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CHRONICLING "THE ULTIMATE MOTION PICTURE"
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For all its emotional power, THE MISFITS, as Levin's film proves, was not at all easy to produce. "It was an anxious set," recalls Lee Jones Schoenburg of Magnum Special Projects. "There was a tremendous amount of tension. First of all, everybody would get there, it was 110 in the shade, and sit around ... Marilyn wouldn't show and wouldn't show, and [we wondered] would it get called off or not? By the time things got going, all sorts of decisions had to be made about scenes to cut and drop." Oddly, neither Huston nor anyone else admonished the unstable Monroe for her constant tardiness (at the time, even though she was married to Miller, she was having an affair with Yves Montand). "That's astonishing because it was John Huston, after all," Levin says. "Okay, Arthur Miller is crumbling in the corner. We understand that he is so emasculated and lost that he can probably do very little about it. He's the writer, not the director. But Huston, in his funny way, was very nonconfrontational. You would think he would be very aggressively expecting her to be on time, but he was rather benign! He too felt you can't rush her, you can't push her -- what's it going to get me to do this? Nothing. It will upset her, so let's just play this thing out."
Not surprisingly, the most poignant recollections come courtesy of Miller, whom Levin did not know before approaching him to participate in the documentary. "We had a lunch, and he said, 'I won't talk about Marilyn,' and I said, 'Fine,' " Levin recalls. "I think he trusted that it wasn't going to be gossipy. I've watched it with him, and I think he was quite pleased. At the very end of that lunch, he said, 'This is a film that should get made, this is a story that should get told.' And that was everything to me, because as much as we put films into the hands of their directors, this is truly Arthur Miller's film to me."
THE MISFITS began as a short story Miller published in ESQUIRE in 1957; he discovered Reno, ironically, while divorcing his first wife in order to marry Monroe. His personal reaction to the landscape is the backdrop for the film, and consequently, THE MISFITS hardly resembles a conventional western. "The casting of Gable was a problem because while he was intrigued by the script, he didn't understand it," Miller notes in Levin's film. "I said, 'Well, it's an Eastern western. The preoccupation of the film is not what it usually is in a western film. It's about people trying to connect and afraid to connect.'" The plot focuses on Gable and Clift, two cowboys, and Wallach, a pilot, who team up to hunt wild horses to be sold for dog food. Roslyn accompanies them on one expedition and is horrified by what she perceives as a blatant act of cruelty. Her anguish forces the men to take a deeper look at their own behavior and motivations. "The subtext of the roping of the horses is such a powerful message -- people have to be allowed to be themselves," Levin says. "They can't be reined in and, as much as possible, happiness can be derived from that realization more than anything else."
The ending, which eerily captures Monroe and Gable in their last appearances on film, is also strangely peaceful. After Gay cuts the horses free, the pair drive off in a truck. Roslyn asks Gay, "How do we get home?" Gazing into the night, he replies, "We'll follow that star and we'll get there."
"I love that this can come around to an optimistic ending, but not be sappy and weird," Levin says. "It feels authentic -- that you can actually go through some horrendous moments with people and yet come to [the other] side is an exceptional message. I also think it's real. In life, you don't ever get that happy ending, but you get little moments where you can feel some hope."
All photographs courtesy of Magnum Photos.
Top banner photos: Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe (Dennis Stock/Magnum and Eve Arnold/Magnum). |
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Clark Gable performed his own stunts for the film (Eve Arnold/Magnum). |
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Arthur Miller and John Huston (Inge Morath/Magnum). |
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