The Misfits

1961, 1080hd

Marilyn Monroe

Brainscan's comments:

Second little gem is Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits.  Students and faculty in the film department where I went to college talked of this movie with deep reverence and the sort of high falutin words otherwise reserved for the work of Eisenstein and Orson Welles.  Beautifully written, wonderfully directed and photographed, edited and acted with consummate skill by everyone involved, and since one of the actresses was Marilyn Monroe at her most vulnerable – and she is in just about every scene – a healthy male cannot keep his eyes off the screen. 

Clark Gable plays the part of an alpha male, a silver-backed primate with powers diminished and eyes grown cloudy.  He was feeling his age, both actor and character.  Within weeks of the movie’s completion, Gable was dead. 

Monroe and her character were frightened and fragile, so clearly doomed that even someone who knows nothing of Monroe would have to feel the pain she shows in her face throughout the movie.  Some scenes are terribly hard to bear, knowing as we do that Monroe would be dead from an overdose in a matter of months.  And the last scene when Monroe and Gable ride away together is impossible to watch more than once.  She looks as though she should be happy but she knows it is all temporary, this moment with him, and she knows what is to follow.  Yikes, it hurts to think about.  And Gable has the look of a man who knows he has won the prize again, one last time before the end comes so very soon.

Anyway, enough of this brouhaha.  Marilyn gets very close to revealing her natural wonders a couple of times and now that The Misfits is on HD, I grabbed it and threw together a clip (above) and a few collages (below).