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The Misfits

The Misfits

List Price: $9.94
Your Price: $9.94
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: marilyn's best work
Review: marilyn and her co-stars deliver an outstanding performance. what a shame that this was marilyn's last finished movie role. This movie get's better with repeated viewings.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Marilyn's most seemingly realistic role
Review: This movie seems to have followed her temporary relationships, but most haunting to me was the scene where Clark Gable says "Wer'e going home now" and they drive into the night as they admire the stars, it's like a huge ironic symbol or just an ironic METEPHORICAL way of them saying goodbye to life and filmmaking...just see it and you'll understand. It was amazing how good Marilyn looked, 35 in this movie and she looked 26, literally. It was a nice movie and I recommend it to all Marilyn fans and to all who say she can't act seriously, watch this movie and take that!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Monroe at her best
Review: In "The Misfits," Arthur Miller creates an atmosphere which seeps directly into the viewer's bones...
Dark, depressing, gloomy, and filmed in black and white, works beautifully.
Monroe, Gable, Clift, Wallach, and even the Mustangs all search for their place among the elements.
From bar to bar they go, drinking, flirting, drinking... did I say drinking?
They all want Monroe, but she doesn't know what she wants...just
to take care of somebody, just to be loved, just to be left alone. (Sounds familiar) she was cast perfectly.
An unbelievably powerful scene is ...
when Monroe does not want the men to catch the Mustangs for dog food...she runs in the middle of the desert, screaming, yelling, crying, tossing the sand in the air...
"Leave them alone, let them be. Why are you doing this? They want to be free. Please. Please. Leave them alone."

The viewer will be there...

feeling, lifting whatever passion they may have too, letting it go, letting it go...

because without freedom or direction.... one has nothing, the characters had nothing, the mustangs with their hoofs tied, had nothing.

When Monroe screams like a mad woman, we all scream with her...
For any wrong ever done, any lonliness we ever had, any love we never recieved.

***Note***A must watch for Monroe's performance alone!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: absolutely first rate drama
Review: I first saw this as a freshman in college, huddled with my co-ed girlfriend who was a such determined optimist in relationships that she thought these were lonely people who didn't know how to act together as friends. Naturally, I had a darker view and saw them as empty losers. We argued.

Now, 30 years later, I watched this inspiringly bleak film again. This time, while still believing they were losers, I also saw it as a portrait of a time and place, an amazing bit of historical context about Reno Nevada. The acting is unbelievably good, I think the best career performances of Monroe, Gable, and Clift. The script is utterly superb and unforgiving, unromantic.

The protagonists are all sad cases, but they are striving for love and fulfillment in a unforgiving world. They come together in the most mundane of circumstances, in a place where everything is stupidly temporary and devoid of the possibility of change. They live in the present, dimly perceive what is missing from their lives and what pain there is in their pasts, but keep going by drink and action and the courting of danger. Then, there is the possibility of something new in Monroe's character, and three men cluster around her in hope.

The result is simply incredible drama, one of Miller's greatest works in my opinion. He is a first-rate writer, exploring depths and times where the normal American (like me) doesn't want to look. He was the conscience of our age and I must re-visit his work now that he passed away.

Highest remcomendation, even if it foreshadowed the end of my only true college romance!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Marilyn Monroe killed Clark Gable making this movie.
Review: Blonde gets divorce in Reno, and proceeds to hang out with a group of guys who catch wild horses and sell them for dog food.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Hooked on This Movie
Review: I first saw this movie many years ago when I was in high school. I came into the movie about 20 minutes from its beginning, and that was a mistake. To understand and appreciate The Misfits, you must see it from the beginning with as few diversions as possible while watching. In my teenage years, I wasn't prepared to see a movie such as this, a movie to make me think as this has now done.

So if you are looking for a movie to entertain you, something really light, this may not be for you. On the other hand, if you want something of depth/intensity/masterful performances (something to lead your mind off in many directions)--this may be a good movie choice.

The actors and actresses gave incredible performances. With all the intensity of the themes running through the movie, Thelma Ritter adds a light and humorous touch to what would otherwise have been a very dark production. At the end of the movie, you may come to the same conclusion as I--we are all in some way misfits.

I highly recommend it...

