Jeff Arnold’s West

The blog of a Western fan, for other Western fans

The Misfits (UA, 1961)

 

Angst – on screen and off

 

In January 1961 there was, in Reno, Nevada, the première of a picture produced by John Huston and Frank E Taylor, The Misfits. Huston directed it, it was written by Arthur Miller and it starred Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.

 

Is The Misfits a Western? Ah, there’s the rub. When is a Western not a Western? When it is ajar, I hear you respond. But don’t be silly. One thing we can say: even if it is set in the (then) present day and contains trucks and planes, it is very much a treatment of the classic theme of ‘the end of the West’.

 

This notion, that the Old West was dead or dying, that the freedoms and man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do qualities of the frontier were no more, that they had been submerged by the modern world, fences and ‘civilization’, was especially popular in the 1960s, when it was paralleled by the decline of the Western movie as genre. After all, the decade opened with The Magnificent Seven, about gunfighters as dinosaurs, out of place in a modern world with nothing to expect but a dusty death, and ended with The Wild Bunch,  about gunfighters as dinosaurs, out of place in a modern world with nothing to expect but a dusty death. Sam Peckinpah was especially fond of this theme – watch Ride the High Country or The Ballad of Cable Hogue and you’ll see.

 

In fact of course this theme had been an essential element of the Western myth from its very inception. The first great Western novel, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, was about nothing else. Frederic Remington’s paintings were often nostalgic and elegiac about a time that had passed – look at The Fall of the Cowboy as an example.

 

 

The last cowboys

 

William S Hart stressed this aspect, especially in his late work Tumbleweeds. Zane Grey often waxed romantically lyrical about the passing of the great days of the West. Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis thesis of the closing of the frontier, universally accepted in its day, reinforced the notion. And the idea continued throughout. Read Glendon Swarthout’s novel The Shootist (1975). In a way, the ‘end of the West’ has always been an integral part of the myth.

 

But nowhere will you find a bitterer and sourer treatment of that theme than in The Misfits.

 

Central to the character of Gay Langland (Gable) is the view he often expresses that “they’ve changed everything around”. There are no more ‘Western’ certainties. He’s a shiftless cowboy with nowhere to go. He has lost his wife. His children hardly ever visit him anymore. Anything is “better than wages” so he loafs about doing this and that, occasionally “mustanging”, that is rounding up some of the few wild horses that are left and selling them to a dealer for dog meat. He renounces even that at the end.

 

 

Gable never better

 

 

I must say that although I am not a fan of Clark Gable, a rather mechanical actor, and I think he was especially weak in Westerns, he is absolutely superb here as the aging Westerner with roguish charm. His performance is by turns sympathetic, moving and sad. This was his last film: he died shortly after it was wrapped. Robert Mitchum was first choice, and he would have been superb, but he didn’t like the script and turned it down. Or maybe he had unhappy memories of River of No Return with Monroe a few years before, a disappointing picture and another beset by problems with cast and crew.

 

 

Great directors can coax good performances out of mediocre actors and great performances out of good ones. Huston did exactly that. But it wasn’t easy.

 

 

It was of course also Marilyn Monroe’s last feature. During filming in 1960 her marriage to Miller was on the rocks. They divorced in January 1961, the month the movie was released. This script, which on one level portrayed a woman recently divorced finding a new man and a future, seemed to be almost a farewell gift to her. But she was already in thrall to barbiturates, unstable, and in a decline. She would die the following August.

 

 

Monroe tragic

 

 

The shooting was beset with Monroe’s absences in detox and her disastrous condition when she was present. She often didn’t know her lines (and the scene where she fails to remember what she was supposed to say at the divorce hearing is telling). Gable was feeling his age and slowing down, and was exhausted and exasperated by his co-star.

 

 

And Montgomery Clift, too, as the punch-drunk rodeo star Perce Howland, really a younger version of Langland and ineluctably destined to the same later life, definitely shows signs of the depression, drug abuse and alcoholism that was afflicting him, as well as the results of the terrible car crash he had had in 1956. It was hardly more than a decade since his youthful Matt in Red River (the only other Western he did) and he was only just 40 yet here he looks like a half-crazed middle-aged man.

 

 

Clift in a bad way

 

Gable told friends he was working with a bunch of loonies. Huston sometimes arrived drunk on the set – and little wonder, you may say.

