"When you're in love with a beautiful woman / you can't keep from cryin'" - Dr. Hook
THE MISFITS (1961) was just on TCM and for a big chunk of it I was floored by its poetic train wreck qualities and wondered why Marilyn Monroe's performance is often maligned in snootier film criticism as 'uneven'. It's like a bi-polar character written for a bi-polar actress by her bi-polar ex-husband can't get a break in this square ass bourgeois town. Now that we can diagnose and prescribe SSRIs for these sorts of mental dysfunctions, perhaps the problems seem one of acting or writing rather than the deep psychic rifts they were. The old school booze and tranquilizer self-medication regimen isn't as respected as it used to be, alas. The hip Critics able to recognize the fearless genius of bringing her own madness to bear on her performance --leaning into it rather than trying to overcompensate. Critics today feel strange about applauding her bravery rather trying to prescribe her lithium. They don't see how she's staring into death in her way --three of the four leads would soon be dead and the movie seemed somehow to know it. But I guess it's no longer 'cool' to confront death like a kid slamming into an oncoming wave at the beach. That wave might have an undertow, Johnny! You're not to fight waves anymore. Fighting is wrong!
But the hep cats amongst us know death is where madness and marriage are finally reconciled but the 'now' we are in is much more terrified than we were back in 1961 when atomic annihilation seemed only a motion away. Now it's less about mortality and more about inclusion and representation, of strength and unity. Death barely factors into 'Big Art' cinema at all, unless it's too have a funeral and scenes of crying while watching old home movie loops of some backyard picnic, freeze-framing on your dead daughter while the tacky Howard Shore music moans and minor keys its way deep into your, you know, your heart?
Once upon a time, though, unrestricted booze, cigarettes, uppers and downers access helped great white male (GWM) writers and directors to see into the void without flinching. Titans like Hawks, John Huston, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Hemingway, John Ford, Henry Miller and Sam Shepherd could make movies and plays about cowboys that were really about how to face death, about dying and reconciling ourselves, presuming full well the next bell tolls for thee. Now, with all these new SSRI prescriptions, we can't even remember where that damn void is much less stare into it. The heroism is gone.
But hey, man, MISFITS still looms tall, for all its faults, and the last family of wild mustangs roaming the wasteland are a handy catch-all metaphor for chain smoking drunk writers, and their indulgent lovers (and the gangsters and big shots that paw them while you watch helplessly from behind your typewriter). Here, in this Arthur Miller-scripted little chamber piece, Marilyn Monroe is both the cherry atop our collective drunk American dream and its hungover, melancholic morning after. She's the enticing gauntlet that you mortgage your soul to grab. And she's the embarrassment when you come too quick and pass out, waking up feeling cheap and ashamed. She puts up with it all, it's part of the job. But she wants more out of her career than playing endearingly daff sexpots, and Miller digs it. He gets her, recognizes that she's the smartest person in every room, forced to couch her genius in breathy baby talk and to resign herself to being ignored even as everyone drools down her blouse. She's used to being alone in a crowd, exiled by her beauty, as if men--being rendered stupid by her allure--can't process her words beyond their shape in the wind. Only Gable's cowboy gets how sad she is. That's what wins her over. But she really connects with Clift, who seems as resigned to death, shell-shocked from bad rodeo falls, as damaged as she is - they're like lost souls, Lake and Ladd, Cage and Shue in LEAVING LAS VEGAS. They don't have to sleep together to share intimacy of the sort Eli Wallach meanwhile doesn't even know he secretly longs for. He can't get bast his crotch chakra, when all the time his heart is broken over an ex-wife whose dream house is an unfinished cottage facing the wasteland of sunburnt eternity.
Meanwhile, the stand-in for Arthur Miller (MM's newly-minted ex-husband) fumes back there on the Reno divorce court steps, watching Nevada cowboys fall over themselves at his once-wife's feet and secretly venting his spleen against them and her inability to fend them off or make her intellect known, the guys tossing him confrontational stares in between flirts, all resulting (or having resulted) in him feeling like he's being cuckolded every time he and her went out in public. He becomes like Welles childish, insecure cutting off ex-wife Rita' Hayworth's hair and dying it blond for LADY FROM SHANGHAI, a symbolic neutering, a vain (and in-vain) attempt to satisfy his petulant egoic insecurity.