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Troubling, Deeply Flawed Movie Falls Short of Its Potential
Review: If ever there was a movie that you would hope would be a masterpiece, especially given the pedigree of talent involved, it may very well be this one. Legends abound throughout the production both in front of and behind the camera. Directed by John Huston and written by Arthur Miller, this is a movie about the last of the cowboys in what apparently was the only frontier left in the early 1960's, the Sierra foothills of Nevada. The last gasp act for these desperate men is to rope wild mustangs from a speeding pick-up truck, so they can sell the carcasses for dog food. It's an intriguing, fragile premise, but the treatment here seems too vaunted. Starring three screen luminaries of towering magnitude - Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift, the film falls short of its lofty ambitions but not for lack of trying. There are isolated moments of great power and poignancy, but the core problem is really Miller's ponderous and rather misguided script, full of pretentious soliloquies that may work for Willy Loman but not for characters who are supposed to be inarticulate by their very nature. The net result is that you rather feel sorry for the actors as they put in a valiant effort to transcend the material. Miller wrote the screenplay expressly for his then-wife as their marriage was falling apart, and it's a miracle that Monroe ended up with a solid role that capitalized on her strengths given that his post-mortem tribute to her, "After the Fall" is a scathing indictment of her memory. But above all else, there is a morbid cloud that seems to darken the tone of the film, and one wonders if Huston was responding to the fragile state of the actors involved.

In what turned out to be her last completed film, Monroe extends on the promise she showed in "Bus Stop" five years earlier. Still stunning with an unbelievable magnetism, she was growing into a highly instinctive actress capable of conveying deeply felt emotions. With the combination of her beauty and vulnerability acting as the elusive flame around which the three men hover, Monroe uses her childlike innocence and unexpected wisdom to make her forlorn divorcee, Rosalyn, a more fully dimensional woman than she probably was on paper. It is one of the very rare occasions when she is the emotional center of the story, and she is particularly effective in reaction shots when she lets her eyes express her emotions for her. Her climactic banshee cry about the cowboys being murderers is a startling moment and a sad glimpse into what a wonderful actress she could have been given the right roles. In his valedictory role as well, Gable still has the old Hollywood star wattage and natural machismo to bring credibility to his aged cowboy, Gay, showing unexpected sensitivity in some difficult scenes. He lets the sadness come through his smiling eyes as he begins to realize his rugged lifestyle is quickly disappearing, the prospect of "wages" growing near and that everything he values is running off with the horses. Perhaps Gable was inspired by his Actors' Studio colleagues to trust his instinct in exposing his vulnerability, but it does backfire badly during his extended drunken scenes where it is discomforting to watch him overact with such broad strokes. It's also painful to see him wrangle the wild mustangs at the end with the knowledge of his looming death, but credit is due him for bringing authenticity to these challenging scenes. Clift, probably as much an acting polar opposite for Gable as he was for John Wayne in "Red River", is quite touching in the smallish role of Perce, the cowboy with the most open-hearted infatuation with Rosalyn. Poor Eli Wallach is saddled with probably the most contrived lines of Miller's script and the least sympathetic character, a mouthy braggart who is the first to meet Rosalyn and then suffers the humiliation of witnessing her growing attraction to Gay. Special mention needs to be given to Russell Metty's stark black-and-white cinematography and the excellent art direction by Stephen Grimes and William Newberry. Yet for all its virtues, this remains a deeply flawed movie and frustrating for anyone who has the right to expect more from this group of amazing artists.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: mmm.
Review: this film feels both very raw and very real. reviewers complain that the film has no point, that it's depressing. I may agree that there is no clear message and that it's not a particularly cheery film, but i feel like it's getting at some sort of essential essence: in a way, it's a little like reading "waiting for godot" by beckett, or some of kafka's stuff: you may not know what it's saying, but you still feel that something very important is going on. it could be because the actors all give such intense performances, or it could be, perhaps, that there is something more essential there, but it's a thing that cannot be conveyed through words (like some nagging feeling that wells up inside one inexplicably: depression? emptiness? despair? the sudden conviction that god may not exist?). i find the movie mesmerizing. and especially interesting because, while filmed in black and white, it does not feel at all like your average black and white movie. it's too messy, too roaming, too raw and emotional. the words themselves seem to be searching, the characters reaching beyond themselves into the great void and coming up with nothing.


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