Movie of the Week: The Misfits (1961)

This week, because Friday is the 58th anniversary of Clark Gable’s death, our movie is, of course, his final film: The Misfits (1961).

Clark Gable is Gay Langland, an aging cowboy in Reno who avoids responsibility and anything tying him down. He and his buddy Guido (Eli Wallach) run into Roslyn (Marilyn Monroe), a depressed ex-dancer who is in Reno getting a divorce. She’s been staying with Isabelle (Thelma Ritter) to establish her residency requirement for the divorce, a very common practice. They all have nowhere to be and no one to answer to, so they decide to head out to Guido’s house in the Nevada desert. Although Guido actively pursues her, Roslyn falls quickly for Gay, and he for her. They decide to stay at Guido’s house alone and live there together. But Roslyn’s delicate sensitivity and Gay’s hard-headed masculinity don’t see eye to eye and their differences show themselves in everything from killing bunnies eating their garden to worrying about their friend Perce (Montgomery Clift) getting hurt in the rodeo. The final straw is when Roslyn accompanies the men on a trip to round up wild mustangs, or “misfits” for dog food.

The Misfits is an apt title for this film, not only fitting for its group of wandering cowboys and recent divorcee, but for the cast portraying them: The King of Hollywood, Clark Gable, who at age 59 was in no shape to be playing a 40-something-year-old cowboy in the hot Nevada desert. In fact, he failed his first physical for production insurance. After giving up alcohol temporarily and crash dieting to lose 35 lbs, he passed. And celebrated with whiskey and a steak.

Clark is paired as the unlikely romantic interest for the 34 year old Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was in a dark place at the time of filming, her career beginning to falter as her reputation of being unreliable preceded her and a prescription drug and alcohol addiction spiraling out of control while her marriage to the film’s screenwriter Arthur Miller was failing. They would in fact separate for good at the completion of filming. Miller had written the role of Roslyn specifically for his wife and commented later,  “I had seen this film as a gift for her, and I came out of it without her.”

Then you have Montgomery Clift, one of the highest regarded and in demand leading men of the 1950’s, whose life and career were derailed after his face was shattered in a 1956 car accident. Suffering a broken jaw, broken nose, fractured sinus and severe facial lacerations, he became addicted to alcohol and painkillers to dull the pain, his face never the same. In an interview soon after filming wrapped, Marilyn called him “the only person I know who is in worse shape than I am.” Despite this, he infamously did his telephone call monologue in this film in one take.

Couple these three with the rough-and-tumble director John Huston, who spent most of the shoot getting drunk and gambling in the Reno casinos, and you have quite the troop of misfits.

Youngster Eli Wallach (awww the old screenwriter from The Holiday!) and scrappy Thelma Ritter round out the superb cast.

This film to me is just sad. I wonder if I would feel the same way if it wasn’t Clark’s swan song and if he didn’t look so terrible in it. I’m not sure though; it’s just a bleak film. The screenplay is very poetic, full of perfectly executed prose that at times seems overdone.

Everyone is sad in this film. Everyone. Marilyn’s marriage just ended and she always feels alone. She remarks that her husband “wasn’t there. You could touch him but he wasn’t there.” She tells Thelma too that her parents were never there for her. Thelma, after coming out to Reno for her own divorce, makes a living out of boarding women for the required six weeks to gain Nevada residency for their divorces. Her husband ran off with her best friend, but she says it was fine, that she wasn’t a good wife anyway and hey, he still sends her roses every year on their divorce anniversary. World War II veteran Eli’s got a lot of demons from the war, and his wife, his childhood sweetheart, died in childbirth. He subsequently abandoned the home they had shared and left the frame of the unfinished baby’s room forever standing there like a monument. Although he leers at Marilyn in a rather disgusting way, his face darkens whenever anyone dares mention his wife. Clark’s marriage ended years ago when he caught his wife with another man. That set him up for a life as a wanderer, never seeing his now-adult son and daughter regularly, having flings with women vacationing in Reno (when we first meet him, he’s saying goodbye to one a the train. “Oh, Gay, will you think of me at all?” she wails), and constantly saying that anything is “better than wages.”

The irony is lost on all of these wanderers that going out to the sweltering desert to round up wild stallions to sell them off for dog food is doing to the horses what they themselves can’t stand: to be roped in and tied down.

