Vidas rebeldes

"The Misfits" is literally about four people who don't fit into society… A divorcée (Monroe) meets cowboy Langland (Gable), who is getting too old for his job… They decide to live together… A former rodeo star (Clift) and an unemployed mechanic (Wallach) join in the drifting…

Huston's masculine images are stripped of their former glory, existing only one rough exterior which fails to conceal what has been lost… Eventually the men agree to round up wild mustangs for a dog food manufacturer…

Scenes of the trio and Monroe speeding across the prairie in a beaten-up truck, raising a hurricane of dust while attempting to rope the stallions, are the strongest evocations of lost souls wandering in time…

Huston's film established Marilyn Monroe as a dramatic sensuous actress, thus liberating her from a decade of steamy cheesecake roles in sexy comedies

This movie is about despair. Despair at the passing of a way of life. Despair at disappointed hopes and dreams. Despair at the loss of a loved one, either through death, divorce or disinterest. Knowing that going in and if you don't mind downbeat films there are some really moving performances from a cast full of legends.

Heavy with gloom there is still much too admire though Miller's prose is at times heavy and tending towards pretension. Marilyn's woozy sexuality coming through a haze of pills and booze at times still suits her character's searching and displaced loneliness.

Clark Gable accepted his part after first choice Robert Mitchum passed. Mitchum would have been great of course and publicly stated he regretted not taking the role since he and Marilyn were longtime friends, before both were famous he had worked with her first husband, and he felt that around him she would have been able to pull herself together as she had on River of No Return. This was the end of the line for Gable and his weathered appearance and weariness actually suits the role better than Mitchum's ruggedness would have at that point. The film contains some of the best acting Clark ever did.

Clift and his sad broken looks make a powerful impact and Wallach scores well too but the great Thelma Ritter is somewhat shortchanged since she disappears about halfway through the picture. Her astringent tartness would have been most welcome later in the film when the real heavy going takes place.

The first hour and a half of this two-hour film is mighty slow going. It's mostly exposition, back-story, some of which could have been edited out. The plot rambles and meanders. There is a lot of glib talk, a lot of filler. The cameraman seems to be asleep. The characters themselves are dispirited, drifting emotionally, buffeted by the storms of life. They whine a lot. Booze helps them cope. The film score is sad, sentimental, and sounds like it was borrowed from a Douglas Sirk melodrama.

Then, as the film enters its final thirty minutes, things change. The pace quickens. The dialogue subsides somewhat. The cameraman wakes up. Drama and tension escalate. The most memorable scenes occur in this final Act, on the bleak, empty salt flats, where the characters confront a herd of wild horses, which in turn forces the characters to confront their own inner wildness. Here at the finale, the B&W visuals transcend human effort. The simple dialogue soars to eloquence. "How do you find your way back in the dark?", asks Marilyn Monroe's character. Comes the response: "Just head for that big star, straight on". Cut to a shot of the vast empty landscape on a clear night, with eyes looking upward, an intuition of eternity.

How ironic these last scenes are. Back in 1960 no one could have known that the film's powerful ending would symbolize such a prescient real-life ending to the careers of two Hollywood legends.

To view "The Misfits" in 2006 turns out to be quite a chilling experience. Prophetically in its "doomness" - personal doomness that is. Arthur Miller writes, unwittingly, his wife's swan song and she sings it with a combination of uppers and downers. Pay attention to Eli Wallach describing Marilyn to Clark Gable. Was that Miller himself being particularly misogynistic or what hell was it? She talks about herself, they all talk about her. She is a hurricane right in the middle of a human storm. Montgomery Clift seems to be talking about himself too. The whole bloody thing is really close to the knuckle. Arid, depressing, slow and yet, riveting, funny, mesmerizing. "The Misfits" should be seen for a variety of reasons but to see Gable and Monroe sharing a black and white screen a short time before their deaths is an experience on itself.

THE MISFITS is a delicate gem of a film, poetic and harsh and as cold as those western stars on the horizon that Gable and Monroe drive toward at film's end. The title refers to the wild mustangs they hunt, but it also describes the 4 main characters, each lost in a world they hardly recognize. At one point Monroe points to a mountain vista and says "it's like a dream." Each of the characters is wounded and lost in some way. Marilyn Monroe plays a divorcée trying to figure out what to do next. Clark Gable plays a cowboy in a vanishing west. Montgomery Clift plays a rancher cheated out of his legacy when his mother remarries. Eli Wallach plays a guy whose life has come to a standstill after the death of his wife. The characters circle each other, trying to make connections, but their timing is always off. Gable and Monroe seem to find something until they go on the mustang hunt.

Gable is magnificent as the aging cowboy who fears "working for wages" as the final sign of giving in to the commonplace and losing the old west. But the old west is, of course, already lost. Most of the action takes place in and around Reno, the perfect symbol for what the west has become. His drunk scene (after he has seen his kids) is astonishing in its pain and ugliness. It's a great performance.

Monroe is stunning and gives a quiet and simple performance that shows what she could have done (had she lived). Leaving her "dumb blonde" persona in the dust, what we get here is Monroe the actress, and she's just plain terrific. Aside from the scene (done in a long shot) where she rages at the men after they have captured the horses, Monroe plays this character very quietly and with lots of small reactions (watch her eyes). It's a great performance.

Clift and Wallach do wonders with their characters and provide a lot of the tension since all three men pursue Monroe. Thelma Ritter is solid as Isabelle. Estelle Winwood has an odd role as the old lady collecting money. James Barton and Kevin McCarthy have small roles.

I think THE MISFITS is a must see for any serious film buff. The film collapsed under the weight of its publicity in 1961 and there was a huge backlash when Gable died within 2 weeks of finishing the film. Yet the film is gorgeous, a shimmering Arthur Miller poem to the worlds and people we've lost.