"I have a sense that we are all moving into one of those rare productions when everything touched becomes alive."
Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller couldn't have been further from the truth when he wrote those words during the early days of bringing The Misfits (1961) to the screen. The tortured production -- once a classic flop, now considered a minor classic -- marked the last completed film for both of its stars, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. And the debate continues as to whether the film led to Gable's death from a heart attack at the still-young age of 59.

The Misfits began life as a 1957 short story in which Miller combined his memories of the modern-day cowboys he met while in Reno to divorce his first wife and his feelings about his second wife, Monroe, who initially struck him as a pure creature intimately connected to the spirit of life. In search of a project that would allow the newlyweds to work together, they pitched a film version to United Artists. They offered the script to director John Huston, who accepted with a one-word cable, "Magnificent." Huston wanted Robert Mitchum to star as the washed-out cowboy who becomes involved with a sensitive divorcee in Reno and takes her along on a job to catch wild horses for a dog food company. Unfortunately, Mitchum considered the script incomprehensible and dodged Huston's phone calls until Clark Gable was cast. When he finally spoke to the director, he warned him about Gable's age and health: "You get him at the end of a rope, fighting those horses, and that's going to be the end of him."

The damage may have been done before the horses even entered the picture, however. Because of Monroe's commitment to make the musical Let's Make Love (1960), production couldn't start until July 1960, when the Nevada locations were baked by temperatures climbing to 120 degrees each day. Delays caused by Monroe's habitual lateness didn't help either. Because of her sleeping problems, Monroe rarely was called before 11 a.m., and usually showed up later than that. In her defense, however, she also had to stay up into the small hours trying to learn Miller's many script changes while trying to deal with the effects of her numerous pain and sleeping medications. Though he often resented her lateness, Gable went out of his way to help her through the shoot, enduring retakes while she tried to focus on the lines and praising her work at every opportunity.

Compounding Monroe's problems was the fact that the film, conceived while she and Miller were still in the full flush of first love, was filmed as their marriage was falling apart. During shooting, she moved out of their shared hotel room to stay with her acting coach, Paula Strasberg. Moreover, she was heartbroken that a role she had seen as her chance to prove that she could play something other than "Marilyn Monroe" was being re-written to include embarrassing elements from her personal life, including references to her mother's mental problems and the failure of her marriage to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. Even Gable's casting contributed to the autobiographical elements of the film. Miller knew she had idolized "The King" during her childhood, often fantasizing that he was her father.

Huston played his own part in the production problems. He was already developing emphysema after decades of heavy smoking, and several days were lost when he was too sick to work. And location shooting in the only U.S. state with legal gambling was a huge mistake for him; he was usually up in the casinos until five in the morning and kept falling asleep in the director's chair during filming. United Artists had given him a gambling allowance. When his losses exceeded that, he had to shut down production for a week to find the money. So he convinced Monroe's psychiatrist and doctor to put her in a Los Angeles hospital for a week to deal with her drug dependency, thereby making her bear the blame for the production shutdown he had caused.

The most grueling scenes in the film were those near the end in which Gable and two other cowboys (Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach) capture wild horses in the desert and break their leader. Rumors at the time suggested that the scenes trying to hold back the lead horse contributed to Gable's heart problems, but a close study of the film reveals that most of these were done through careful cutting. Gable is rarely in the same shot as the horse. He did, however, have to shoot a scene in which the horse drags him across the desert floor. He was actually holding a rope attached to a truck, with the camera in the bed. But even though he was heavily padded, he came home from the day's shooting a bloody mess. He tried to lie to his wife that it had just been an accident, but she knew better, telling him he was out of his mind.

The film finished shooting with studio work in Hollywood, but Gable was already too sick to attend the wrap party on November 4. He suffered a heart attack on the sixth and died ten days later. In a sorrowful interview, Monroe wondered if she'd contributed to his ill health, while gossip columnist Hedda Hopper blamed it on Huston. Few at the time even considered his three-pack-a-day smoking habit or his grief over the death of good friend Ward Bond just days earlier.

Since Huston had shot in sequence and cut the film as they went along, Gable had already seen his performance before he took ill and felt it was his best acting ever. With his death, United Artists tried to get the film completed in time for the 1960 Academy Awards®, hoping he would snare a posthumous nomination. But when composer Alex North protested that he couldn't possibly get the picture scored that quickly, Huston had to agree. The release was pushed back to a more reasonable February 1 date, when it fared poorly with critics and audiences. Over time, however, the film has gained a special luster, particularly when Monroe died two years later without having finished another picture. Today, The Misfits is considered a minor classic, with special interest as an example of the loss of traditional values in the modern Western, as one of Huston's trademark celebrations of a team of charismatic losers and as the last film from two of Hollywood's greatest stars.

Producer: Frank E. Taylor
Director: John Huston
Screenplay: Arthur Miller
Based on a Short Story by Miller
Cinematography: Russell Metty
Art Direction: Stephen Grimes, William Newberry
Music: Alex North
Principal Cast: Clark Gable (Gay Langland), Marilyn Monroe (Roslyn Taber), Montgomery Clift (Perce Howland), Thelma Ritter (Isabelle Steers), Eli Wallach (Guido), Estelle Winwood (Church Lady), Kevin McCarthy (Raymond Taber), Marietta Tree (Susan).
BW-125m. Letterboxed.

by Frank Miller