Some movies are oxymoronically dubbed Instant Classics. The passage of time is required to achieve classic status, in my book. Later critics and audiences re-evaluate it and it is then recognized for what was originally overlooked. Orson Welles' was revived and raised to Olympus many years after his work was done.
John Huston’s THE MISFITS is a classic, not so much because of its inherent quality. Viewing it today, 45 years after its initial release (1961), it is still a messy movie with a pretentiously romantic arty theme. Still, Huston’s visual style, settings, leisurely story telling, make the movie more watchable for a generation weaned on Indie art films, with many of the same flaws and pleasures.
It became a classic because of events that began as soon as it was completed. First, Clark Gable died shortly after, at 59 of a heart attack, brought on by the physical stress of his role and, perhaps, the mental stress of dealing with Marilyn’s neuroses. Marilyn Monroe and screen writer Arthur Miller separated during filming, divorced soon after, and Marilyn overdosed and died before completing another movie, at age 36. Montgomery Clift (41), who plays a featured role, never made another notable movie and died 5 years later, ravaged by depression and drugs.
Watching the movie now it is hard not to be affected by that knowledge. But it is not simply bits of movie trivia that lend ironic meaning to the movie. It is that the events and back story fit so well into the themes, images, and mood of the work, enhance it to the point that it becomes an extraordinary sample of pop culture iconography.
Gable, Marilyn, and Clift each were powerful icons of their eras in movie culture. The Old King of the studio era, the Sex Goddess, and the forerunner of the new male – the brooding sensitive (possibly sexually ambiguous, certainly the Anti-Macho) boy. None will survive in the world that was beginning in the 1960's, the one we now occupy. Watching it now, the actors seem to foresee their fates, and it is excruciating to watch them living it.
The characters they are playing are also on the edge of extinction — the rugged frontiersman, the aging beauty, the broken cowboy. Huston and Miller were consciously showing the end of the legendary Hollywood West. The characters live at the end of the world, the fringe of the western desert, not romantic and noble, but shabby and arid, lurid, cruel.
The men have dusty western dreams. They try to rope mustangs — killing the free to make money to preserve their own sense of freedom — unaware of the irony, until the woman, in a last burst of energy — screams them out of their killing frenzy. Miller — a city boy — cruelly exposes the irony of the Western and the Hollywood myths: both were built on the destruction of freedom. Killing the mustangs is symbolic suicide and despite the triteness inherent in the motion picture script, the real life and mythic pop culture life script conjoin to lend far greater irony to the climax.
The stars are stars of Greek tragedy. The traits that gave them their power were their fatal flaws: Gable’s machismo, Marilyn’s innocent and vulnerable sex appeal, Clift’s fragile sensitivity. Our legends are bound to self-destruct; they can’t survive their own myths.
John Huston’s THE MISFITS is a classic, not so much because of its inherent quality. Viewing it today, 45 years after its initial release (1961), it is still a messy movie with a pretentiously romantic arty theme. Still, Huston’s visual style, settings, leisurely story telling, make the movie more watchable for a generation weaned on Indie art films, with many of the same flaws and pleasures.
It became a classic because of events that began as soon as it was completed. First, Clark Gable died shortly after, at 59 of a heart attack, brought on by the physical stress of his role and, perhaps, the mental stress of dealing with Marilyn’s neuroses. Marilyn Monroe and screen writer Arthur Miller separated during filming, divorced soon after, and Marilyn overdosed and died before completing another movie, at age 36. Montgomery Clift (41), who plays a featured role, never made another notable movie and died 5 years later, ravaged by depression and drugs.
Watching the movie now it is hard not to be affected by that knowledge. But it is not simply bits of movie trivia that lend ironic meaning to the movie. It is that the events and back story fit so well into the themes, images, and mood of the work, enhance it to the point that it becomes an extraordinary sample of pop culture iconography.
Gable, Marilyn, and Clift each were powerful icons of their eras in movie culture. The Old King of the studio era, the Sex Goddess, and the forerunner of the new male – the brooding sensitive (possibly sexually ambiguous, certainly the Anti-Macho) boy. None will survive in the world that was beginning in the 1960's, the one we now occupy. Watching it now, the actors seem to foresee their fates, and it is excruciating to watch them living it.
The characters they are playing are also on the edge of extinction — the rugged frontiersman, the aging beauty, the broken cowboy. Huston and Miller were consciously showing the end of the legendary Hollywood West. The characters live at the end of the world, the fringe of the western desert, not romantic and noble, but shabby and arid, lurid, cruel.
The men have dusty western dreams. They try to rope mustangs — killing the free to make money to preserve their own sense of freedom — unaware of the irony, until the woman, in a last burst of energy — screams them out of their killing frenzy. Miller — a city boy — cruelly exposes the irony of the Western and the Hollywood myths: both were built on the destruction of freedom. Killing the mustangs is symbolic suicide and despite the triteness inherent in the motion picture script, the real life and mythic pop culture life script conjoin to lend far greater irony to the climax.
The stars are stars of Greek tragedy. The traits that gave them their power were their fatal flaws: Gable’s machismo, Marilyn’s innocent and vulnerable sex appeal, Clift’s fragile sensitivity. Our legends are bound to self-destruct; they can’t survive their own myths.
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