The Misfits (1961)
The Misfits (1961) is a beautiful (if hard-to-watch) elegy, not only for the American West it depicts in a slow fade into obsolescence, but also for three of its actors. Plotwise, Roslyn Tabor (Marilyn Monroe) goes through a dismissively quick divorce (for which Reno was already famous by 1931) at the start of the film. Through a divorcee friend Isabelle Steers (Thelma Ritter) she meets Guido (Eli Wallach) and then Gay Langland (Clark Gable); Steers disappears without fanfare about halfway through the film, to be replaced by Perce Howard (Montgomery Clift), met by chance en route to a rodeo. The men are outwardly tough western types, though only Gay is explicitly called a cowboy. Guido is a mechanic, a former airforce bomber traumatised both by the war and by his wife’s unexpected death. Perce (Clift) completes the trio of men, as a youth formerly destined to inherit his father’s ranch, but ousted by his father-in-law, winding up a sort of doomed protégé to Gay, who is himself waning in relevance. Along with Roslyn the four form a strange sort of family and are presumably the titular misfits, though there’s a clear parallel with a handful of horses they seek in the hills, to corral by plane, the pathetic remnants of thousands that once ran wild in the hills of Nevada. Continue reading