A whole reel goes by while the cowpokes tussle over who will release the horses and win MM's favor, all while she convulses in empathic-neurotic pain in the backseat, as do we. But outside on the vast flat plain, her dramatic tantrums seem lost in the wind. Huston films her way downwind, so her shouts are heard only as murmurs. I'm fairly sure, Huston hated her by that time in the shooting, for holding up filming so many times people were getting heart attacks and kidney stones in frustration. But hey, it suits her character. Despite the gorgeousness, she's a drunk through and through, same as the lot of them, so what the hell were you expecting? To gentle her down real nice with the right halter? (five bucks if you recognize that quote!)
But it's a tricky line between a sober actor playing drunk and an actor drinking during shooting and then acting drunker (or less drunk) than he or she is. The sober actor might get all the motions and slurs right, but the insulated bi-polar aspect -- the ability to careen from jubilant to morose, from possessive to ambivalent, from greedy to benevolent from mopey to zen, and back again, like a drunken slow motion slalom -- can only come from the fortified brand of drinking that limits itself to only one or three before breakfast, just to kill the shakes, you understand? And out in the desert heat that kind of buzz-balancing can knock you flat on your dehydrated ass by lunch, let alone holding out til cocktail hour, where you can finally drink in public, and get as sloppy as you want.
We know Burton and Huston drank constantly on the set of IGUANA (and Elizabeth was there, too). And the actors we see in MISFITS are all 'real' drunks, except Wallach. We can feel it. The drinking is legit. That being said, real drunkenness isn't always 'fun' to watch. I used to feel kind of strange when our old neighborhood would have big block parties and all the adults would get smashed and be out all night laughing it up in their lawn chairs while we kids roasted punks and marshmallows, blessedly free of any set bedtime, able, like them, to stay up until dawn. We'd be somewhat alarmed but also thrilled, to see our parents falling off their lawn chairs, hooking up with each other's wives, and belting out slurred folk songs, while we roasted marshmallows and smoked punks to keep the mosquitoes away and played kick the can while the parents roared at their endless dirty jokes around the glowing coals and seemed gradually to get sort of dangerous and unhinged. To me, in my innocence, they seemed like they'd all just been in a bad car accident or been hit on the head with baseballs. They lurched wildly and said contradictory things, punishing us for doing something they told us to do mere moments ago, and then forgetting they punished us and giving us sips of their (horrible-tasting) beer, rubbing our head too hard, then pushing us away again, telling us, at 5 AM, not to stay up all night.
The main drawback of MISFITS for me is the skeevy presence of Eli Wallach as Guido. Nothing personal against him as an actor. We all love him as the crafty Sicilian seducer in BABY DOLL, but Guido as a character here, with his all-too human sexual frustration and petulant longing for Monroe--is repugnant and tragically mired in biologic impulse. I don't want to see Wallach in anything for weeks after a MISFITS screening. I want to remove him from the scene, as I've tried to do with friends who get drunk and won't stop hitting on other friends at all-night parties, and I feel bad for Thelma Ritter, forced to be the fifth wheel as Monty Clift, Clark Gable, and Wallach all vie for MM's attention like starving orphans at the Charles Dickens bakeshop window. Of course we're not supposed to like Guido, but if not why are we even hanging out with him? Age is supposed to make people wise, and Guido seems an odd fit, like if Mrs. Fellowes stayed up with Shannon and, Maxine, and Miss Jelks in IGUANA and tried to get Burton in the sack herself. There's moments when Wallach cuts in on Gable and Monroe dancing that remind me of De Niro in NEW YORK, NEW YORK. We're like, yes, the guy can act and the guy filming him can direct and the writer can write, but they all forgot an essential ingredient: why we should we spend two hours with someone that this pushy and uncouth? As sensible people we naturally want to ditch guys like Guido at the bar, so we sneak out while he's in the bathroom, bring the cool people back with us, pick up a quarter keg on the way, and then turn the lights out and tell everyone to be super quiet if he comes peering in the window and/or knocking. I resent that Miller underestimates my wally-shucking acumen!
But hey, man, MISFITS still looms tall, for all its faults, and the last family of wild mustangs roaming the wasteland are a handy catch-all metaphor for chain smoking drunk writers, and their indulgent lovers (and the gangsters and big shots that paw them while you watch helplessly from behind your typewriter). Here, in this Arthur Miller-scripted little chamber piece, Marilyn Monroe is both the cherry atop our collective drunk American dream and its hungover, melancholic morning after. She's the enticing gauntlet that you mortgage your soul to grab. And she's the embarrassment when you come too quick and pass out, waking up feeling cheap and ashamed. She puts up with it all, it's part of the job. But she wants more out of her career than playing endearingly daff sexpots, and Miller digs it. He gets her, recognizes that she's the smartest person in every room, forced to couch her genius in breathy baby talk and to resign herself to being ignored even as everyone drools down her blouse. She's used to being alone in a crowd, exiled by her beauty, as if men--being rendered stupid by her allure--can't process her words beyond their shape in the wind. Only Gable's cowboy gets how sad she is. That's what wins her over. But she really connects with Clift, who seems as resigned to death, shell-shocked from bad rodeo falls, as damaged as she is - they're like lost souls, Lake and Ladd, Cage and Shue in LEAVING LAS VEGAS. They don't have to sleep together to share intimacy of the sort Eli Wallach meanwhile doesn't even know he secretly longs for. He can't get bast his crotch chakra, when all the time his heart is broken over an ex-wife whose dream house is an unfinished cottage facing the wasteland of sunburnt eternity.
