The Misfits review – Marilyn Monroe is fascinatingly sad in John Huston’s desolate western

The 100th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, and a two-month retrospective at BFI Southbank, is the occasion for the rerelease of her most serious and poignant film, John Huston’s western drama and American pastoral from 1961. The film’s end of an era desolation feels more sombre than ever; the last film for both Clark Gable and Monroe and a melancholy late role for Montgomery Clift.

The Misfits was written for the screen by Monroe’s then husband, Arthur Miller, adapted from his own short story from a few years before. Miller’s opaque motivations are a subtext running under this movie; with a strangely uxorious dedication or vengefulness, Miller conceived the whole thing for Marilyn. It is the story of a passionate, vulnerable, childlike free spirit who finds a complex kind of excitement and freedom – flavoured with disillusion – with a real man after divorcing an emotionally blank city dweller. (Monroe and Miller divorced immediately after production.) The key irony of the title is that of course no one on screen is a misfit: they fit in all too well with the stark landscape and each other in their loneliness, their discontent and their yearning for something else or something more to live for.

Monroe is Roslyn, a woman who has arrived in Reno, Nevada to get the “quickie” divorce available in that state. She lives with her roommate and pal Isabelle (Thelma Ritter), who coaches her in what to say in the divorce hearing. In this scene, as Roslyn nervously mutters the formal phrases to herself, you can hear Monroe stop speaking in her signature breathiness and take on a weird kind of normality or neutrality, the way she might have habitually spoken on screen had her career gone another way.

Once a free woman, Roslyn finds that three new men fall in love with her. She catches the eye of Gaylord Langland (Clark Gable), an ageing, womanising cowboy whose adult children from his previous marriage clearly find him a boozy embarrassment. Gaylord’s wingman buddy Guido (Eli Wallach) invites Gaylord, Roslyn and Isabelle for a party in the empty, half-built house out in the desert where his wife died in childbirth; he simply and submissively lends it to Roslyn and Gaylord to live in effectively as man and wife – despite clearly being obsessed with her himself. Gaylord plays the attentive husband, even planting a vegetable garden and more or less allowing his quasi-wife to talk him out of shooting the rabbit that had been eating their lettuces – a premonition of the film’s climactic scene in the desert. Then they all decide to go up into the mountains with their other pal, Perce (Clift), an easygoing, sweet-natured bronco rider, careless of his own safety, resentful of his widowed mother for remarrying a man who is cutting Perce out of his inheritance, and obviously entranced with Roslyn too.

All three are complete gentlemen, and it is out on that stark plain that the four of them confront their destiny. Roslyn understands that their plan is to capture a few wild mustangs; she loves the romance of it all and perhaps imagines the captured beasts are to be kept and ridden. But no; all too late, Roslyn grasps that these are “misfit” horses to be sold as pet food, having been lassoed with a heavy tyre on the end of a rope and cruelly allowed to exhaust themselves as they frantically gallop, dragging it for hours. That is their horrible, inglorious and symbolic destiny; the humans are also, in their own way, dragging tyres.

As for Roslyn, her anger at the whole business brings about a kind of redemption for Gable’s lonesome and ironically obsolete cowboy. Monroe’s performance is fascinatingly sad: the mannerisms and style (apart from that pre-divorce moment) are what had become her authentic self and they have their own sad music, especially when she stops dead in the middle of cocktails with Ritter’s Isabelle and confesses that, just for a moment, she misses her mother.