade her to stay in Nevada. She ends up living with Gay in the unfinished home that Guido built for himself and his wife before his wife died late in her first pregnancy.

Gay, Guido and Isabelle take Roslyn to a rodeo. Gay wants to find another cowboy to help them round up wild horses in the mountains. He and the others need the money and he assures Roslyn that the mavericks are ‘nothing but misfit horses.’ On the way to the rodeo, they run across Perce Howland (Clift), a simple, easy-going, cowboy acquaintance of Guido and Gay, who right away finds a special affinity with Roslyn.

Thus the five human ‘misfits.’ Roslyn, disappointed in love and marriage, seeks a purpose and something she can believe in. Cowboy Gay, facing late middle age in the less and less wide-open spaces, has to work out what to do with the rest of his life. Perce is a homeless drifter trying to find his way home through the rodeo circuit. Guido is guilty about his role as a bomber pilot in the war and the loss of his pregnant wife. Isabelle, unlucky in love, lives vicariously through her young women boarders in Reno for their divorces.  

But Roslyn is the center of the story. The scriptwriter, director, and four other main characters seem fascinated trying to figure out who she is. Huston several times shows her shapely rear end rolling and everyone comments on her looks, but the main characters each appreciate that there is more to her than that.

‘She’s kind of hard to figure out, you know,’ Guido tells Gay early in the story. ‘One minute she looks kind of dumb and brand new like a kid. And the next minute she… She sure moves, though.’

‘Mmm. She sure is prime,’ Gay says in a tone that conveys the twinkle in Gable’s eye, half-dozing with his hat pulled over his eyes and a cigarette in his mouth.

Towards the end of the film, dismissing Roslyn’s naïve wonder at his book-learning, Guido says, ‘Knowing things don’t matter much. You got something a lot more important.’

‘What?’ Roslyn asks.

‘You care. Whatever happens to anybody happens to you. You’re really hooked into the whole thing, Roslyn. It’s a blessing,’ Guido says.

Monroe speaks in her characteristic breathy whisper, which can be off-putting because it makes much of what she does sound like ‘acting,’ rather than acting such that what she is doing sounds and feels natural. For all this, she makes better sense than most ordinary people do most of the time. Her otherworldly physical beauty is like a disability, in that people focus on it as though they would someone with an unsightly or uncommon physical handicap. But Roslyn doesn’t behave and act like ‘other people’ either. The film and story use carefully selected characters to try to divine the person that inhabits that ‘magnificent torso.’

They drink a lot. They spend a lot of time in motor vehicles in the Nevada desert outside of Reno. They talk and dance—Wallach really can dance—and drink some more. They go to the rodeo and drink a lot more, come home, then go together to round up ‘misfits’ in the nearby mountains.

Roslyn objects when Gay explains to her that they round up the horses to sell to dealers who slaughter them for dog food. Gay tries to mollify her by saying he is doing what he has done all along, but that times have changed and no one needs the maverick ponies for anything but dog food any more.

‘Somehow or other it all got changed around, see. I’m doing the same thing I always did. It’s just that they changed it all around,’ Gay says.

Roslyn insists that this is wrong. It may turn out that by staying with Gay and his friends in Nevada she touches and changes their lives, rather than they guide hers.  

All of this looks easy and effortless under Huston’s direction, contrary to contemporary anecdotes and memoirs of meltdowns behind the scenes, mainly because Huston’s camera loves these five actors.

Huston tends to put his camera in one spot and let scenes play out. The camera finds ambient frames and watches groups of actors work side by side and front to back to front in longer takes. There are about a dozen well-conceived and beautifully played scenes framed by an automobile or truck window—iconic scenes more American than apple pie.

The best of these scenes belongs to Clift’s Perce, the rodeo bum they pick up agreeing to stake him to compete in the rodeo if he rides a round up with them. Roslyn, in the automobile passenger seat, is the reference point, centered in the foreground with Gay, driving, on the right, and Perce, Isabelle and Guido in the back seat. An animated, slightly inebriated Perce comes into the frame from the back seat, leaning forward on the back of the front seat, telling stories while the camera listens to him and watches the action as an observer might. When he sits back laughing after making a joke, Isabelle leans forward into to the frame to speak, then Guido, then Perce again; Roslyn clearly is entertained and Gay, amused but silent, with one hand on the steering wheel, takes slugs from a bottle in the near background. 

Perce may have the movie’s three best scenes: this one in the automobile; a scene after the rodeo in which he took a pair of serious falls, where he sits outside on a car seat in a small yard behind a bar talking with Roslyn with his bandaged head in her lap; and the scene in which he is introduced, in a roadside telephone booth talking long distance with his mother as the other actors watch and listen to him from the car. The last of the three is a small drama itself, of a piece, which Clift reportedly nailed on first take.

Clift’s masterly work in these scenes does not diminish the other actors’ fine performances. These are just three great scenes in a well-written, beautifully shot classic filled with lovely moments and inspired work from each actor.

The biographical details alluded to above are as follow: Gable died of a heart attack two weeks after the shoot finished in November 1960, at age 59; Miller and Monroe were married from June 1956 to January 1961; the film was released in February 1961; Monroe overdosed on sleeping pills in August 1962 at age 36.