Meanwhile, the stand-in for Arthur Miller (MM's newly-minted ex-husband) fumes back there on the Reno divorce court steps, watching Nevada cowboys fall over themselves at his once-wife's feet and secretly venting his spleen against them and her inability to fend them off or make her intellect known, the guys tossing him confrontational stares in between flirts, all resulting (or having resulted) in him feeling like he's being cuckolded every time he and her went out in public. He becomes like Welles childish, insecure cutting off ex-wife Rita' Hayworth's hair and dying it blond for LADY FROM SHANGHAI, a symbolic neutering, a vain (and in-vain) attempt to satisfy his petulant egoic insecurity.
But unlike Welles, Miller sees beyond his own genius far enough to recognize his pin-up ex-wife's mythic potential. Hayworth's character in Welles' film could be played by anyone --it's generic femme fatale material. But for MISFITS, Miller clearly understood Monroe's full mythic American mirage and the intelligent would-be beatnik underneath it; he saw the bravery in trying to escape from her own demons as well as the public's. As a termite art reward he writes for her these devastating one-liners that become private jokes between herself and maybe us if we're really listening rather than just drooling in the dark. Even if the rest of the world dismisses her quips as 'idiot savant wisdom' she at least has saved herself, the way Prospero saves himself from potentially infected late-coming party guests in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.
And it's Death that must be acknowledged first and foremost if Marilyn is to come into focus. Death! The ultimate marital therapist, it hangs over THE MISFITS like a windless, gnat-filled haze. Death! It hovers over the maiden of madness (MM) as a halo. Death! If you've never had to face it yourself--i.e. in a war, hospital, or crematorium--let me assure you it can be done with sanity intact, if you're drunk. Booze can enable a clear-eyed view of death invisible to the naked, sober, civilian eye (who'd merely shake and tremble like the drunk does sober just thinking about 'wages'. Cigarettes can help you think clearly enough to write about rather than just screaming in terror. But kill you? Yes, that too.
John Huston, like Howard Hawks and few others, saw the inextricable link of death to the cinematic outdoor activities of all men, be they whalers or iguana wranglers or prospectors or cowboys or boxers or detectives. Huston's great literary drunkenness is of the sort one sees in WWI pilots in 1930s movies, the kind only facing death, and seeing your friends die in flames, can endow.
The similarity of MISFIT's 'freeing-the-horses' climax and the incident of Richard Burton cutting loose the titular lizard in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1957) should prove no coincidence but a clear thread in Huston's 60s oeuvre (who made both). In the nonstop stream of barbarism that is civilization through the eyes of the alcoholic, poetic, and bi-polar (the only sane souls around), Huston knows that a single act of compassion just may save oneself, like a kind of ceremonial anti-sacrifice, because 'you are that'. It's this motif that attempts to somehow impose order on the swirl of visuals in Malick's TREE OF LIFE (my sort-of review here), for example, as when a dinosaur merely tags a wounded possible dinner with his foot and marches off (and later a similar gesture is repeated between warring siblings), and it's this gesture--the throwing them back because they're too small, as it were--that, ideally, finally, redeems both womanizing drunks Burton and Gable, and sends ugly Americans like Ms. Fellowes and Guido (Eli Wallach) home to stew any chance they had for love in their own fermenting mason jar juices.
Otherwise, the plots of IGUANA and MISFITS are almost comically nonexistent. In the former, Dick Burton freaks out after getting fired from his job for giving in to the relentless charms of Sue Lyon, then is told weird sad Carson McCullers-style stories of an old maid's two sexual encounters with creepy lonely men while an old man spouts a poem. In the latter, Gable, along with fellow cowboy Montgomery Clift, ropes wild mustangs in the Nevada desert to sell to a dog food conglomerate. Before that they drink with and try to ball Marilyn Monroe while Thelma Ritter acts as a tipsy sort of chaperone, But in these skeletons of plots, the whole world seems to fall apart only to magically reveal that death has the power to pull it all back together.
