Pretty far down on my personal list of Items of Negligible Interest
– somewhere just above trade stats for Argentinian tomatoes and junior school
netball scores from Uttar Pradesh – is the life of Marilyn Monroe, trashy,
glitzy and tragic a phenomenon though she is.
It was even a while before I recognised her when I
accidentally got caught up in her final completed film, John Huston’s The Misfits (1961). I was intrigued by the
way the light fell on Clark Gable’s rugged visage, a certain amusement in
seeing so young an Eli Wallach, a certain stilted grace in that period’s acting
style, so theatrical compared to today’s naturalistic mumbling. But most
interesting to me was the prominent role of the animals.
In the film, Monroe plays the role of Roslyn Taber, a troubled
but vivacious woman who goes to Reno, Nevada to get a quickie divorce, as one
did; and ends up under the wing of Gay Langland (Gable), a somewhat ageing
cowboy who hoicks her off to a half-built house in the Nevada desert which
belongs to ex-Air Force pilot and widower Guido Racanelli (Wallach). Later they
are joined by another dislocated individual, Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift).
Each nursing amorous designs upon the suddenly liberated Roslyn, they embark on
a last manly adventure, running down some of the few remaining wild mustangs in the Nevada hills. Anything’s better
than “wages”, apparently.
Much commentary has highlighted the way the film jibes with
Monroe’s own well-known love of animals, which was less activist than adoring
of pets – a basset, a parakeet, a seldom-ridden horse, and most famously a Maltese
poodle, a gift from Frank Sinatra, which she named, because of the latter’s
connection with that illustrious outfit, Mafia, or Maf. “Dogs never bite me,”
Monroe is famously quoted as saying, “Just humans.” And again: “I like animals. If you talk to a dog or a cat, it doesn't tell you to shut
up.” When, as late as 1993, the film’s screenwriter, playwright Arthur Miller (The Crucible, Death of a Salesman),
received a Classic Film Award for The
Misfits, it was Monroe’s love of horses he spoke about. Perhaps a little
like Monroe herself, Roslyn cares,
feels others’ distress as her own, “hooked into the whole thing,” as Guido
says; her “gift for life” alternately infuriates and allows the men to open up,
but also makes her preternaturally vulnerable, belonging nowhere.
The Roslyn/Monroe congruence is unsurprising, given that the
role was specifically written for Monroe by Miller, then her third husband.
Miller had himself gone to Reno to divorce his previous wife, and met up with
some of those ageing mustangers. He had also written a vignette, “Please Don’t
Kill Anything”, in which a Monroe-like character runs along a beach, picking up
fish rejected by the fishermen and throwing them back into the sea. Monroe
certainly stimulated in Miller this animal-saving theme, which he incorporated
into a short story, “The Misfits”, published in Esquire in 1957. The story was subtitled “Chicken feed: the last
frontier of the quixotic cowboy”, because the mustangs were indeed destined for
slaughtering and rendering into dog and chicken feed. The last mustangers are “unreconstructed
originals”, as James Goode called them, “the last real men left on this earth”,
the film character Isabelle Steers (Thelma Ritter) says – “and as unreliable as
jack-rabbits.” They were as much misfits as the straggling horses, the remnants
of great wild herds that by 1946 had been reduced to handfuls. This was the basis
for the screenplay which Miller worked up with Huston, though there would be
significant differences. (Also set in this period, incidentally, was another
Miller story, "The Bees", in which an upwardly-mobile house-owner battles to rid his home of bees,
bombing them with DDT and sulphur dioxide; the mass poisoning was clearly a
synecdoche of suburbia’s sprawling invasion of the natural world.)
Film critics have always been deeply divided about the quality
of The Misfits – “a sparky but
rather shallow story of emotional frailty”, Timeout opined; ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty
considers it “an illuminating period piece, documenting the
transition from a frontier to an urban West [and] a sensitive treatment of
human ageing”. Most observers were
as fascinated by its real-life back-stories: the already-crumbling
Miller-Monroe marriage; her earlier miscarriage, her unreliability and rehab,
and dissatisfaction with the rather dilly, patronising role Miller had penned
for her; Huston’s alcoholism that put him to sleep in his director’s chair;
tensions between Gable and Wallach. Most of all, the so-called “curse”: the
fact that Gable was dead of a heart attack just 12 days after the film wrapped
in November 1960, Monroe 18 months later of a barbiturates overdose, and Clift
in 1965 aged only 46. (Wallach, in contrast, continued acting for decades,
dying in 2014.) These prurient aspects overshadowed attention to the animal
theme, though it has been pointed out that in its clear objection to animal
cruelty the film was ahead of its time. There has also been some discussion
about whether cruelty had been inflicted on the actual animals on set,
especially in the climactic mustang-catching scenes, which I and many other
viewers now find very hard to watch.
The mustangs have rightly preoccupied most studies. Their decimation
has mostly been interpreted as symbolic or symptomatic of the waning of the
legendary Old Wild West, overtaken by post-war disillusionment and mechanised
modernity. The Misfits is an early
anti-Western. Along with this goes the degradation of masculinity itself: the
legendary rugged and weaponised self-sufficiency – which involves the
unsentimental domination of land, animals and women alike – is becoming subordinated
to impersonal machinery and effete gardening. Guido, for example, expresses his
daring individualism and freedom in his rather creaky biplane, but in his one
unguarded moment confesses to Roslyn that he’s haunted by the easy,
depersonalised destruction of cities and people – and “puppydogs” – he meted out as a bomber pilot. Now he flies only to harry the last few
mustangs to their ignominious end – and “Shame on you!” Isabelle Steers
expostulates.
