Misconceived and Misbegotten Misfits

...She has left her husband because she couldn't reach him or "touch" him...

...She seems to be acting only for herself, aware only of herself and Paula Strasberg, her omnipresent drama coach...

...I'm not referring, à la Louella Parsons, to the personal tragedies of the participants —Clark Gable's death, Marilyn Monroe's breakdown, the Arthur Millers' divorce—but to the movie itself, certainly the year's greatest disappointment...

...I had the feeling all through the picture that he was somehow not involved in it at all, that he was merely going through the motions...

...The first evidence of this flight was the use of the small screen and blackand-white film, most of it shot through a dark filter...

...Her face, far from expressing any kind of inner purity, seems to be in constant search of itself...

...then tell us the individual is dead, and there is no refuge...

...In the film, Marilyn Monroe is the purity symbol...

...One also forgives him for Moby Dick and The Red Badge of Courage because they were movies that partly succeeded despite all the compromises that had to be made...

...But there is nothing of Huston's in The Misfits except for one short scene in a bar during rodeo time and that last agonizing sequence with the horses...

...Nothing in the movie connects with the character she projects...

...In the movie, people do talk about space and light, but one is not allowed to see it or feel it...

...Monroe is distressing to watch...

...We are told that, despite her unhappy marriage and her somewhat checkered career, she has preserved her basic innocence...

...It may have been an uncalled-for remark, but I knew exactly what she meant...

...she has fled the cities because, when she danced in night clubs, the customers misunderstood her intent and made passes at her...

...One remembers The A sphalt Jungle, The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and one forgives him for Moulin Rouge...

...The Misfits is sad because it is an egomaniacal film in which most of the actors stand apart from each other, working out their private destinies, while the scriptwriter, worried about his standing as a playwright and imbued with the odd notion that film-making is a more commercial enterprise than play-producing, deliberately wrote arty, unrealistic, pseudo-mystical dialogue that could be laughed at if it hadn't been turned out by the author of Death of a Salesman...

...Apparently, everybody involved, with the exception of Huston, was so concerned with his own personal integrity, with the preservation of his own little slice of immortality, that the movie was forgotten...

...He survives, one suspects, through sheer abundance of talent...

...Show us the space, show us the land and the sky...

...What happened...

...The Misfits is a flight from reality into that private American dream world of the Self, a world in which is it assumed that everything large and popular is corrupt and that only the individual is worth saving...

...Now I've been to Reno and Pyramid Lake, where a good deal of the action was filmed, and the first thing that strikes you about the country is the space and the light...

...This is hardly an original idea, and if we are going to be asked to swallow it again, why not approach it unflinchingly, honestly...

...Gable is still Gable, every inch a man, but he doesn't really look or move like a cowboy...

...Poor Wallach has Miller's most embarrassing lines and they submerge him...

...Perhaps, when he saw what he was up against, he just quit...

...Through her, two of the men she becomes involved with are made happier, truer to themselves...

...You have the feeling that she is in some sort of terrible trouble and it makes you nervous to look at her...

...They come to realize that it is wrong to rope wild horses and sell them to a dog-food manufacturer...

...Oh, the hopes that were aroused when it was announced that Miller had written his first screenplay, that Monroe and Gable would star in it, that such first-rate actors as Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift would also appear in it, and that John Huston would direct it...

...She can't bear brutality and can't understand why a man would want to ride in a rodeo and get thrown to the ground...

...So they turn the horses loose and ride happily back into town, probably to a big steak dinner...

...About half-way through the film, a woman behind me said, "My God, Miller's trying to make a ghetto out of the American West...

...A reality was being denied, perhaps because a true feeling of the land, of the space and the colors, would have defeated the script—which was a small, dark thing, lamenting, appropriately enough, the passing of the individual, the prevalence of corruption...

...Of the others, only Clift, as Miller's cow-punching Hamlet, is believable and he is very good indeed...

...The real mystery of the movie is Huston, who has always been able in the past to make his kind of film within a commercial framework, without flinching or running away from the pressure money brings to bear on the artist...