And it's Death that must be acknowledged first and foremost if Marilyn is to come into focus. Death! The ultimate marital therapist, it hangs over THE MISFITS like a windless, gnat-filled haze. Death! It hovers over the maiden of madness (MM) as a halo. Death! If you've never had to face it yourself--i.e. in a war, hospital, or crematorium--let me assure you it can be done with sanity intact, if you're drunk. Booze can enable a clear-eyed view of death invisible to the naked, sober, civilian eye (who'd merely shake and tremble like the drunk does sober just thinking about 'wages'. Cigarettes can help you think clearly enough to write about rather than just screaming in terror. But kill you? Yes, that too.
John Huston, like Howard Hawks and few others, saw the inextricable link of death to the cinematic outdoor activities of all men, be they whalers or iguana wranglers or prospectors or cowboys or boxers or detectives. Huston's great literary drunkenness is of the sort one sees in WWI pilots in 1930s movies, the kind only facing death, and seeing your friends die in flames, can endow.
The similarity of MISFIT's 'freeing-the-horses' climax and the incident of Richard Burton cutting loose the titular lizard in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1957) should prove no coincidence but a clear thread in Huston's 60s oeuvre (who made both). In the nonstop stream of barbarism that is civilization through the eyes of the alcoholic, poetic, and bi-polar (the only sane souls around), Huston knows that a single act of compassion just may save oneself, like a kind of ceremonial anti-sacrifice, because 'you are that'. It's this motif that attempts to somehow impose order on the swirl of visuals in Malick's TREE OF LIFE (my sort-of review here), for example, as when a dinosaur merely tags a wounded possible dinner with his foot and marches off (and later a similar gesture is repeated between warring siblings), and it's this gesture--the throwing them back because they're too small, as it were--that, ideally, finally, redeems both womanizing drunks Burton and Gable, and sends ugly Americans like Ms. Fellowes and Guido (Eli Wallach) home to stew any chance they had for love in their own fermenting mason jar juices.
Otherwise, the plots of IGUANA and MISFITS are almost comically nonexistent. In the former, Dick Burton freaks out after getting fired from his job for giving in to the relentless charms of Sue Lyon, then is told weird sad Carson McCullers-style stories of an old maid's two sexual encounters with creepy lonely men while an old man spouts a poem. In the latter, Gable, along with fellow cowboy Montgomery Clift, ropes wild mustangs in the Nevada desert to sell to a dog food conglomerate. Before that they drink with and try to ball Marilyn Monroe while Thelma Ritter acts as a tipsy sort of chaperone, But in these skeletons of plots, the whole world seems to fall apart only to magically reveal that death has the power to pull it all back together.
In MISFITS, it turns out Gahle, Clift, and pilot Wallach have already caught and sold every last mustang in the desert, all bound to be "stacked and canned" as Burton puts it in IGUANA. except for a single hardscrabble family, still hanging on. The strategy: ex-bomber Guido barnstorms them down out of the mountains and into the lassos of Gable and Clift, there waiting at the end of the ravine. Meanwhile, alone in the car, Marilyn has a nervous breakdown thinking about these poor gorgeous wild and free beasts being ground-up, stacked, and canned (Burton's words for modern humanity in IGUANA) so the boys can afford to get her drunk.
A whole reel goes by while the cowpokes tussle over who will release the horses and win MM's favor, all while she convulses in empathic-neurotic pain in the backseat, as do we. But outside on the vast flat plain, her dramatic tantrums seem lost in the wind. Huston films her way downwind, so her shouts are heard only as murmurs. I'm fairly sure, Huston hated her by that time in the shooting, for holding up filming so many times people were getting heart attacks and kidney stones in frustration. But hey, it suits her character. Despite the gorgeousness, she's a drunk through and through, same as the lot of them, so what the hell were you expecting? To gentle her down real nice with the right halter? (five bucks if you recognize that quote!)