Less commented on have been the film’s other animal presences.
There are the rodeo animals. Perce Howland enters the film as almost manically
dislocated, dissolute, lost. With reckless drunkenness he tries to relive his
glory days as a rodeo rider; he gets violently thrown by one bucking bronco,
but despite his bruises takes on a raging bull. Though the emotionally demonstrative
Roslyn seems at this stage more concerned for him than for the animals, the
film pointedly has Guido show her (and the viewer) the painful straps which
galvanise the animals into bucking frenzy in the first place. Those animals had
to be hurting; and Perce’s foray into manhood is equally painfully
unsuccessful. That’s why, it seems, he joins the mustanging expedition, for the
sake of his battered self-image, not for the money.
In another telling scene Gay, trying in his way to adapt to
a settled life commensurate with his age and times, finds that a rabbit has
been nibbling his new lettuces: his response, in the frontiersman way, is to grab
his shotgun, ready to hunt it down. Roslyn begs for the rabbit’s life; she’s
happy to sacrifice a few lettuces, and “can’t bear to see anything killed”. He
calls her “silly”; the argument rapidly spirals into one about mutual respect.
There is a strong hint here and elsewhere that the subordination of women and
animals go hand-in-hand. This brief but resonant and obviously symbolic episode
serves as a precursor to Roslyn’s later response to the mustang-catching. Just
before it Gay also mentions that some pilots like Guido are hired to kill
eagles, because they take “so many lambs” – another instance of agricultural
regimes overwhelming the wild.
No one I’ve read so far has explored the role of the dog,
Gay’s rangy and enthusiastic Pointer, named (I think) Dooley. Dooley is Gay’s
constant companion, his “friend”; Roslyn connects with the dog even before she
meets Gay himself. When the group camps out in the moonlit desert, it’s Roslyn
who notices that the dog is trembling violently and panting. He got “a whiff of
the horses”, Gay guesses. When Roslyn leans down to comfort him, Dooley
uncharacteristically snaps at her. It’s not the horses he’s afraid of, Guido
asserts, “it’s us.” The dog identifies with the wild animals, knows what’s
going to happen, and is “scared he’s gonna end up dead, too.” This is the point
at which Roslyn learns the true fate of the mustangs, initiating a crucial
discussion on kindness, the changed world, the place of death, the excuses for
killing. The dog reappears, panting and moaning: “Shame on you, you old fool,”
Gay tells him, “You be quiet now.” Emotion is to be denied. As the capture gets
under way, the dog is tethered to the parked plane, sidelined, much as Roslyn
is. After the whole event, a joyous reunion between Roslyn and Dooley presages
the final hint of a reconciliatory, if uncertain future.
So the film advances to its climactic mustanging episodes. Guido
asserts that there might be 15 or so mustangs up in the hills; the others are
dubious that they’ll be worth it, but they go for it anyway. If this is meant
to be a manly reprise of the Old West, it’s compromised from the start: it’s heavy
on technology. First Guido locates from the air a small mustang group – a stallion,
four mares and a colt – then uses the biplane to harry them down onto the wide
desert flats. There the men, Roslyn and dog aboard, chase the mustangs down in
a truck, roping them and weighing them to exhaustion with dragging tyres. The
mustangs don’t stand a chance.
Two scenes I find especially rivetting and affecting. In
one, the colt, who will not leave the side of its mother, is seen pawing
desperately at the flanks of the roped, exhausted and fallen mare. This is close
to the note on which Miller’s original story ended:
The Esquire story
thus ends dispiritingly, the horses awaiting their inevitable fate. The film
ends differently. The second affecting scene is the turning-point: Roslyn runs
away across the sands, and from a distance, the vast desert and distant hills
behind her, screams and screams her distress: “Murderers!” she yells, “You’re
murderers! Liars! You’re only happy when something dies!” It’s a genuinely
hair-raising moment. Though Guido tries to disparage this outburst as just the
usual woman being “crazy”, Perse responds to her sentiments, and begins to cut
the mustangs free of the tyres they are roped to. “Go home!” Roslyn cries out to
the mustangs from the truck cab, “Go!” Gay, incensed, then embarks on perhaps
the only genuinely masculine effort in the film: he runs and catches up with
the stallion, hanging onto the remaining length of rope round its neck through
an exhausting and appalling duel. Roslyn, trying to intervene, is herself
hurled to the ground. Though some shots are obviously studio-staged, others
seem all too real: indeed, the effort Gable expended on this fight was later
blamed for his heart-attack. Gay triumphs in the end, wrestling the sweating
stallion to the ground, and lashing it to the truck bumper. Then, however,
Roslyn’s “sentimentality” prevails even over him; having, presumably, proven
his manhood in the traditional manner, he cuts the stallion loose again.
Whether with conscious or unconscious symbolism, though, the rope remains
around the stallion’s neck, trailing behind him as he runs.
Though for Marilyn Monroe’s sake (and Hollywood’s) Miller
ended the film on this liberatory note, it strikes one now as just a little
tinny. Though some protective legislation for mustangs took effect in the
1950s, their day was already well and truly over – another sad instance of the
crushing advance of human civilisation, the very world of spiritless work these
predatory cowboys hate.
******