What to Watch If You Like: The Misfits

Few films have been more overshadowed by events off screen than The Misfits (1961). Scripted by playwright Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston, it has been primarily known in the six decades since its release for being the last completed outing of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. Yet this frank discussion of American social and cultural mores deserves to be remembered for heralding a new kind of Hollywood film-making in the 1960s and beyond.

In Episode Five of Series Five of Quantum Leap (1989-93), Dr Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) travels through time and lands on 4 April 1960. He inhabits the body of Dennis Boardman (Stephen Bowers), the chauffeur to Marilyn Monroe (Susan Griffiths), and quickly discovers that she is being duped into a dependency upon alcohol and drugs by new assistant Barbara Whitmore (Liz Vassey), who is really an aspiring actress hoping to benefit from Monroe's travails. In his efforts to save Marilyn from her self-destructive side, Sam/Dennis persuades her of the impact that The Misfits might have on her career and she ends 'Goodbye Norma Jean' convinced that the picture will be her salvation.

The film also crops up in Tim Fywell's teleplay, Norma Jean & Marilyn (1996), as Monroe (Mira Sorvino) works on scenes with writer-husband Arthur Miller (David Dukes) and co-star Montgomery Clift (Jeffrey Combs). Indeed, The Misfits plays such a key part in the Monroe legend that it also features prominently in documentaries like Terry Sanders's The Legend of Marilyn Monroe (1964) and Gary Feldman and Suzette Winters's Marilyn Monroe: Beyond the Legend (1987). So, what's all the fuss about?

From Reno With Love

In order to obtain a divorce in Reno, Nevada in the late 1950s, it was necessary to establish residency by living in the desert town for six weeks. While waiting out his stint in order to finalise his legal separation from college sweetheart Mary Grace Slattery, playwright Arthur Miller met a band of cowboys, who made a living catching wild horses and selling them to the makers of canned pet food. Already renowned as the writer of such Broadway hits as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949, which was filmed by Volker Schlöndorff in 1985), The Crucible (1953, filmed by Nicholas Hytner with Miller's son-in-law, Daniel Day-Lewis, in 1996) and A View From the Bridge (1955), Miller sold the resulting story, 'The Misfits', to Esquire magazine.

It was published in October 1957, some 18 months after Miller had married second wife, Marilyn Monroe, As is made clear in Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn (2011), however, the relationship was always fraught with tension. Yet Miller was very much in Monroe's corner and worked without credit on Norman Krasna's screenplay for George Cukor's Let's Make Love (1960) to boost his wife's role after she had earned a Golden Globe for her performance in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959). The shift of emphasis prompted Gregory Peck to quit the project and Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston and Cary Grant were all considered for the male lead. This was much to the frustration of Krasna, who felt the material was better suited to Cyd Charisse. But he had no say in the matter or in the casting of Yves Montand as Monroe's co-star. He had teamed with wife Simone Signoret in Raymond Rouleau's 1957 French film adaptation of The Crucible and Miller was pleased with the casting, even though Montand didn't speak English.

During the protracted shoot, Montand and Monroe were rumoured to have embarked upon an affair and the whispers must have reached Miller, who was working on a screenplay based on his Esquire story, which he hoped would further her bid to prove that she was a serious actress and not just a movie star. He was also keen to show his support after Marilyn had suffered a miscarriage and later claimed that The Misfits had been a love letter to his wife - hence the increased focus from the original story on Rosalyn Tabor, who is first seen applying make-up in a mirror while trying to memorise lines for her divorce hearing (which Miller had lifted from Monroe's petition against second husband, baseball legend, Joe DiMaggio).

This might have been a joke about Monroe's reputation for being late on set and having difficulty remembering dialogue, but it was an affectionate one and as sincerely meant as the effusive compliments that Rosalyn receives from her three male companions. Yet, Miller was also writing about his own perceived status as Mr Monroe, as the script's underlying message is that men should dictates the terms of a relationship. Moreover, as the shoot progressed, Miller began slipping in lines for Guido the pilot (Eli Wallach) that reflected his own growing disillusion with his increasingly erratic spouse.

