The first time Marilyn Monroe appears onscreen in The Misfits, her final completed film, she’s rehearsing. As Roslyn Taber, a soon-to-be divorcee on her way to the courthouse for a hearing, she’s going over her lines for the judge, perfecting her makeup, making sure she’s wearing the right dress. She needs to be exactly what the justice system wants her to be, a wronged woman in search of freedom, even if Roslyn herself doesn’t entirely believe it. A century after Monroe’s birth, it still stands as one of the most fascinating character introductions in Monroe’s filmography, because it reflects in many ways the entire process of making The Misfits—a tragic finale for Monroe, where a disintegrating marriage should’ve given way to a new beginning.
No one thought at the time that John Huston’s film, adapted by Monroe’s then-husband Arthur Miller from his short story of the same name, would mark Monroe’s swan song. It was never intended as a farewell. In fact, it was initially conceived as a kind of reintroduction for the star, who’d spent a couple of years away from the spotlight to concentrate on marriage and motherhood, the latter of which sadly never came to fruition. The Misfits was supposed to be Marilyn Monroe’s glorious return, cementing her not just as a movie star who could still pull in crowds, but as a serious actress capable of more than Hollywood had ever given her credit for. Instead, The Misfits was not the career relaunch or marriage-saving labor of love that the star had hoped it would be, but rather an unintentional curtain call that merely teased what her legacy could’ve been.
Despite its pedigree, including Huston and Miller behind the camera and Monroe, Clark Gable (who died 12 days after filming completed, making it his unintended swan song as well), Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach in front of it, The Misfits is not a great film. Years of rewrites, as Miller and Huston doubled back over the text time and time again, rendered it tonally rough. Characters spout long Millerian monologues about life rather than talking to each other, and the pacing, with the exception of the climactic sequence, often grinds the film to a halt. It’s a film caught between aching character drama about the death of a certain kind of American masculinity and romantic Western about a woman who offers a few lonesome cowboys a chance at redemption. No one is victimized by that dissonance more than Monroe.
Roslyn’s arc, when it’s working, is meant to challenge our conception of what a Marilyn Monroe character should be like. In that initial scene, she’s half-naked, putting on makeup, preparing to please one man (a judge) so she can escape the clutches of another (her soon-to-be ex-husband). She’s preoccupied with making everyone happy, getting everything just right. She’s also drop-dead gorgeous to the point that her landlady, Ms. Steers (Thelma Ritter), informs mechanic and pilot Guido (Wallach) that Roslyn can’t drive her car because men keep causing fender benders just to have an excuse to talk to her. When Guido finally lays eyes on her, he’s instantly obsessed, and that contagious obsession soon passes on to aging cowboy Gaylord (Gable) and rodeo rambler Perce (Clift). Right away, Monroe is back in the Sugar Kane, Some Like It Hot mold of an irresistible woman who could just use a hand and is instantly surrounded by men who’d like to lend that hand.
Then the narrative shifts. Roslyn is initially sold the idea that a man—whether it’s free-spirited Gay or wounded Guido—will save her, but she’s then given the opportunity to do a little self-saving when Guido offers her a house in the Nevada desert free of charge. There, with Gay by her side, she falls in love not just with Gable’s seasoned swagger but with the landscape itself. Away from the city and the trappings of her old life, she finds what Gay calls, at the end of the movie and under darker circumstances, “another way to be alive.” Reinvigorated by the freedom of this new life, her own joy and relative youth (Monroe was in her mid-30s at the time of filming, while Wallach was in his mid-40s and Gable was nearing 60) provides a charge to the broken down older men around her, reminding them what’s possible and how easy it can be to enjoy the little things.
