In the Misfits all characters are breathed with a special tragedy and obscurity. Maybe that wasn't John Huston's intention, when he was planning to bring Arthur Miller's legacy to Marilyn Monroe to the big screen as a western of sorts.
Clark Gable as the aging cowboy Guy, suffered a heart attack the day after filming finished and died ten days later. Montgomery Clift's life ended 1966 at forty-five after a lifetime of drunkenness, car accidents and with his jaw sewn up several times. Was aus Eli Wallach wurde, who served in the US Army during the war, I do not know, in the film he plays the mentally broken and not a little cranky Guido, a man, who didn't make it, to take his wife, who died of pregnancy complications, to the hospital because of a burst car tire. His pride and joy is a flight jacket left over from the war.
What happened to Marilyn, don't have to tell. The Misfits was her last film, her actual first tragic role. Her husband Arthur Miller wrote this role for her, a gift, a transfiguration and a fool. Miller was already falling in love with collaborating photographer Inge Morath during filming, whom he married three months later. As so often happens, Miller dresses his protagonist in his work of art with an almost wise clairvoyance, while he talks about the real character in an interview e.g. said the following: “Sometimes we have to sacrifice someone. Also the jews have been sacrificed…..” (what a comparison!!?)”. Miller, so he explains, didn't want to be dragged into the abyss with Marilyn, into that suicidal and destructive spiral, from which she had not been able to escape since her traumatic childhood as an orphan, neither, when she finally became a star, and, especially not then.
In her last interview, the Marilyn at her home in Brentwood, gives to a reporter, she says, dissolved from the champagne, and giggling brightly in many places: “I wish I were a Cleaning Woman.” She would rather have cleaned the rooms at Columbia Pictures, she means, and …. my God …….. what can you deduce from this sentence?……. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
…. The fact is, that Marilyn herself recognized, very very early, that she never, really never for what is loved, what she is. (As do we all, by the way!) And so she used her charms( which sometimes obscure achievements, and, extra), and belonged to everyone (men), while in real life even the last husband (the Brain) made sure, the injuries deepen, instead of mats.
Okay, it had become difficult with Marilyn, who was addicted to pills, the child hungry for love, to live in a household. to be the man of an icon, the most beautiful woman in the world, with which he himself, logo, also wanted to decorate, Miller must soon have given small pangs in his vanity. So he wanted to get rid of her. But: why didn't he remain her friend?? Why wasn't it possible, with a certain distance, continue to accompany Marilyn….? What is a brain for?….also….. !? I ask (also a fool, but without compensation options)
“Nothing can live, without anything else dying.”
Arthur Miller leaves this sentence in the Misfits, a work of epic proportions, tell his aging Cowboy Guy to Roslyn. The three men (Guy, Guido and Perce) are, accompanied by Roslyn, in the Nevada desert, in order to pursue their leisure activities or, better yet, extra income employment; they catch and kill horses, which are later processed into dog food, an activity, which brings little more, and who follows Guy today for the last time, because he doesn't want to let his freedom be taken away from him, to do and leave, what he wants, because he's a cowboy, who can live, when something else dies.
Guido is also furious, that Roslyn, the desired and at the same time hostile female intruder makes such a fuss, and wants to keep the men away from it, to catch the horses. Is, there Roslyn, like each of the three men in one “weaknesses” moment made a love proposal, in the car, on the way to the desert:
“I can't land, not here, not on the moon. help me! Or at least say a few kind words to me! I've never met anyone: help me said!”,(stark!!!!!!)
is Guido, the war aviator, desperately wants to stop Guy from doing it, get broken by a woman ….. break his whole identity! Because what is the other: stop chasing horses, Than stop being a cowboy?! But like I said: The Misfits is not a Western. John Huston said, he wanted to do a western. The result was this great film about three men and one woman (two women, wenn man die witzige und geniale Isabella Steers dazuzählt). And each of these three men and this woman bring their own, untold, choking tragedy to vibrate. It's the tragedies of the people behind the roles, the roles by chance? penetrate, so it's the actors, at the end, playing their own roles. And who knows, maybe that's why there was such a disaster on the set …?
‘Nichts kann leben, without anything else dying.’
The motto of a Mr. Miller respectively the film, starting with a divorce, the end of a love. (while for one of the two ex-lovers the new love is already at the start). So a love dies, so that a new one can live. Desperately, Roslyn tries to memorize the text in front of the mirror, whom she wants to bring before the court …. “He was mean… and has my rights … hat…… …..But why can't I just say, He was not there?!”
Lol.lol.
I have said, that Miller gifts Monroe in this film: Three men, two of them mentally crippled, one at the end of his life, resentments, he softens in the face of Monroe. They reveal their hearts to Roslyn, they confide in her! Everyone is ready, giving up his old life for her and starting anew, with empathy and dazzling beauty, radiating from her. But just: at the same time he takes, Miller, Marilyn, the, what he concedes to her on screen, gone again, by calling their stupidity (“she was silly”, Miller) satirized. She can't even remember that sentence, with which she wants to teach the judge, why she wants a divorce from her husband ….
Okay, this naïve stupidity was alongside the sex (what yes one on one went sillywoman&Sex) Marilyns Rolle, perfected by herself down to the smallest detail ….. what would a movie have looked like, in dem Marilyn nicht diese Rolle spielt, sondern eine komplett andere ….?