Having also started out as a writer, John Huston was always Miller's first choice to direct his 'cinematic novel' and he flew to Ireland to discuss the project at Huston's St Clerans estate neat Galway. As it stated that the cowboy was as much an endangered species as the wild beasts he corralled, the screenplay echoed such earlier Huston studies of declining masculinity as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo (both 1948), The African Queen (1951) and Moby Dick (1956), which are all available to rent on high-quality disc from Cinema Paradiso. But Huston was also keen to make a film in the United States again, after spending a decade in self-imposed exile after MGM had emasculated The Red Badge of Courage (1951) with a judgemental edit that Huston felt chimed in with the anti-Communist witch-hunt that was being conducted at the time by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Moreover, Huston looked forward to reuniting with Monroe, whose profile he had helped raise with the role of Angela Phinlay in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). He had also hoped to renew his acquaintance with Robert Mitchum after Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957), but the actor had not enjoyed the physical aspects of the shoot in the Caribbean and so feared that Huston would prove equally reckless on the Nevada Flats that he left instructions for his secretary to tell Huston that he had died. When they did speak after the role of Gaylord Langland had gone to Clark Gable, Mitchum warned Huston about over-exerting the 59 year-old: 'You get him at the end of a rope, fighting those horses, and that's going to be the end of him.

Like Mitchum, Gable didn't entirely understand Miller's intentions in seeking to modernise the Western so that 'the good guy is also part of the problem'. But he had enjoyed such previous excursions into the genre as Howard Higgin's The Painted Desert (1931), William A. Wellman's Across the Wide Missouri (1951), and Raoul Walsh's The Tall Men (1955) and The King and Four Queens (1956). Moreover, despite fifth wife Kay Williams's misgivings about the physical nature of the project, Gable hoped to make one last classic before he retired, although he was also aware that the $750,000 fee topped up with 10% of the gross represented the biggest payday of his career. Gable also persuaded producer Frank E. Taylor to allow him to work a nine-to-five week, with a $48,000 weekly stipend if shooting overran. No wonder he told one reporter that the picture was about 'people who sell their work, but not their lives'.

While Gable set about crash dieting to lose 35lbs, Miller began coaxing old friend Montgomery Clift to play Gable's buddy, Perce Howland. Clift had been at a low ebb since scarring his face in a car crash while making Edward Dmytryk's Raintree County (1957), with Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he would reunite on Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). But actress friend Nancy Walker talked him into taking the role of the washed-up rodeo rider and Monroe let slip that she was delighted he would be joining the cast, as he is 'the only person I know who is in even worse shape than I am'.

Rounding off the ensemble was the wonderful Thelma Ritter, who had worked with Monroe on Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950). This biting satire on the theatre world had earned Ritter the first of her record six Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress. She may never have won, but Cinema Paradiso users can enjoy her wisecracking displays in Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk (1959) and John Frankenheimer's Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). They can also see her at her scene-stealing best in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), Frank Capra's A Hole in the Head (1959) and Michael Gordon's Move Over, Darling (1963), more of which anon.

The Divorce Capital Strikes Again

Gable might have been the King of Hollywood, but the production unquestionably revolved around its queen bee. In fairness to Monroe, a strike by the Screen Actors' Guild had prevented her from finishing Let's Make Love on time, but the delay meant that shooting couldn't start until July 1960, by which time the temperature in the Nevada desert regularly reached 120°F. When she finally arrived, she brought an entourage that included two hairdressers, a make-up artist, a body cosmetician, a seamstress, a wardrobe assistant, two secretaries, a masseur, a stand-in, a press agent and her acting coach. The latter, Paula Strasberg, became known as 'the Black Bear', as she hovered behind Huston but in Monroe's line of sight in order to guide her through scenes. Huston rarely spoke to performers about motivation or meaning, but he quickly came to resent Strasberg's presence, as Monroe consulted her about every tiny detail.

By contrast, Gable turned up with old pal Lew Smith serving as his 'dialogue coach'. although he was really there to give the veteran someone to complain to when he felt threatened by the Method trio of Clift, Wallach and Kevin McCarthy, who was playing Monroe's soon-to-be ex-husband. In fact, they had been impressed when Gable had discussed technique at a first-night dinner party and confided that he approached each role by bringing to it 'everything I have been, everything I am, and everything I hope to be'.

Gable was taken by Clift's dedication, as he had received a bang on the nose while researching his role at a rodeo in Pocatello. After he completed the telephone conversation to his mother in a single take (a scene Clift called 'an audition in front of the gods and goddesses of the performing arts'), Gable became so intrigued by his process that he would often come to the set solely to watch his scenes. Nevertheless, he reduced his co-star to tears when he threatened to knock him out if he kept slapping him vigorously on the back during a driving sequence in which Clift became so lost in the moment that he kept leaving bruises.