We know Burton and Huston drank constantly on the set of IGUANA (and Elizabeth was there, too). And the actors we see in MISFITS are all 'real' drunks, except Wallach. We can feel it. The drinking is legit. That being said, real drunkenness isn't always 'fun' to watch. I used to feel kind of strange when our old neighborhood would have big block parties and all the adults would get smashed and be out all night laughing it up in their lawn chairs while we kids roasted punks and marshmallows, blessedly free of any set bedtime, able, like them, to stay up until dawn. We'd be somewhat alarmed but also thrilled, to see our parents falling off their lawn chairs, hooking up with each other's wives, and belting out slurred folk songs, while we roasted marshmallows and smoked punks to keep the mosquitoes away and played kick the can while the parents roared at their endless dirty jokes around the glowing coals and seemed gradually to get sort of dangerous and unhinged. To me, in my innocence, they seemed like they'd all just been in a bad car accident or been hit on the head with baseballs. They lurched wildly and said contradictory things, punishing us for doing something they told us to do mere moments ago, and then forgetting they punished us and giving us sips of their (horrible-tasting) beer, rubbing our head too hard, then pushing us away again, telling us, at 5 AM, not to stay up all night.
The main drawback of MISFITS for me is the skeevy presence of Eli Wallach as Guido. Nothing personal against him as an actor. We all love him as the crafty Sicilian seducer in BABY DOLL, but Guido as a character here, with his all-too human sexual frustration and petulant longing for Monroe--is repugnant and tragically mired in biologic impulse. I don't want to see Wallach in anything for weeks after a MISFITS screening. I want to remove him from the scene, as I've tried to do with friends who get drunk and won't stop hitting on other friends at all-night parties, and I feel bad for Thelma Ritter, forced to be the fifth wheel as Monty Clift, Clark Gable, and Wallach all vie for MM's attention like starving orphans at the Charles Dickens bakeshop window. Of course we're not supposed to like Guido, but if not why are we even hanging out with him? Age is supposed to make people wise, and Guido seems an odd fit, like if Mrs. Fellowes stayed up with Shannon and, Maxine, and Miss Jelks in IGUANA and tried to get Burton in the sack herself. There's moments when Wallach cuts in on Gable and Monroe dancing that remind me of De Niro in NEW YORK, NEW YORK. We're like, yes, the guy can act and the guy filming him can direct and the writer can write, but they all forgot an essential ingredient: why we should we spend two hours with someone that this pushy and uncouth? As sensible people we naturally want to ditch guys like Guido at the bar, so we sneak out while he's in the bathroom, bring the cool people back with us, pick up a quarter keg on the way, and then turn the lights out and tell everyone to be super quiet if he comes peering in the window and/or knocking. I resent that Miller underestimates my wally-shucking acumen!
Then again, it is his house.
POST-SCRIPT 7-5-15- Interestingly, I'm half-watching this again on TCM and not getting this skeevy Wallach vibe at all. It's clearer that he respects both the boundary of Gable-Monroe (who've been living together a week somewhere between their first trip to the half-finished house, and the day of the rodeo, which I missed in the past) and he's nice to Thelma Ritter --together they're like the fifth business of the play - the secondary romance between the man's butler and the maiden's maid, so to speak, though they're just buddies. His bemused tolerance of her bespeaks to his character- though he gets skeevy later it's still nice to see him less loathsome than I recall via this post.
POST-SCRIPT 8-7-16 - Interestingly, I'm half watching this while spanking my sphinx (don't ask) and notice --as I never did before--that Gable and Monroe are supposed to have spent at least a few weeks together shacked up in Guido's unfinished house in between the day of the rodeo and the last time Thelma and Guido were there--time enough to build a garden at least-- and Marilyn's brilliant observations--ignored by the rest of them for the brilliance they are--and Clift's shattered face and wobbly drunkenness and the way everyone is so hammered all day at the rodeo, not just Clift, nor Monroe, nor Gable but Wallach, too--I don't remember any of that. Last time I was blinded by my dislike of skeevy Guido; this time I'm not overly horrified by him, nor enthralled by Clift or Gable by contrast (Gable's mush-mouth drunkenness seems tragic; he makes a spectacle of himself in a great powerful scene (was he really drunk? It sure seems that way). I also noticed details in the ride home from the rodeo with Gable passed out in back of the station wagon, Clift sleeping on her Marilyn's lap in the backseat, and Wallach weaving over the yellow line while looking backwards and cresting 90 mph. " Now I respect Wallach's existential loneliness, he 'gets' Rosalind in ways Gay and Monty don't --he's impressed by her sensitivity ("when something happens to someone, you care.") and is wiser to his own failings; he just doesn't know any other way to reach Marilyn except through sexual come-ons --and though it's kind of repulsive, it's because we don't want to own up to feeling that way herself. He wants what Gable has, and Clift has with her- a kind of stray puppy playing with a young girl kind of affection. He's tragic. And Marilyn is tragic (even Clift makes a kind of sad play for her in the end) and Gable is tragic (he's got tombstones in his eyes). and he knows it.
