The Misfits

The Misfits shot on location in Nevada. The bar at which the cowboys hung out was the Styx in Reno, where Miller had met the cowboys who inspired the original story. The rodeo scenes were shot in nearby Dayton, a ghost town, and the horse-roping scenes were shot on a dry lake bed in the desert. The first problem to affect the film was a postponement of the start date from March to July because Marilyn Monroe's earlier film, Let's Make Love (1960), had been delayed by a Screen Actor's Guild strike. This meant the film would be shot in Arizona during the height of summer heat. Montgomery Clift arrived on location before filming was to begin so he could research his role. While working a rodeo in Pocatello, Idaho, he was bruised on the bridge of his nose. It was exactly the type of injury his character was supposed to have in the film. Because of Monroe's reputation for lateness, director John Huston had her daily call set for 10 a.m. instead of the customary 9 a.m. but often she was even later. Contributing to Monroe's lateness was Miller's habit of handing her often complicated re-writes the night or morning before a scene was to be shot. The changes threw her into a panic, making it even harder for the actress to sleep. Monroe wasn't the only production member who had trouble showing up on time. Huston was often late after spending all night gambling. Clark Gable took it all in stride. He was ready when called and simply waited with his script open to the page being shot that day. When someone asked if the lateness upset him, he said, "No, it doesn't drive me mad. Of course it would be better if we did start. But I'm being paid for it, very handsomely." To his personal friends, Gable confessed that the production delays bothered him a great deal. "It's stealing," he told screenwriter John Lee Mahin. "It's stealing the banks money and United Artists' money." Monroe was terrified at the thought of working with Clark Gable. As a child growing up in foster homes and with her single mother, she had slept with Gable's picture under her pillow and fantasized that he was her father. The night before their first scene together, she couldn't sleep without a large dose of Nembutal. As a result, she was two hours late getting to the set. When she apologized to Gable, he simply said, "You're not late, honey," and led her aside to talk. Throughout the filming, he treated her with the same courtesy. Gable was equally solicitous of Montgomery Clift and so impressed with his talents that he showed up to watch him work even when he himself wasn't called for the day. The one cast member Gable never warmed to was Eli Wallach. They were so uncomfortable with each other that at first they had trouble remembering lines in their scenes together. Eventually, they developed a grudging respect, though each kidded the other relentlessly. Wallach would jokingly ask, "Hey, King, can you lower my taxes?", while Gable once quipped that they were having boiled ham for lunch in Wallach's honor. When Gable learned that the film's publicist was ready to quit because Monroe kept skipping or showing up late for on-set interviews, he offered to meet with the press while the publicist got her to the interviews. He not only kept the press happy, but his presence made it easier for Monroe to face the reporters. While the other actors in The Misfits competed to win director John Huston's approval, Gable saw him more as a rival. Both were known for their masculine escapades -- drinking, hunting, womanizing. The older Gable, settled into his fifth marriage, was at times baffled and annoyed at the director's carousing during filming, particularly his habit of losing large sums of money at the gambling tables and bragging about it. During filming, Monroe's marriage to Arthur Miller fell apart, partly because of disagreements over the script and her feelings of betrayal over how he had written her character. She also felt he had turned Huston against her, leading him to treat her like an idiot. Within a few weeks of the production's start, they were staying in separate suites. They had stopped speaking by August, with Monroe's acting coach, Paula Strasberg, serving as intercessor. In addition, Miller had begun seeing photographer Inge Morath, who was documenting the production and would become his third wife. Monroe's sole romantic comfort during the first weeks of filming was her affair with Yves Montand, her co-star in Let's Make Love. Whenever she had a weekend break in filming, she would fly to Los Angeles to see her doctors and Montand. When Hedda Hopper printed a column in which he stated that the romance was just his way of guaranteeing the success of their love scenes in the film, Monroe grew more upset. She knew he was just trying to keep the affair from hurting his wife, actress Simone Signoret, but the words still hurt. As shooting progressed, Monroe became increasingly dependent upon pills. She had prescriptions flown in every other day by her Los Angeles doctors and received additional medication from local doctors. She was taking three times the normal dosage of the sleeping aid Nembutal. The pills left her disoriented, unsteady on her feet and incoherent. They also led to wild mood swings and rashes. Like Monroe, Clift had a problem with medication as well, having become dependent upon painkillers and other pills after his automobile accident. Many on the film were concerned about his ability to perform the role, particularly since the first scene he was scheduled to shoot was a long telephone scene in which he calls his mother on a pay phone as the other characters --played by Monroe, Gable, Wallach and Thelma