By contrast, Gable found Wallach persistently annoying and they kept up a spiky badinage throughout the shoot after the latter had piped up, 'Hey King, can you lower my taxes?' Gable was much more solicitous towards Monroe, who had kept his picture under her pillow during her troubled childhood and had even fantasised that he might be her father. But he disliked her lateness, as he not only felt it was disrespectful to the cast and crew, but that it was also tantamount to stealing off the producers.

Part of the problem lay in the fact that Miller kept tinkering with the script and Monroe had to stay up late learning her new lines. But she was also taking a cocktail of sleeping pills, uppers and painkillers that meant she rarely arrived on the set before 11am. Moreover, as Miller became increasingly dismayed by the state of his marriage, he started using the screenplay to snipe at Monroe by including aspects of her own life in the dialogue. The resulting distress, however, made her more reliant upon medication and Strasberg, although her own behaviour was far from beyond reproach. She kept slipping off to Los Angeles to see Montand and had daily prescription drops from her doctor back home supplemented by presecriptions from local pharmacies. As a result, Monroe became prone to mood swings that invariably held up production.

Famed for the kind of extra-curricular activity that Clint Eastwood would later depict in the film à clef, White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), Huston also played his part. At one point, he cynically convinced doctors to claim that Monroe required hospitalisation so that a temporary shutdown caused by his need to find money for a gambling debt could be covered by United Artists's insurance policy. The irony was compounded by the fact that several days were also lost to Huston's emphysema, which had been brought on by his heavy smoking.

Huston was also an inveterate gambler, Indeed, such was his addiction to the tables that he had been given a nightly allowance on top of his salary. But he often lost heavily and sometimes slept through scenes because he had been up all night. On one occasion, he even had the film's generator brought to the casino during a power cut so that he could keep playing. He even decamped to Virginia City to compete in a camel race and returned in triumph after winning. Throughout it all, however, Huston continued to get exceptional work out of his cast, while cinematographer Russell Metty worked miracles to capture the human and equine talent against the implacable landscape. Having made his name at RKO with Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938), Metty had moved to Universal, where he made 11 picures with Douglas Sirk. Prior to this assignment, he had collaborated with Orson Welles on Touch of Evil (1958) and Stanley Kubrick on Spartacus (1960), for which he had won an Academy Award.

Metty wasn't the only camera specialist on the set, however. Frank Taylor had cut a deal with the Magnum photo agency to provide exclusive access to the shoot. In addition to Eve Arnold, Elliott Erwitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the cohort also included Inge Morath, who had previously collaborated with Huston (who called her 'the high priestess of photography') on Moulin Rouge (1952) and The Unforgiven (1959). She took some of the most revealing images ever seen of Monroe, as well as a comic pose of Wallach as Sigmund Freud, because Huston had announced that he and Clift would team up on a biopic of the Viennese neurologist.

Away from the set, however, Morath grew close to Miller, who needed a confidante as his marriage crumbled around him after they had stopped speaking after Monroe had moved out of their hotel suite. So much for Miller's assertion at the start of the summer: 'I have a sense that we are all moving into one of those rare productions when everything touched becomes alive.' He and Morath would marry in 1962, with daughter Rebecca Miller going on to direct such diverse features as Angela (1995), Personal Velocity (2001), The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) and Maggie's Plan (2013), which are all available to rent on disc from Cinema Paradiso, where choice and quality go hand in hand.

While Miller changed partners, Gable was pleased to announce baby news, which only made his wife more anxious about the forthcoming horse-roping scenes. Huston had insisted on using untamed animals and Clift had been thrown while posing for a close-up atop a bucking bronco in the rodeo bullpen. But Gable felt he had to live up to his macho reputation and do some of his own stunts. Despite the searing heat, he did several takes chasing after the truck, while he also agreed to be dragged along the desert floor for 400 feet behind a vehicle travelling at 30mph. Although he was heavily padded, Gable sustained several cuts and bruises and later stormed off the set when Huston asked him to attempt a more perilous set-piece after his stuntman injured himself.

It's often been said that the rigorous nature of the stunts led to Gable suffering a heart attack the day after the picture wrapped. But the close-ups of him wrestling with the horse's neck were actually filmed using a stuffed mock-up and made to look lifelike by George Tomasini's skilful editing. Moreover, the location shoot had ended in October and the company had spent a couple of weeks doing retakes on the Paramount lot. But Gable's patience had been tested. So, when Miller presented him with five new pages on the last day of filming, he refused to approve the changes and insisted instead on a screening of the rough cut. As he left the screening room, he thanked Taylor because 'I now have two things to be proud of in my career: Gone With the Wind and this.'

