New Picture

The Misfits (Seven Arts; United Artists) is a dozen pictures rolled into one. Most of them, unfortunately, are terrible. It is Playwright Arthur Miller's first picture and the late Clark Gable's last. It is a routine gland opera, an honest but clumsy western, a pseudosociological study of the American cowboy in the last, disgusting stages of obsolescence, a raucous ode to Reno and the horrors of divorce, a ponderous disquisition on man's inhumanity to man, woman and various other animals, an obtuse attempt to write sophisticated comedy, a woolly lament for the loss of innocence in American life and, above all, a glum, long (2 hr. 5 min.), fatuously embarrassing psychoanalysis of Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller and what went wrong with their famous marriage.

Roslyn, the film's heroine, is admittedly Marilyn. Gable's Gay, the aging cowboy, obviously speaks for Miller. The two meet in Reno, where she has spent six weeks getting a divorce and he has spent 30 years getting divorcees. He takes her to an isolated cabin, listens to interminable hard-luck stories out of Marilyn's childhood, falls improbably in love, hauls her off to a rodeo with two of his buddies (Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach). She is terrified by the violence she sees there; he is bewildered by her inability to accept death as a part of life--in effect, to accept life. All four of them drive off to the mountains to rope some wild mustangs, which will be sold to a slaughterhouse and ground up for dog meat. Roslyn's horror at this apparently wanton destruction of life and Gay's refusal to see the horror of it collide to provide the picture's climax and conclusion.

The end of the film by all odds is the best part of it. Visually, the pounding wild-horse chase and the magnificent archetypal battle between man and beast that ends the chase are hung like a grand, insane mirage against the glittering salt flats. Dramatically, the main themes of the film, mercifully disburdened of Miller's words, resolve themselves in fluent and exciting action. Symbolically, the image of innocence ruthlessly hunted down and indifferently converted to dog meat makes a shattering comment on an aspect of modern life. But the rest of the picture--despite skillful work by Director John Huston--is rambling, banal, loaded with logy profundities ("I can't make a landing," sobs a drunken pilot, "and I can't get up to God, either"). Perhaps the most suitable comment on the whole business is made by one of Scenarist Miller's characters, who at the dullest point in the picture remarks quietly: "Help."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.