Less than a year after the release of John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), both of its stars would be dead. Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, the Cowboy and the Showgirl, icons of the American Golden Age, passed away at the dawn of the 1960s. Initially spurned by critics and audiences, the film is now regarded as a masterpiece in the filmographies of Huston, Gable and, crucially, Monroe. The BFI’s nationwide re-release of the film coincides with a complete retrospective of Monroe’s career at the BFI Southbank; a retrospective that aims to challenge the simplistic narratives that have defined Monroe and her work for decades. The Misfits is a fascinating focal point.
Marilyn Monroe remains an enigma. Her cinematic persona was designed to appeal to the male gaze, and she epitomises Laura Mulvey’s concept of woman as spectacle, but her best roles suggest the intelligence she hid and was encouraged to hide She is a self-made icon who worked through difficult times and personal trauma to become the most famous person in the world. Narratives that portray Marilyn as solely a victim, a tool, or, worst of all, a fool, simplify her story and ignore the complexity of who she was, what she was striving for, and when she was doing it. It also misses the greatest appeal of revisiting her work today, which is to see how she subtly subverted these roles through her performance. There’s a sardonic irony to her most iconic characters that reminds viewers that this is a persona she designed herself; a means to an end, and Roslyn, her character in The Misfits, is a fascinating example.
Roslyn is almost the culmination of her complex ‘dumb blonde’ characters. She encapsulates the disarming innocence and unbridled sex appeal that Monroe consciously crafted throughout her career, an unsettling contradiction to modern audiences. As Eli Wallach’s Guido says, “one minute she looks kinda dumb, brand-new like a kid. And the next minute… she sure moves though, don’t she?” But Roslyn’s real power isn’t in how she looks, but what she sees. She forces the men to see themselves. Gable’s Gay and his associates are forced to justify the only lifestyle they’ve ever known to her, and without the adoration of the crowd or the reassurance of wider society, they find themselves cruel and weak.
The men assure themselves that what they are doing is better than wages, but none are willing to break away without some assurance of intimacy from Roslyn. Doing right isn’t enough in and of itself, they require at the very least the assurance of sex to replace one primitive urge with another. The film showcases several instances of performative masculine bravado, but none more spectacular than the lengthy sequence of rounding up wild mustangs. They set about the small herd in a biplane, a truck and ultimately on foot with lassos. This includes an extraordinary sequence of Gable subduing a buck entirely on his own. The sequences prefigures the savage kangaroo hunt in Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971) but resonates with the same sense of bestial masculinty burning itself out in the wildnerness.
The BFI’s restoration brings all of this to startling life. The sweeping plains of the Nevada desert that “may as well be the moon”, have a mythic feel in their granduer. This in contrast with the bustling streets of the Dayton during the rodeo. Civilisation stripped back until the men can find themselves back where they believe they belong, the frontier. Out there, alone with Rosalyn, they must confront themselves.
A remarkable moment of empathy comes when Gable is attempting to justify his capturing of these horses who will likely end up slaughtered for pet food. He explains that he does what he does to survive in the lifestyle he finds comfortable, and that he can’t be held accountable for how his labour is exploited. He draws a comparison to Roslyn’s dancing, suggesting that she too is not responsible for the attention she naturally gathers from men whilst working as a dancer in a nightclub. He believes both are innocent, it’s the world that’s come in and turned it all around.
Of course he cannot see the economic and societal differences that give him significantly more power than she does over his life and work. He is ultimately uninterested in justifying her lifestyle, only his. This perhaps is also the limits of the empathy of screenwriter Arthur Miller, who wrote the film specifically for his then wife. Although moral clarity is with Monroe and by the end the men’s enterprise and worldview will have fallen apart, her character still conforms to so much of what she had hoped to escape.
Huston’s film ends with Gay and Roslyn driving off towards a star in search of a new way of life. Earlier in the film Guido observed that it takes starlight so long tor each the earth that the stars in the sky may already be dead. Our heroes depart, chasing ghosts in the sky.
BFI Distribution rerelease THE MISFITS on 5 June in UK and Irish Cinemas, and screens at BFI Southbank as part of the BFI’s 2 month film season, Marilyn Monroe: Self Made Star, celebrating 100 year’s since the birth of cinema’s most enduring film icon.