Ritter -- watch in the background. Clift described the shot as an "audition in front of the gods and goddesses of the performing arts," but he pulled it off in one take. That was the moment that won Gable over to his side. The only problem Gable had with Clift occurred while filming a scene driving to the rodeo. In his excitement, Clift hammered on Gable's back, and the King asked him not to do it again, as he had back problems. Even when Gable showed Clift the black and blue marks his blows were causing, it didn't seem to matter. The next time Clift hit him on the back, Gable yelled, "I'm going to hang one on you, you little bastard, if you do that again!" Clift burst into tears. Huston insisted on using real wild horses for the rodeo scene. The horse Clift had to ride was too wild for the actor, but Huston insisted that he sit on it in the bullpen chute for a close-up. When the horse lost control it threw Clift against the side of the chute, ripping his shirt. That was the take Huston used in the film. One of the most difficult scenes in The Misfits was a five minute exchange between Monroe and Clift that Huston wanted to shoot in one long take - the longest single take in his entire career. Nobody believed the two actors, notorious for their problems remembering lines, could pull it off. Monroe requested that all strangers be removed from the set beforehand and asked that nobody stand in her line of sight. Each actor was so concerned for the other, however, that they pulled it off in just six tries, giving Huston two perfect takes. One of Gable's few on-the-set blow-ups occurred during the filming of the horse-roping scenes. When Huston insisted on another take after Gable's stunt double had been injured, the actor walked off the set in disgust. Gable could have refused to do any of the stunts for The Misfits, but insisted on doing all but the most dangerous shots. He even allowed himself to be dragged behind a truck for 400 feet over the desert floor and chased the truck for repeated takes. The horse-roping scenes were equally hard for Clift. When the crew forgot to have him put on gloves during the first takes, he had to hold the ropes with his bare hands for the rest of the shoot, leaving his hands raw and bloody. The Misfits production was shut down in late August when the film exceeded its budget. It took two weeks of meetings with United Artists executives and Los Angeles and New York to get things back on track. Part of the problem was that Huston had exceeded his gambling allowance, so to cover his tracks, he convinced Monroe's doctors to have her hospitalized for her drug problems, even though the production had contributed to them. At least the film's insurance company paid for her treatment. Location shooting for The Misfits ended in October 1960, after which the crew moved to the Paramount Studios for re-takes. During the Los Angeles filming, director Henry Hathaway, who had worked with Monroe on Niagara (1953), saw her sobbing outside one of the sound stages. Upset at how the film was turning out, she said, "I just couldn't face having to do another scene with Marilyn Monroe." On the last day of filming, Miller arrived with five pages of re-writes for an early scene. Gable refused to approve the changes and insisted on a screening of the film the next morning. After The Misfits was finished, he thanked producer Frank Taylor, "I now have two things to be proud of in my career: Gone with the Wind [1939] and this." But he still refused to shoot the new scene. The Misfits completed filming on November 4, 1960, with a brief re-take of the film's final scene, with Gable and Monroe. The next day, Gable had a heart attack. Eleven days later, he died. Although many felt the physical strain of his role in The Misfits was responsible, Gable's heavy smoking, drinking and grief over the recent death of his friend Ward Bond probably contributed to his early passing as well. by Frank Miller Sources: Donald Spotto, Marilyn Monroe: The Biography Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care Lyn Tournabene, Long Live the King: A Biography of Clark Gable

"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

AWARDS & HONORS Although both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable had great hopes that their performances in The Misfits would win them dramatic accolades, the film was completely ignored in that year's Oscar® race. John Huston received a Directors Guild nomination for his work on The Misfits, but lost to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story (1961). In 1993, The Misfits's depiction of the capture of wild mustangs for sale to dog food companies won it a classic film award in The Fund for Animals' Genesis Awards. THE CRITICS' CORNER - THE MISFITS "....Characters and theme do not congeal. There is a lot of absorbing detail in it, but it doesn't add up to a point. Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. (He died a few weeks after shooting was done.) Miss Ritter, James Barton and Estelle Winwood are amusing in very minor roles, and Alex North has provided some good theme music. But the picture just doesn't come off." - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times "A superbly shot anti-Western, constantly dragged down by Arthur Miller's verbose, cloyingly glib script about emotional cripples searching for a meaning to life in the twilight of the American frontier....it really comes good only in the mustang round-up at the end, an overly symbolic but nevertheless magnificent sequence." - Tom Milne, TimeOut Film Guide "The theme with its implications of an essentially male savagery suits Mr. Huston, and he has drawn extraordinary qualities from all his chief players." - Dilys Powell "Ill-fated melodrama....pretentious film which seldom stops wallowing in self-pity." