The Misfits

Director: John Huston

1961 / 125min / DCP

The final film for stars Clark Gable, playing an aging cowboy, “Gay” Langland, and Marilyn Monroe, as the Reno divorcée, Roslyn, whom he whisks off to his unfinished ranch in the Nevada countryside, from a tailor-made script by Arthur Miller, Monroe’s then-husband. (Their marriage disintegrated rapidly during the shoot.) Aspects of Langland’s untamed lifestyle—full of rowdy pals including truck driver Eli Wallach and bronc-buster Monty Clift—intrigue the gentle Roslyn, but she is repulsed by others, such as the brutality of the rodeo scene and his roping of wild mustangs for dog food. Huston’s muscular direction grounds Miller’s airy metaphors in a tactile, physical world, while Russell Metty’s monochrome photography offsets the film’s clash of wills against a bone-white backdrop of sepulchral desert.