The 100th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, along with a two-month retrospective at BFI Southbank, marks the rerelease of her most serious and poignant film, John Huston’s western drama and American pastoral from 1961. The film’s end-of-era desolation feels more somber than ever. It is the last film for both Clark Gable and Monroe, and a melancholy late role for Montgomery Clift.
A Glimpse into the Film's Core
The Misfits was written for the screen by Monroe’s then-husband, Arthur Miller, adapted from his own short story. Miller’s opaque motivations run as a subtext, with a strangely uxorious dedication or vengefulness, Miller conceived the whole thing for Marilyn. It tells the story of a passionate, vulnerable, childlike free spirit who finds a complex kind of excitement and freedom—flavored with disillusion—with a real man after divorcing an emotionally blank city dweller. Monroe and Miller divorced immediately after production. The key irony of the title is that no one on screen is a misfit; they fit in all too well with the stark landscape and each other in their loneliness, discontent, and yearning for something more.
Marilyn Monroe's Role as Roslyn
Monroe plays Roslyn, a woman who arrives in Reno, Nevada, to obtain a quick divorce. She lives with her roommate Isabelle (Thelma Ritter), who coaches her on what to say in the divorce hearing. In this scene, as Roslyn nervously mutters the formal phrases, Monroe stops speaking in her signature breathy voice and adopts a weird normality or neutrality, as if she might have spoken on screen had her career taken a different path.
Once free, Roslyn finds three new men falling in love with her. She catches the eye of Gaylord Langland (Clark Gable), an aging, womanizing cowboy whose adult children find him a boozy embarrassment. Gaylord’s wingman buddy Guido (Eli Wallach) invites Gaylord, Roslyn, and Isabelle for a party in the empty, half-built house in the desert where his wife died in childbirth. He simply and submissively lends it to Roslyn and Gaylord to live as man and wife, despite being obsessed with her himself. Gaylord plays the attentive husband, planting a vegetable garden and allowing Roslyn to talk him out of shooting a rabbit eating their lettuces—a premonition of the film’s climactic desert scene. They then decide to go to the mountains with their friend Perce (Clift), an easygoing bronco rider who is careless of his own safety, resentful of his widowed mother for remarrying, and obviously entranced with Roslyn.
The Confrontation in the Desert
All three are complete gentlemen, and on the stark plain, the four confront their destiny. Roslyn loves the romance of capturing wild mustangs, imagining they will be kept and ridden. But all too late, she realizes these misfit horses are to be sold as pet food. They are lassoed with a heavy tire on a rope and cruelly allowed to exhaust themselves as they gallop, dragging it for hours. This is their horrible, inglorious destiny; the humans are also, in their own way, dragging tires.
Roslyn’s anger at the whole business brings a kind of redemption for Gable’s lonesome and obsolete cowboy. Monroe’s performance is fascinatingly sad. Her mannerisms and style, apart from the pre-divorce moment, have become her authentic self, and they have their own sad music. This is especially evident when she stops dead during cocktails with Isabelle and confesses that she misses her mother.
The Misfits is in UK and Irish cinemas from June 5.