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide "The Misfits is essentially a life portrait of Marilyn Monroe...but its theme is also a demystification of the great American dreams of success and the West." - Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films "The superbly shot sequences of rodeo riding and particularly of the pursuit and roping of wild mustangs were outstanding visual set pieces in contrast to Arthur Miller's copious dialogue and lachrymose philosophy." - The Oxford Companion to Film "...it is not the classic that it should have been....Like many Huston films, this picture contains Hemingway themes and characters; also the distinct European ambiance in the early group scenes is like something out of The Sun Also Rises. Miller's script is overwritten, without being insightful. It's full of gloom and doom; the mustang scene is truly unpleasant to watch....Monroe was having tremendous psychological problems during the filming, so it's amazing what a wonderful performance she gives....I'd like to think that this role comes closest to the real Marilyn Monroe." - Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic "The making of this film had more melodrama than the Christmas edition of most soaps but it is, at times, quite beautiful in a very melancholy way. Miller didn't really believe in the happy ending; nor do we." - The Rough Guide to Cult Movies "Unsatisfying but engrossing parable....." - Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide "At face value, The Misfits, is a robust, high-voltage adventure drama, vibrating with explosively emotional histrionics, conceived and executed with a refreshing disdain for superficial technical and photographic slickness in favor of an uncommonly honest and direct cinematic approach. Within this framework, however, lurks a complex mass of introspective conflicts, symbolic parallels and motivational contradictions, the nuances of which may seriously confound general audiences" - Variety "An erratic, sometimes personal in the wrong way, and generally unlucky picture that is often affecting. Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay...about contemporary cowboys -- "misfits" in the film's symbolism -- who hunt down wild horses and sell them to be butchered for dog food. Marilyn Monroe is the lonely, emotionally unstable divorcée who is deeply upset by the men's determination to capture the horses. Monroe has never worked her vulnerability so fulsomely before; the film has an uncomfortable element of fake psychodrama -- she's pushy about her own sensitivity....If there is a right tone in which to ply the Miller script, the director, John Huston, doesn't find it." - Pauline Kael, 5,001 Nights at the Movies "The Misfits became a landmark after its 1961 release -- but for the wrong reasons. It was the final film that both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable starred in, the latter succumbing to a heart attack aged just 59 only eight days after the shoot ended. The film's already poignant subject - the passing of a way of life - was therefore given a remarkable extra edge of sadness and tragedy." - Daniel Etherington, Channel 4 Films "A disturbing but captivating film about modern cowboys who have lost their purpose in a world that has robbed them of the West into which they were born. The Misfits was Gable's and Monroe's last film....Many have called this film a brilliant mood piece of a dying Old West; that doesn't make it a masterpiece, but the ghosts of its cast still haunt one's viewing experience." - TV Guide Compiled by Frank Miller & Jeff Stafford

From All the Right Moves to Olympia, from Caddyshack to Rocky, Hollywood's most memorable sports-oriented movies are celebrated in Sports Cinema: The Best of Hollywood's Athletic Heroes, Losers, Myths, and Misfits by Randy Williams, the latest release from Limelight Editions.Celebrities, including Sylvester Stallone and Spike Lee, also weigh in with their favorites in the book's special "Starting 5" section. It also features nearly 400 striking and original movie stills making it an ideal holiday gift idea for movie collectors and sports movie fans alike. Beginning with The Freshman (1925), Mr. Williams counts down his top 100 movie picks from more than nine decades, based upon hundreds of hours of film watching and his expertise as a lifelong sports fan and sports writer. Enhancing his chapter-by-chapter explorations of each film are sports-themed sections, including "The Players," which lists cast members; "The Game," which provides a synopsis of each movie; "Instant Replay," which includes movie commentary by Mr. Williams, as well little-known trivia; and "All-Star Moments," which offers movie highlights. Casual moviegoers, sports fans, and film buffs will get "the story behind the film" from those involved, including actors, directors, and various cast members in the "Post-Game Comments" section. Mr. Williams's credits include producing Sports Nuts, a radio show hosted by Gabe Kaplan and featuring Hollywood celebrities and prominent athletes discussing sports and movies. He also served as Manager of Research for Fox Sports. He has also written for national and international publications, including Sports Illustrated, the Hollywood Reporter, Olympic Review, Reuters, and the Washington Post. For more information on other books from Amadeus Press, Click Here. To order Sports Cinema: The Best of Hollywood's Athletic Heroes, Losers, Myths, and Misfits, use this link to Barnes and Noble.