To confess, I guess I developed a deep Guido hatred from being in a band in college, which meant having a hot girlfriend and regularly throwing big drunken parties wherein I had to regularly fend off the sexual mustang-hormone snarky needy skeevy bastards with their denim jackets and terrible townie teeth that hung around her and clawed the turf and snorted coke through their bovine nostrils and got all mean and grew ugly devil horns after I cut in and/or kicked them out for daring to try and traverse the yawning chasms of charisma between them and my gorgeous girl. So yeah, I hate the Guidos and the wallies and the dirtbags. And when their scummy bullying come-ons trumped my poet boozer moodiness, I formed a permanent resentment.
In other words, Arthur Miller, I feel your pain.
It's not fair to him, of course, because he had an unimpeachable literary rep, so the heat was on to perform as a genius and he must have been suffering from the same anti-wally poison due to being the envy of every man alive. There's a Charlie McCarthy Show (radio) episode where Charlie and Marilyn are running off to get married, and when the world finds out he's chased by legions of angry soldiers and sailors trying to prevent it. Everyone chimes in, from Arthur Godfrey ("by golly, there'll be no commercials today") to Winston Churchill ("never has so much... been taken away from so many... by so little.") Even the justice of the peace tries to steal her away ("Mrs. Monroe, I'm a bachelor steady habits").
Surely passing sailors and soldiers didn't view splintery ectomorph Arthur Miller as competition in the virile red blooded satyr category, any more than they did "woodpecker's pin-up boy" Charlie McCarthy. Guido seems to be the receptacle for all that passive aggressive rage Miller surely felt against all the slavering legions - he's the trog everyman who knows he'll kick himself for days if I doesn't at least make a try for that blonde brass ring. I can vouch that it's a horrible, powerless feeling being the Arthur. People mistakenly think it's a prestige position --the envy of every man--but it's hard to keep 'earning' her in their eyes, no matter if they're perfect strangers. There's almost nothing you can do about it that doesn't look childish on your part. (My strategy: spill my drink on their shoes, but I rarely did since I loved booze too much to throw it away.) I avoided dating really hot girls, but keeping them as friends if possible --to be the Clift, so to speak, rather than either the Guido or the Gable. But then again, I've got tombstones in my eyes too.
Perhaps it's no accident then that Wallach is the only actor still alive in real life as of this writing, as if watching all the other cast members slowly vanish in the desert wind like shimmering horizon angels left him cursed with longevity (the reward for self-hatred). The other actors found 'the highway under the big star' and left Eli behind to fly his damned crop duster "without ever being able to land."
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Then there are the wild mustangs in that desert valley. You can wonder why Gable doesn't realize that he, himself, is the reason there are no more wild mustangs in the canyon. His attitude in roping them, so casual about the preciousness of animal life, tells us he's a true cowboy and maybe cowboys--courageous as they may be--are all sociopaths. Maybe all hunters and soldiers have to be immune to their fellow creature's suffering just to keep from cryin'. Gable's blind to having drained the mustang bottle, but Marilyn knows those poor mustangs are just like her --caught in the thresher of dirtbag male desire. The horses bring money for booze which the cowboys feed to her in an effort to get her into bed. Guido then offers to free them if it means her can get her into bed without the bottle (thus 'landing' in however patchy a field) which skeeves MM and us all out--like he's holding the horses hostage--and Clift is just too sensitive, too banged up, to deal with her pain, beyond a sympathetic gaze.
By all accounts Clift and Monroe were both half out of their minds on booze and pills during the torturously long location shoot and the wild-eyed, emotionally battered vulnerability they display is not just acting. Though still charismatic in certain angles, overall Clift looks like shit, with visible broken nose ridge fracture, smashed puffy face; he seems super out of it even before he's kicked by a bull, like "that bull had the whole Milky Way in its hoof!" (was his character's beat-up look a way to rationalize the obvious damage to Clift's face?)
POST-SCRIPT 7-5-15- Interestingly, I'm half-watching this again on TCM and not getting this skeevy Wallach vibe at all. It's clearer that he respects both the boundary of Gable-Monroe (who've been living together a week somewhere between their first trip to the half-finished house, and the day of the rodeo, which I missed in the past) and he's nice to Thelma Ritter --together they're like the fifth business of the play - the secondary romance between the man's butler and the maiden's maid, so to speak, though they're just buddies. His bemused tolerance of her bespeaks to his character- though he gets skeevy later it's still nice to see him less loathsome than I recall via this post.
