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It will require a filmgoer of immensely sterner aesthetic discipline than I possess to consider “The Misfits” on its artistic merits alone, for its double identity—as a major new film and as an honest-to-goodness news story—is complex and nearly indivisible. It is, of course, the last movie made by Clark Gable, who died almost immediately after completing work in what appears to have been an exhausting role. It is Arthur Miller’s first screenplay, written as a serious vehicle for his wife, Marilyn Monroe, who divorced him as soon as it was completed. Its director, John Huston, and its other principals—Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter—have all attained a level of accomplishment that inspires hopeful curiosity about any film in which they have a part. All these circumstances make it easy for me to report that “The Misfits” is almost continuously absorbing, and all the more painful for me to have to add that it strikes me as a dramatic failure of considerable dimensions.
“The Misfits” was filmed in Nevada, mostly outdoors, and concerns itself with a young, hopeless, and frightened divorcée who contracts a tentative alliance with a middle-aged vagabond cowboy. All is felicity until she accompanies her paramour and two footloose cronies on a business expedition to capture wild mustangs, which are to be turned over to a dog-meat factory. The cruelty of this seedy operation reawakens all her terrors of a world that has treated her most shabbily, and the violence of her innocent reaction to it causes the three men to understand the self-delusions that have sustained their highly prized concept of personal freedom. This inadequate summary will at least indicate that Mr. Miller has been entirely earnest in his intentions, and that “The Misfits” contains plenty of good, chewy dramatic opportunities for its fortunate players.
The casting of the film is almost impeccable. In a part literally made for her, Miss Monroe displays a gentleness and a tired, childlike grace that are appropriate and moving and, very evidently, a reflection of herself. If she is not consistently an actress here, she is an actress at moments, notably in one scene of sad, sensual alcoholic collapse. Mr. Gable underplays his aging frontiersman with a professional awareness of his own attractiveness and of his own limitations; my only reservation is that he is almost too visibly at peace with himself as a person to be always convincing in the part of a sentimental failure. Montgomery Clift, as a young bronc rider, and Eli Wallach, as a confused, threadbare ex-bomber pilot, are admirable, particularly in several passages of comedy, and Thelma Ritter does fine as a cheerful middle-aged bat. Mr. Huston’s direction is at least deft, and his scenes of the mustang roundup, which is accomplished by airplane and flat-bed truck, are stirring and even horrifying.
It must be clear by now that all my severe doubts about “The Misfits” center on Arthur Miller’s screenplay, which seems to me obtrusively symbolic and so sentimental as to be unintelligent. Let it be admitted that hearts of pure gold (which are what all the principals in the story own) are difficult for a dramatist to set beating with a thud that sounds human, but this is a handicap Mr. Miller has chosen for himself. I wish he had not attempted to pose his valid dramatic questions about the survival of personal goodness in an increasingly cynical and unlovely society in the person of a fallen child and three true-blue buckaroos under a big desert sky, for this romanticism makes his answers false and fundamentally uninteresting. What must ensue is some embarrassingly high-flown dialogue (“We’re all blind bombardiers,” says the guilt-smitten former pilot. “I can’t make a landing and I can’t get up to God”) and a landscape peopled with caricatures. When, at the end of the picture, Mr. Gable’s rueful cowboy, the last of the Western giants, ropes and wrestles down the last free stallion and then cuts it loose, we realize with disappointment that we have been on the Plains of Allegory all along and that the drumming of hooves does not obscure the clack of the author’s typewriter. ♦
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Roger Angell was a senior editor and a staff writer. He died in 2022, at the age of a hundred and one. He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956. He wrote more than a hundred Sporting Scene pieces, mostly on baseball but also on tennis, hockey, football, rowing, and horse racing. In addition, he wrote film reviews, stories, casuals, Notes and Comment pieces, and, for many years, the magazine’s Christmas verse, “Greetings, Friends!” His writing has appeared in many anthologies, including “The Best American Sports Writing,” “The Best American Short Stories,” “The Best American Essays,” and “The Best American Magazine Writing.” His work has also been collected in nine of his own books, among them “The Stone Arbor and Other Stories,” “A Day in the Life of Roger Angell,” “Let Me Finish,” and “This Old Man: All in Pieces.” His baseball books include “The Summer Game,” “Five Seasons,” “Late Innings,” “Season Ticket,” “Once More Around the Park,” “A Pitcher’s Story,” and “Game Time.” “Nothing but You: Love Stories from The New Yorker” is an anthology of fiction selected by him. He won a number of awards for his writing, including a George Polk Award for Commentary, a Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2011 he was the inaugural winner of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. In 2014, Angell received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given to writers by the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2015, he won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for his piece “This Old Man.”