Der Schriftsteller Arthur Miller wäre hier gefordert gewesen noch weiter zu gehen. But yes, auch Marilyn, die in ihrem letzten Interview sagt: ich wäre lieber Putzfrau gewesen…. wäre weiter gefordert gewesen. Sie kam schon etwas ins Alter ….ihre Karriere würde bald andere, vertieftere Rollen verlangt haben … dreissig Tage blieb sie dem Set ihres letzten unvollendeten Filmes “Something’s got to give” fern, vermutlich aus guten Gründen, whereupon she was fired from the studios and lost her last footing …..
So The Misfits remains Marilyn's last big film, the film of a man and a woman, a role body and a role brain, who could not reinvent themselves together.
For Marilyn, it's the only great part in the role of Marilyn, played by Marilyn, a fictional character, so real and touching, as only a real human can be…. what, as can be seen from the film, at the time of Marilyn's flights of fancy, all benefited ….
John Huston apparently had a reason too, why he films Marilyn in a wide angle at the climax of the film. Far away, melted to a small point, in the Nevada desert, she stands and screams: “You are lier! You are murderer! you are only happy, if you can watch, how something perishes! You are all tooooot!”
Roslyn is beside herself, she screams and screams, she is angry …… um dem Sexsymbol, innocent, the soft, empathetic woman to enable this brute and indigestible outburst, the cameraman had to take the focus off her face, take away from her body, and place the woman in an empty expanse, which is eroding at its edges……
“Don't let yourself be bent, I know that!”, meanwhile Guido says to Guy. “At first they pretend, then they take everything from us!”
Juice, poor Guido is tipping over and now hates all women
(I can understand him, because he let himself be looked into, weil ich diese Schwäche habe, always, to show solidarity with the radicals…more than that: my favorite writers are almost all almost openly misogynistic, what, oh god only “Misanthrop” called, but also that, Misanthropischsein ist doch gerade nochmals etwas Anderes als das, was es scheint, das den Mis-an-thropen vorgegangen ist….Not? Und das ist ganz bestimmt etwas Menschliches!? Possibly even something more human, as the label: humanitarian, who knows…. ich liebe also weiterhin den Mann, der in seinen Gefühlen zu mir ständig kippt, rein theoretisch…ihm, der kippt, kippe ich meinerseits zu, nicht demjenigen, der verkündet: meine Weste ist weiss. Was die Rollen mit uns machen, die Geschichte und Kultur mit mir machte, das tangiert mein gesundes Selbstvertrauen nicht….No, so unbekümmerte Gleiche kann ich nicht im Kern lieben, ich liebe Marilyn, ich liebe Arschloch Miller und ich bin etwas in Judith Butler verliebt…..etc., I mean, das sind die Folgen, dass ich Bilder “love” got to, “Mythen”, “Legenden” von meiner erbärmlichen Illusionsschachtel, dem Abandonment aus….)
But dude, ambivalent enough, to be human, is still torn. Should he let go of the horses?, the, tied together with ropes lying on the ground? And if he does: then he won't be lying on the ground himself? The attributions, that you give yourself, are large structures! It takes a long time, to dismantle their own beliefs. It's okay, if you nudge them a little in their static nature….
It's getting night. Shining stars are dripping down on the four lost figures, the director, who wanted to keep the film together, the author, who just wanted to leave….Perce is very silent all the time.
Worth it, watch the film in its original language, man vernimmt dann die ganze Zerbrechlichkeit Marilyns in ihrer Stimme. IN der deutschen Übersetzung lässt Perces sanfte, fading away in speech, tief traurige Stimme aufhorchen. Also his time, the time of the rodeo driver, is over. When he falls from the bull for the last time, he then appears with a head bandage in front of Guido's little house. Too drunk, noticing this wrap, he grabs his skull and begins, screaming. “Who did this?!”, calls he. “Who put this stuff on me??” Roslyn screams again in fear, as she sees, as Perce slowly unwraps his head from the bandage, that glows white in the night light. Guy, who is also drunk and calls for his children, whom he abandoned for the rest of his life, Guido, pounding on his house in jealousy of Guy and anger at fate (the vacation home in the desert near Reno, in which they stay during their stay), that he never finished building … after his wife died, Perce, whose skull breaks apart and …. Roslyn….. in a beautiful, waisted white luminous floral dress…. get caught up in it, I mean in the swaddles of that loosened gauze, everyone gets caught up in it….splendid.
It's a great shot, which is yet trumped by battle, which Guy finally delivers with the horses, at night, under the starry sky of Nevada. He will release the horses, but he still allows himself to be dragged across the desert floor by their ropes ….the horses pull the old cowboy behind them, digging. When he can let go, Roslyn owes it to him with her love.
Clark Cable puts his arm around Marilyn's shoulders in the credits. He is sentimental, erschöpftem Blick schaut er auf seine Rolle als Clark Cable zurück. “Aber wie findest du den Weg nach hause?”, fragt Roslyn vieldeutig und er zeigt unter den Sternen auf denjenigen, der am grössten ist. Hihi. I think, er nennt sie noch einmal Kindchen, er beruhigt sie. Sie lehnt ihren Kopf an seine Schulter und über ihren Augen, die voller Licht sind, schliessen sich die langen künstlichen Wimpern.
Die starke Schulter eines Mannes zum Anlehnen. Vergass ich noch unbedingt zu sagen.
(The Misfits, ein Film, der an Aktualität längst nicht alles eingebüsst hat, obschon man das Vergangene gerne als verstaubt bezeichnet und sich die Binden nur verändern, nicht lösen)