It’s unfortunate for us all that we never got to see Marilyn attempt to play such a dramatic role again. While some site her drunken erotic dance or her shrieking “Murderers!! You three dead men!!” outburst in the desert as her best here, I personally think her most perfectly executed moment is when leering Eli tells her if she leaves Gay and goes off with him, he’ll free the horses. “Give me a reason and I’ll stop it,” he sneers, all wide-eyed and creepy looking. She is aghast. “A reason? You, the sensitive fellow, so sad for his wife, crying to me about the bombs you’ve dropped and the people you killed. You have to get something to be human? You never felt anything for anybody in your life! All you know is the sad words. You ‘d blow up the world and all you’d feel is sorry for yourself!”

This was the third Clark Gable film I ever saw–after Gone with the Wind and It Happened One Night. Coming off of those two, you can understand why my mouth was agape when I first saw him in this film. He doesn’t look well at all. For a man of 59, he looks more like 79. His face seems to have aged years since his prior film, It Started in Naples. His voice was now raspy and throaty, like he has a constant cold. Forty years of chain-smoking cigarettes had definitely taken its toll.  I’ve never understood why all these articles after his death commented how healthy he looked during the production of this film. The man did not look well at all. One never wants to assume that a man of 59 is at death’s door, but he certainly was not the picture of health.

The shoot for The Misfits was a long and arduous one for everyone involved. The first scene was filmed on July 18, 1960 in Reno. The sweltering Nevada heat, dust and windstorms caused delay after delay. A five minute scene with Marilyn and Monty took a week to shoot as neither of them could get it quite right and Huston was not satisfied.The breakdown of Marilyn and Arthur Miller’s marriage caused her to abuse prescription drugs to help her sleep, making her late to the set or to not show up at all. Clark was often bored as they scrambled to shoot around her. He had a stuntman but often volunteered to do some of the stunts himself, such as roping a horse and being dragged behind it.

His wife Kay recalled: “Most of The Misfits was shot on a blistering hot dry lake bed 50 miles from Reno. The thermometer generally registered 135 degrees by mid-afternoon. Many members of the cast and crew became ill. But Clark outrode and outwalked men half his age.He did take after strenuous take roping a wild stallion singlehanded.
Clark enjoyed hard work, but his own punctuality made it difficult for him to tolerate tardiness. He was the first one to arrive on the set each morning. A disciplined professional, he was always ready to work, always knew his lines. Naturally, it was frustrating for him to spend hours waiting for others. One evening, I heard Pa yell and dashed in to see what was wrong. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. But I discovered raw brush burns on one whole side of his body. Clark explained they had filmed a scene in which he was dragged on a rope behind a truck going 30 miles an hour. I was appalled. ‘Why are you doing those scenes?’ I asked. ‘You’ve got a stunt man who’s supposed to do them.’ Clark confessed that he’d found the waiting so demoralizing he’d volunteered to do the scenes just to keep occupied.”

Marilyn up and left Nevada on August 27 and was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital for exhaustion. Production was shut down for over a week while she recovered. By the time the shoot moved to Paramount Studios on October 24 to film some close-ups and rear projection shots, everyone had had enough. Thelma Ritter had become quite ill, Huston had bronchitis and Clark developed laryngitis from all the dust, and Arthur and Marilyn were not on speaking terms.

On November 4, 1960, production wrapped on the film as the final scene was shot: Clark and Marilyn, alone in the car, surrounded by darkness.

“How do you find your way back in the dark?” she asks.
“Just head for that big star straight on. The highway’s under it, it’ll take us right home,” he says.

Those were the final words either of them would utter onscreen. There were no end credits, no “The End” on the screen; it just faded to black. You can’t get more poetic than that.

Clark would suffer a heart attack just two days later, on the morning of November 6. On his tenth day in the hospital, he would succumb to a sudden second heart attack. He was 59.

While they pushed to try and finish the film before December 31 so Clark could qualify for a posthumous Academy Award nomination, ultimately it couldn’t be done. The film premiered on what would have been Clark’s 60th birthday: February 1, 1961. He did not receive an Academy Award nomination.

Marilyn’s next film, a remake of the 1940 Irene Dunne-Cary Grant comedy My Favorite Wife titled Something’s Got to Give, never came to fruition. After weeks of delays due to her unpredictable behavior, Marilyn was fired on June 8, 1962, and the film was shelved after her co-star Dean Martin refused to continue without her. (A remake of My Favorite Wife, with a different screenplay, was made in 1963 as Move Over, Darling with James Garner and Doris Day).

And so The Misfits became the final film for Marilyn as well, as she was found dead on August 5, 1962. She was 36.

There is a LOT of trivia and a LOT of behind the scenes photos for this film, so be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram this week!