POST-SCRIPT 8-7-16 - Interestingly, I'm half watching this while spanking my sphinx (don't ask) and notice --as I never did before--that Gable and Monroe are supposed to have spent at least a few weeks together shacked up in Guido's unfinished house in between the day of the rodeo and the last time Thelma and Guido were there--time enough to build a garden at least-- and Marilyn's brilliant observations--ignored by the rest of them for the brilliance they are--and Clift's shattered face and wobbly drunkenness and the way everyone is so hammered all day at the rodeo, not just Clift, nor Monroe, nor Gable but Wallach, too--I don't remember any of that. Last time I was blinded by my dislike of skeevy Guido; this time I'm not overly horrified by him, nor enthralled by Clift or Gable by contrast (Gable's mush-mouth drunkenness seems tragic; he makes a spectacle of himself in a great powerful scene (was he really drunk? It sure seems that way). I also noticed details in the ride home from the rodeo with Gable passed out in back of the station wagon, Clift sleeping on her Marilyn's lap in the backseat, and Wallach weaving over the yellow line while looking backwards and cresting 90 mph. " Now I respect Wallach's existential loneliness, he 'gets' Rosalind in ways Gay and Monty don't --he's impressed by her sensitivity ("when something happens to someone, you care.") and is wiser to his own failings; he just doesn't know any other way to reach Marilyn except through sexual come-ons --and though it's kind of repulsive, it's because we don't want to own up to feeling that way herself. He wants what Gable has, and Clift has with her- a kind of stray puppy playing with a young girl kind of affection. He's tragic. And Marilyn is tragic (even Clift makes a kind of sad play for her in the end) and Gable is tragic (he's got tombstones in his eyes). and he knows it.
To confess, I guess I developed a deep Guido hatred from being in a band in college, which meant having a hot girlfriend and regularly throwing big drunken parties wherein I had to regularly fend off the sexual mustang-hormone snarky needy skeevy bastards with their denim jackets and terrible townie teeth that hung around her and clawed the turf and snorted coke through their bovine nostrils and got all mean and grew ugly devil horns after I cut in and/or kicked them out for daring to try and traverse the yawning chasms of charisma between them and my gorgeous girl. So yeah, I hate the Guidos and the wallies and the dirtbags. And when their scummy bullying come-ons trumped my poet boozer moodiness, I formed a permanent resentment.
In other words, Arthur Miller, I feel your pain.
It's not fair to him, of course, because he had an unimpeachable literary rep, so the heat was on to perform as a genius and he must have been suffering from the same anti-wally poison due to being the envy of every man alive. There's a Charlie McCarthy Show (radio) episode where Charlie and Marilyn are running off to get married, and when the world finds out he's chased by legions of angry soldiers and sailors trying to prevent it. Everyone chimes in, from Arthur Godfrey ("by golly, there'll be no commercials today") to Winston Churchill ("never has so much... been taken away from so many... by so little.") Even the justice of the peace tries to steal her away ("Mrs. Monroe, I'm a bachelor steady habits").
Surely passing sailors and soldiers didn't view splintery ectomorph Arthur Miller as competition in the virile red blooded satyr category, any more than they did "woodpecker's pin-up boy" Charlie McCarthy. Guido seems to be the receptacle for all that passive aggressive rage Miller surely felt against all the slavering legions - he's the trog everyman who knows he'll kick himself for days if I doesn't at least make a try for that blonde brass ring. I can vouch that it's a horrible, powerless feeling being the Arthur. People mistakenly think it's a prestige position --the envy of every man--but it's hard to keep 'earning' her in their eyes, no matter if they're perfect strangers. There's almost nothing you can do about it that doesn't look childish on your part. (My strategy: spill my drink on their shoes, but I rarely did since I loved booze too much to throw it away.) I avoided dating really hot girls, but keeping them as friends if possible --to be the Clift, so to speak, rather than either the Guido or the Gable. But then again, I've got tombstones in my eyes too.
Perhaps it's no accident then that Wallach is the only actor still alive in real life as of this writing, as if watching all the other cast members slowly vanish in the desert wind like shimmering horizon angels left him cursed with longevity (the reward for self-hatred). The other actors found 'the highway under the big star' and left Eli behind to fly his damned crop duster "without ever being able to land."