When the chief dramatic tension of the film finally arrives, Miller, to his credit, swerves. For a moment it feels like the chief conflict will simply be Guido’s jealousy over Gay’s relationship with Roslyn, putting Monroe in yet another film in which men fight over her. That’s still a part of it, but the greater conflict arises when Roslyn comes to understand the casual violence toward animals with which Gay lives his life. It starts with rabbits in the garden, but later swells to include wild mustangs in the desert, which Gay, Perce, and Guido plan to rope, wrangle, and sell to dog food companies for a quick buck. Roslyn sees this as needlessly cruel, and the audience sees the horses as embodiments of her own newfound freedom, which Gay wants to strangle out of existence. It’s a tremendous shock to Roslyn, who now sees that the men who showed her the way to freedom are no better than any other men, ready to tie down anything that’s free and tame it because, as Gay puts it, “nothing can live unless something dies.” In the end, Roslyn must put saving herself on hold in order to save Gay, who has a change of heart and rides off in the dark with Roslyn, following the North Star home.
It’s worth laying Roslyn’s arc out like this, if only to see that it’s not so much a character arc as it is a series of wild emotional swings, capped off by Monroe’s screaming monologue in the desert as she curses her three cowboys as “dead men.” According to Monroe biographer Donald Spoto, she hated that scene, and felt that it reduced her character to nothing more than a “screaming, crazy fit,” taking all of the nuance and intelligence out of Roslyn’s life in that moment.
As Spoto points out in Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, when Miller first began writing The Misfits in the late 1950s, he was deeply in love with his new bride, ready to build dream houses in the country designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and settle down with kids, while she played the perfect housewife and mother. By 1960, as The Misfits began shooting with a script so unfinished that Monroe had to stay up half the night to learn the pages written each day, the marriage was crumbling. Monroe and Miller had separate hotel rooms, Monroe was struggling with new levels of substance abuse, and with each new rewrite it seemed that Roslyn got further away from the character Miller had originally conceived, the one that would mark his wife’s return as a serious dramatic actress. Roslyn had lost much of her nuance, reduced to “pretty girl” in some scenes and “shrieking scold” in others.
Despite her reputation as a difficult actress to work with because of chronic lateness, drug addiction, and paralyzing insecurities, despite her bouts of illness and exhaustion and the sweltering Nevada heat, despite her need for many takes to get each scene exactly right and her reliance on the Strasberg family to serve as her constant acting coaches, Monroe was not swallowed whole by Miller’s writerly machinations. Nor was she intimidated or overshadowed by the male movie stars around her, even Gable, whom she’d often said she imagined to be her father when she was a girl. At one point, as the film’s budget ballooned and production threatened to close down, Huston—whose gambling addiction hindered the production in its own right—had Monroe hospitalized for a week in part so he had some time to finesse more money out of the studio, blaming her delicate condition in the press. Like Roslyn, her hope for a fresh start was pulled in many different directions by a cadre of older, often condescending men.
And yet there is life in Roslyn, even at Monroe’s most exhausted and addled (some of Huston’s soft-focus shots deliberately mask her rougher days), even when she’s clearly chafing against everything her character must face. In a film starring multiple members of Hollywood royalty and directed by one of its early kings, she delivers the most compelling performance by far. Long devoted to Lee Strasberg’s method, she took all of her personal strife and channeled it into a heartbreaking depiction of a woman who slowly realizes she is nothing but a finite resource to these men, who draw strength from her youth and beauty and see it as a way to recapture days long since past.
The scene in which Roslyn sits, looking up at the night sky with Perce’s head in her lap, is a particularly potent example. As Clift unloads his troubles on his co-star, Monroe listens with patience, her doe eyes glittering with vibrance, her face shifting subtly from icy calculation to passionate investment. Her “screaming fit” at the end aside, Roslyn’s strength as the men around her collapse, and her willingness to forgive and move forward, come across beautifully in Monroe’s patient performance, the cold fire to Gable’s ashen, crumbling fury.
When The Misfits wrapped in late 1960, Monroe was already developing other projects and getting used to the idea that her marriage was ending. She could not have known, any more than Gable could, that this thorny little revisionist Western, choppy and troubled though it was, would be the end for her career. This makes The Misfits an unintentionally profound finale. As both Roslyn Tabor and as herself, Monroe delivers a peek at another way to be alive, a chance to rise above the men who’d dare to control her, and to instead become an emotional driving force unto herself. We get a glimpse of the actress she would’ve become, a complex and thoughtful and mercurial figure capable of weathering storms. The Misfits is a mess, but Monroe, in her own quiet way, is its salvation.
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