Dead Folks in the Desert

The following is a Monday night movie from a few weeks ago:

The Misfits, if nothing else, is a movie populated by ghosts. That, in and of itself, makes it a remarkably creepy and affecting movie.

I try not to do TOO much reading about the movies before I watch them, but to put The Misfits in context, I read a bit of the background. This was Marilyn Monroe’s final completed film, shot about a year before she died and filmed during the height of her popularity. It was also Clark Gable’s last film and he reportedly died less than a week after his last day on set. The story goes that working with Monroe put so much stress on him (and made him so frustrated) that it precipitated a heart attack. While that’s debatable, there’s no question among film historians that Gable’s boredom on set (waiting for the chronically late Monroe to arrive) prompted him to take a more active role in the film, doing most of his own stunts and putting his body through a great deal of wear-and-tear.

So it goes that The Misfits is like one of those spooky polaroids where you can see spirits floating in the background. Monroe does some positively uncanny speech-making about living life to the fullest and how we’re each capable of dying in any given moment. Gable makes some observations about the passing of the old cowboy days and the onslaught of progress. There’s an unnerving shot of Monroe sleeping naked, face-down in bed, that seems to me to be exactly that position where she was described to be found. And there’s a fight that Gable has in the last few minutes with a horse that, knowing he would be dead within weeks, if not days, is absolutely devastating to watch. Rounding out the cast, there’s another player named Montgomery Clift whose great tragedy was that he was supposed to be the next "James Dean" (he looks the part.) He carries a lot of frustration in this movie. He was also dead by the time he was 42 (about 5 years after this movie wrapped – this was his last appearance of any significance.)

[Super Bonus Feature: with the introduction of Montgomery Clift to the Monday line-up, the Clash’s The Right Profile is so much more FUN now!]

Did you know how much I love John Huston? I adored the Treasure of the Sierra Madre and loved the Maltese Falcon a lot when I saw it. However what clinched this new man-crush was the 120 minute doc on Huston on the Sierra Madre DVD (find it if you have the time) which documents how much of a bohemian Man’s Man Huston was in his long life. Watching anything he does is a pleasure now and in the course of my Monday’s, I think I’ve got at least 7-8 Huston movies to devour, making him the fourth most prolific director in my list (behind only Hitchcock, Ford and Kurosawa.) This was the first Huston movie to pop up. Plus hey! the man made Annie in the early 80’s with Albert Finney – what a range!!

T. started watching The Misfits with me but then fell away to do other things. It was at about the 30 or 40 minute point that she turned to me and asked, "what is this movie about anyway?" and then wandered off. Because at first pass, the movie doesn’t seem to be about much of anything. There’s no debating that it’s light on plot. Without question. A plot does show up by the end, but for the most part, the movie really rambles from scene to scene without much direction. Like the characters. Essentially, Monroe plays a new divorcee who follows Clark Gable and Eli Wallach (the most consistent repeating character-actor in my last few weeks of movie-going!) to a semi-finished house in the Nevada desert. She flirts with Gable, but mostly wants to "be free" outside of the city. Gable, on the other hand, is an aging cowboy who can’t find work and mostly rustles wild horses for dog food. Wallach is widower and an amateur pilot who pines after Monroe’s character. The Montgomery Clift character is a rodeo rider who shows up at the halfway point to help Wallach and Gable rangle some horses, which is the first and only time that a conventional plot shows up.

The movie strikes a remarkable balance between romanticism and cynicism. On the one hand, the movie is about Monroe running away to the wild country to live life to the fullest and completely embrace a natural life-style. But the cowboys are out of work, struggling for money and prone to terrible nights of drunken binging. And there’s nothing romantic about Clift’s rodeo-riding when he falls off his horse and repeatedly gets the shit knocked out of him. It’s a big deal (and a major crisis for Monroe’s character) when the Clark Gable character wants to kill the rabbits that are eating his garden. It’s worse still when Monroe learns that the cowboys will be capturing the wild mustangs to turn them into dog food. Much as she loves the cowboy lifestyle, she can’t cope with the killing which, of course, is part and parcel of the lifestyle.

And then there’s this Marilyn Monroe that everyone talks about. I saw my first Marilyn Monroe movie about 18 months ago when I rented Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot from the library. She was mainly a supporting character in that film, and a love interest. In this movie, she’s the star, sharing top-billing with Gable (another actor I’ve never watched before.) Watching her is sort of like watching one of the most famous faces in movie history come to life. I understand her appeal in some respects. She’s certainly stunning in a movie-star sort of way and she has an uncanny sex appeal that goes beyond the way she looks and moves. But the sad truth is that even in this movie, her best performance from what I’ve read, she’s not a particularly great actor. In fact, she seems to be playing herself. (Proof comes from the fact that the movie was written for her by Arthur Miller, her ex-husband, while he was going through his first divorce. I get the impression that Marilyn’s character was very much modelled on the real Marilyn – naïve, sexual, flamboyant and dumb as a bird house.)

Forgive me this. Watching The Misfits, it seemed to me that dying at 36 was the best thing that could happen to Marilyn Monroe – professionally speaking. I’ve heard people say that Elvis should have died in 1960 at the peak of his popularity and the height of his super-rock powers (of course I don’t agree,) but for Marilyn there was probably not much of a career beyond the early 60’s. She simply didn’t have the acting chops to maintain her career, and her current super-popularity mostly stems from her mysterious death and legend. If she’d lived, she would have probably turned into a sad, sad bird that no one paid much notice. (There are times in this movie where you can already see the image of the future Marilyn in her face.) In time, I suspect she would have become a parody of herself the way that Elizabeth Taylor or Marlon Brando or others did. A diminished icon.

Finally, I have to come back to the last scene. And I don’t know if I’d regard this as a spoiler or not but here it comes. Clark Gable has a magnificent wrestling match with a wild mustang. He grabs it by the reigns and actually fights it to the ground, taking shots to the face and ending up a bloody mess. It’s a high point and after letting the movie percolate for a few days, I had to go back and watch the scene again.