From the archive: "The Misfits"

Death famously hovered over the set of John Huston’s The Misfits, like buzzards over the desert. This was to be Clark Gable’s final film, and Marilyn Monroe’s final completed film; Monty Clift, his agonised beauty withered by the combination of a car accident and subsequent drug dependency issues, would make only three more, his final words a definitive “absolutely not!” when asked whether he wanted to revisit Huston’s film on TV.

Ideas of ageing and mortality were already present in the marrow of this woozily elegiac drama: it finds the Hollywood that grew up swooning over the likes of Gable, Monroe and Clift pausing to consider what happens when the dew comes off our illusions, what follows once the honeymoon is over. As penned by Arthur Miller, salvaging what he could from the wreckage of his marriage to Marilyn, it may be the most personal and deeply felt American movie of its moment.

Monroe – in the only role to showcase her as a woman, rather than a starlet or sex object – plays Roslyn, just arrived in Reno to finalise her divorce. The proceedings concluded, Roslyn falls in with a community of fellow ragtags either looking for a second chance, or resigning themselves to their fate: cynical, tail-chasing cowpoke Gay Langland (Gable), widowed mechanic Guido (Eli Wallach), garrulous old broad Isabelle (Thelma Ritter), beat-up bronco rider Perce (Clift).

For a while, this group share a paradise on Earth – rebuilding, replanting, availing themselves of the fresh desert air – but it’s a temporary one. Not for nothing, Isabelle points out Nevada is the Leave It state, so-named for the way it encourages gamblers to leave their money (and spouses one another) behind; even the roughneck Gay, not generally one for philosophising, notes – with a recognisably Miller-like brevity – that “nothing’s it, not forever”. We’re heading for a fall of one kind or another.

Huston reportedly spent much of the shoot sleeping off a hangover: though he conjures a world of dusty bordertowns, home to a lot of drunks, divorcees and front porches that could do with a sweep, and does something radical late on with a long shot that undoes everything the movies had taught us about Marilyn Monroe, he mostly makes himself secondary to the material. We’re watching a handful of characters rubbing up against each other, and finding – as per the title, and the jigsaw pieces under the credits – that they don’t entirely tessellate.

This may be one of the few instances where Hollywood got out of a writer’s way, which explains the film’s integrity, its evenness of tone: it seizes upon a pretty vague, very literary theme – the nature of things – and then dedicates everything (characters, actors, score, Russell Metty’s sunburnt photography) to bringing it into sharper focus.

Accordingly, the symbolism pops right out at you, without ever seeming too obvious: Guido’s unfinished home, the bandages holding the Clift character together, the wild horses that possibly stand for happiness or success, and serve to point up how one person’s pursuit of these goals can impact negatively on those around them. (The finale has faint echoes of Huston’s Sierra Madre morality play, as interpersonal differences blow a shot at a fortune.)

If it can’t quite be filed alongside Death of a Salesman in the tragedy top-drawer – not least because the closing moments suggest somebody behind the camera had a happier ending in mind – we’re not far off it: consider, for one, Gable’s “when you get through wishing, all that’s left is a man’s work, and there ain’t much of that left in this country.”

A half-century on, at a moment when Hollywood has given itself over more or less entirely to escapism, it’s striking to encounter a star vehicle with this degree of hard and painful life experience seared into it. Things change, Miller concludes ruefully, and that’s as much a cause for sadness as it might be a source of comfort.

(Moviemail, June 2015)

The Misfits returns to selected cinemas from Friday.