 

 

Eli Wallach, as the pilot Guido, looking much younger than when he was Calvera in The Magnificent Seven the year before, is one of the best actors on the set. But his character too is a dislocated person, an unhappy widower, mentally scarred by his wartime experiences, pretending to feel what he does not and secretly lusting after the Monroe character.

 

 

Wallach always good

 

 

The nearest to a happy and ‘normal’ person in the story is Isabelle (Thelma Ritter, a great actress) but even she is a divorcée who helps others with their divorces, and a person almost camping out in Reno rather than truly living there.

 

 

Ritter fine

 

 

They are not a well-adjusted bunch…

 

 

Justin Kwedi on the site DVD Classik suggests that “Le western crépusculaire et post moderne naît en partie ici” (the crepuscular post-modern Western really starts here) and he has a point. The following year we would get the splendid which had some similarities – though was perhaps more obviously ‘Western’. It was an even better picture in my view. Monsieur Kwedi adds, of The Misfits: “L’Ouest est un cimetière, un mirage dont les héros doivent s’échapper s’ils veulent renaître ; et après l’ouverture idéalisée, Huston capture cet espace d’une façon funèbre à travers les nuances noires ténébreuses de la photo de Russel Metty.” (The West is a cemetery, a mirage which the heroes must escape from if they want to be reborn; and after the idealized opening scenes Huston captures this space in a funereal way with the dark shadows of Russell Metty’s photography).

 

 

Actually, Metty’s cinematography is very fine, and the visual is one of the film’s great strengths. Metty had been filming Westerns since 1931 but many of them were B-pictures and it could be that The Misfists was the best Western he ever did – if Western it be. The black & white was perhaps a curious choice for an A-picture like this in the early 60s but it is certainly very beautiful.

 

 

Russ Metty

 

 

The Alex North music too is haunting and atmospheric.

 

 

I’m not sure about the Arthur Miller screenplay, though. Writing for The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann said that Miller “has done some representative worrying for all of us about certain defects and defeats in contemporary life” but the writing was always theatrical. Here, the characters are supposed to be ‘ordinary’ people, not especially educated, yet Miller makes them super-articulate and even philosophical in their dialectical speeches. What Kauffmann calls “these uncommonly loquacious Westerners” express their neuroses at some length, as if they were Sartre readers on Broadway. At one point Guido says “We’re all blind bombardiers . . . Droppin’ a bomb is like tellin’ a lie – makes everything so quiet afterwards.” It just doesn’t ring true. And the suddenly upbeat ending after all this angst does not ring true either.

 

 

Miller and Huston on the set

 

 

The picture received a lukewarm reception from the critics. Still, The Misfits is in many ways a fine film, and Huston was a master at using wide open spaces to highlight the vulnerability and loneliness of Western characters – though of course he was not the first to do this. The movie was not even nominated for the Osars and Huston himself was dismissive of it. But I think it’s very fine.

 

 

9 Responses

  1. I prefer "LONELY ARE THE BRAVE" too, Jeff, but I find quite a bit to like about "THE MISFITS" too. Far from perfect film, but I think Gable was magnificent in it.

  2. Excellent and interesting review, Jeff. Your comment that black and white was a curious choice for an A picture. There seems to have been a fashion for it in the early sixties. Examples that spring to mind are 'Inherit The Wind', 'The Apartment', 'To Kill A Mockingbird', 'Judgement At Nuremburg' and 'The Birdman of Alcatraz'. It's as if black and white was used to signal 'serious' and 'class' as opposed to having fun watching 'The Commancheros'. 'The Misfits' seems to be part of this fashion. For me, a more curious choice is why '3.10 to Yuma' was filmed in B&W. Paul

    1. Yes, I think that's perceptive. B&W gave a touch of class and made it 'intellectual'. It made a 'movie' into a 'film'.
      With B-movies it was often a question of budget.
      As to 3:10, I'm really glad they did it in monochrome: 3:10 (Charles Lawton Jr) and High Noon (Floyd Crosby) are, in my view, the finest ever b&w Westerns visually.
      Jeff

      1. Always liked John Ford in B&W – STAGECOACH and CLEMENTINE and although not really a Western (though it is a pioneering migration west) THE GRAPES OF WRATH.

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