The Misfits (1961)

The Misfits is a film directed by John Huston and is quite an odd film to watch, but for the most part it keeps you glued to the screen. The cast is just brilliant: Clarke Gable(his last film), Marilyn Monroe(her last film), Montgomery Clift(he was awesome in Red River and quite good in this) and the crazy dude from The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Eli Wallach.

So what we have here is: Roslyn Taber (Monroe) is this kind of character who is fed up with the way life has turned out for her, and is lookin for meaning in life and blah blah all that. She's in Reno to divorce her rich businessman husband who was never "there" for her. "There" meaning that he never talked to her or they never really got to know eachother boo hoo. Gay Langland (Gable) and Guido(crazy fella from The Good the Bad and the Ugly) are these aging cowboy types. "The west has gone! The east has arrived! Now we'll have to earn wages! Goodbye to the cowboy lifestyle! No more cattle drives! Oh no!" That kind of thing.

So the aging cowboys get by in life by catching wild mustangs that are too small for rodeos, so they get made into dog food. Pretty sad actually. In thier younger days they would have sold the horses for actual transport purposes, but with the arrival of the demon machines, gasoline engine mechnaical beasts, horse transpotation soon became obsolete, and the horses soon became dog food. So what was once exciting and a decent living for the two cowboys has now become something terrible, horses->dogfood.

Well the cowboys and Roslyn(and her friend) meet in a restaurant, and strangely they all just decide to go live in Guido's(Wallach) house in the desert for a while. Well with Marilyn Monroe being amazingly hot, the two cowboys just want to get it on with her, and she being really naive this is what happens. The rest of the film is just about how terrible their lives have become, them trying to "find" themselves, and Roslyn getting hella pissed off at what the cowboys do for a living. It's worth a watch, but it is quite depressing at the same time. It was suppose to have been a classic, what with he great cast and director and good writer and all, but never really lived up to it's potential. Marilyn Monroe is hot.