On 4 November 1960, the company dispersed, with Gable joking about his experience with Monroe, 'She damn near gave me a heart attack.' The next day, he went into cardiac arrest after learning that old friend and John Ford stalwart Ward Bond had died. He spent 11 days in intensive care, receiving a message from President Dwight D. Eisenhower that if he could survive a coronary, so could he. On 16 November 1960, however, Clark Gable died at the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. Kay would give birth to his son, John Clark, in the same hospital on 20 March 1961. As she told gossip columist Louella Parsons, she had no doubt why Gable never got to meet his son: 'It wasn't the physical exertion that killed him. It was the horrible tension, the eternal waiting, waiting, waiting. He waited around forever, for everybody. He'd get so angry that he'd just go ahead and do anything to keep occupied.'

The Misfire That Became a Classic

In almost every aspect, Arthur Miller's screenplay averred that Hollywood was in the process of changing direction. By setting the action in Reno and focusing on two divorced characters and a third awaiting her papers, Miller shatters the myth peddled by so many movies that marriage is a happy ending. He further curdled the patented studio mix by showing how Gay and Rosalyn shack up together in the house that Guido had been building for the wife who had died in childbirth. Moreover, he has Guido make a play for Rosalyn rather than root for his best friend's happiness. By contrast, Reno landlady Isabelle proves more steadfast in her support (although she has had plenty of practice, as Rosalyn is her 77th tenant) and even finds a way to be mature when she meets her ex-husband and his new wife for the first time.

Miller questions another staple of the Hollywood formula when he reveals that Gay has been a poor father to his children, while Perce concedes that his controlling mother has ruined his life. The latter detail may well be another of the many references that Miller makes throughout to Monroe's off-screen life and, because Huston shot in sequence, it's possible to chronicle how the playwright's attitude to his wife changed during the arduous production, as the romantic sheen that had inspired the script becomes scuffed.

It's also intriguing to see how Miller and Huston combined art and commerce by acceding to Monroe's desire to give a serious performance while also adding salacious sequences like the barroom paddle ball wager and a bedroom scene that exploited the actress's physique. Indeed, during one take of this intimate encounter with Gable, Monroe's breast popped into shot and she pleaded with Huston to keep it in the picture in the hope it would undermine the Production Code and its unhealthy brand of chauvinist censorship.

Of course, the image never made it into the final cut. But Huston and Miller did get away with normalising 'living in sin', while also implying that mother will always be the only woman in Perce's heart. They also dispelled myths about life on the range, as they remind audiences that the cowboy - that romantic figure at the heart of the Hollywood Western - does little more than round up majestic creatures for slaughter. Indeed, the writer and director further deglamorise the genre by showing how Gay, Guido and Perce use a plane and a truck to capture the mustangs, one of which ignominiously drags Gay through the dust before giving up the fight.

This sequence has become synonymous with Gable's demise and the spectre of death looms over the picture. Monroe moved on to make Something's Got to Give with director George Cukor and co-stars Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. However, as Patty Ivins Specht reveals in Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days (2001), this remake of Garson Kanin's screwball classic, My Favorite Wife (1940), was doomed to remain unfinished, as Marilyn's private life slipped into the downward spiral that would culminate in her death on 4 August 1962. Twentieth Century-Fox would revive the project as Move Over, Darling, while the title would be tweaked for Nancy Myers's Something's Gotta Give (2003), in which Jack Nicholson's playboy winds up being nursed by his latest fling's playwright mother, Diane Keaton.

Legend has it that The Misfits aired on television the night that Montgomery Clift died (23 July 1966) and that he had refused to watch it because it brought back painful memories. He had worked with Huston on Freud and, despite it having been an unhappy shoot, Clift had contracted to a reunion on Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), only for Marlon Brando to step after the 45 year-old had succumbed to a heart attack in his bath shortly after he had responded to nurse Lorenzo James's suggestion that he watch The Misfits with his last words, 'Absolutely not'.

Attempts had been made to rush release the film to qualify Gable for a posthumous Oscar tilt. But composer Alex North refused to be rushed over his score and it finally emerged on 1 February 1961. The critics were cool rather than condemnatory and, as a result, the film made a small loss on its $4.1 million budget. It acquired a ghoulish cult cachet after Monroe and Clift died, but was eventually reappraised and declared an important film both in its own right and for its impact on the star system and the emergence of a new Hollywood. It was as if fate had concurred with the final exchange between Monroe and Gable, in which he had responded to the question, 'How do you find your way back in the dark?' with the words, 'Just head for that big star straight on. The highway's under it, and it will take us right home.'