Then there are the wild mustangs in that desert valley. You can wonder why Gable doesn't realize that he, himself, is the reason there are no more wild mustangs in the canyon. His attitude in roping them, so casual about the preciousness of animal life, tells us he's a true cowboy and maybe cowboys--courageous as they may be--are all sociopaths. Maybe all hunters and soldiers have to be immune to their fellow creature's suffering just to keep from cryin'. Gable's blind to having drained the mustang bottle, but Marilyn knows those poor mustangs are just like her --caught in the thresher of dirtbag male desire. The horses bring money for booze which the cowboys feed to her in an effort to get her into bed. Guido then offers to free them if it means her can get her into bed without the bottle (thus 'landing' in however patchy a field) which skeeves MM and us all out--like he's holding the horses hostage--and Clift is just too sensitive, too banged up, to deal with her pain, beyond a sympathetic gaze.
By all accounts Clift and Monroe were both half out of their minds on booze and pills during the torturously long location shoot and the wild-eyed, emotionally battered vulnerability they display is not just acting. Though still charismatic in certain angles, overall Clift looks like shit, with visible broken nose ridge fracture, smashed puffy face; he seems super out of it even before he's kicked by a bull, like "that bull had the whole Milky Way in its hoof!" (was his character's beat-up look a way to rationalize the obvious damage to Clift's face?) And the Marlboro cowboys all thrown up against the barb wire tracheotomies of Reno, legs wrapped up in kids' paddleball strings, noses bloody from getting kicked by bucking broncos, faces paralyzed in car accidents, faces bloated by booze and "another roll of pills"-- and they shall lament there's no more hosses to rope for dog food, and the pills are harder and harder to get now that the jig is up, and the dogs that ate the food there was are all dead from old age and Clift and Monroe never got there at all.
That's progress, like the westward expansion of the dust bowl. The whole final segment of roping the mustangs and Marilyn Monroe freaking out with those big bipolar doe eyes is so painful I sometimes have to walk away from it, but keep it running on the DVD player anyway, and come back in time for that brilliant final fade-out, with Gable and Monroe driving 'home' towards that far off star. No credits, no music, no... nothing. It's not perfect as a film but as Death's desert Christmas card it's ripe with transcendental mythic inscrutability and that alone makes it a drunken, desperate little triumph. Set it free, Shannon, set them all free, like Monroe, Clift and Gable and the iguana and mustangs are set finally free, and play God here tonight. Run, Marilyn! Run for the hills before the Giancana beach boy's cannibal hot pots claim your sweet gropeworthy fetlocks and your mustang hips are devoured by the ravenous eyes of our collective Anubis.
That's progress, like the westward expansion of the dust bowl. The whole final segment of roping the mustangs and Marilyn Monroe freaking out with those big bipolar doe eyes is so painful I sometimes have to walk away from it, but keep it running on the DVD player anyway, and come back in time for that brilliant final fade-out, with Gable and Monroe driving 'home' towards that far off star. No credits, no music, no... nothing. It's not perfect as a film but as Death's desert Christmas card it's ripe with transcendental mythic inscrutability and that alone makes it a drunken, desperate little triumph. Set it free, Shannon, set them all free, like Monroe, Clift and Gable and the iguana and mustangs are set finally free, and play God here tonight. Run, Marilyn! Run for the hills before the Giancana beach boy's cannibal hot pots claim your sweet gropeworthy fetlocks and your mustang hips are devoured by the ravenous eyes of our collective Anubis.
Wow. I really need to see this film.
ReplyDeleteEric I live to read these posts of yours...this particular one on The Misfits is nothing short of great! Your personal insight matched by the candid nature of how these films speak to you is how films should be reviewed...I have been watching the misfits for years and never grasped the full scope of it until reading this...don't ever stop writing my friend you are an original.
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ReplyDeleteUmmm, Eric, Eli Wallach didn't play Angel Eyes in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He played Tuco. Please change that. It makes you look so ignorant.
ReplyDeleteIf Wallach's portrayal if Guido bothers your (obviously) delicate sensibilities that much, it's because he did his job as a very good actor. Guido is SUPPOSED to be repugnant. Otherwise, you're missing the whole point of the character's presence in the movie. But, my God, try REALLY hard not to be too repulsed by Guido, okay? We would hate to have you miss Wallach's other fine performances because you were hiding under the bed!
thanks for your impassioned defense, Stampschick. I excised the Angel Eyes, not sure why i thought that. Anyway, Eli Wallach is lucky to have so fervent a defender! If you'll note I post-scripted awhile ago checking the vehemence of my response, confessing it's based, as all too often these things are, on projecting traits I wish I could somehow exorcise from my own character through a cinematic denial. The thing about Misfits, I've seen it dozens of times, and thought it was a masterpiece maybe 1/3 the time, and in all those viewings I've never seen the same film twice, as if my memory is somehow re-editing it in every interim. Either way, keep up the attitude! The all-too often drab and conformative world of cinema criticism needs more maniac amore.
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