Death, despair, and box office disaster: the star-studded curse of ‘The Misfits’
Movies aren’t guaranteed to be reflective of the parts assembled in making them, but there was no reason to doubt The Misfits was going to be anything other than a rousing success when the star-powered contemporary western was gearing up for its theatrical debut in February 1961.
With the legendary John Huston at the helm, the film boasted a director who’d already won two Academy Awards from 11 nominations and gifted the world with classics like The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, never mind having celebrated playwright Arthur Miller on screenwriting duties adapting his own source material for the big screen.
The story of a former stripper forming an unexpectedly affectatious triangle with an ex-cowboy gambling addict and a war veteran and then becoming involved in a business capturing wild horses alongside a veteran rodeo rider was an unusual one, but The Misfits assembled enough A-list pedigree to theoretically guarantee the outlandish nature of the narrative wouldn’t alienate audiences.
The central quartet was comprised of Marilyn Monroe’s Roslyn Tabor, Clark Gable’s Gay Langland, Eli Wallach’s Guido Racanelli, and Montgomery Clift’s Perce Howland, respectively, with the four of them all household names who’d made a career out of appealing to almost every demographic covering multiple generations. On paper, at least, it was a lock.
Golden Globe-winning sex symbol Monroe, Oscar-winning ‘Golden Age’ icon Gable, four-time Oscar-nominated method man Clift, and Tony-winning western favourite Wallach made for a formidable bunch, but for whatever reason, nobody seemed all that interested in seeing them strut their stuff as part of the same ensemble.
Despite boasting such a wide-ranging array of talented creatives and nameworthy stars, The Misfits flopped at the box office after barely recouping its budget. Nobody could have seen it coming, but the film’s lasting legacy would go on to become that of tragedy more than anything else, with several key players all experiencing all encountering death and despair in short order.
Working with then-husband Miller placed even greater strain on Monroe personally, professionally, and psychologically, with production being shut down for two weeks so she could be hospitalised in an effort to combat her battle with depression. She ended up despising The Misfits and her work in it, and it ended up as the last completed movie of her career after she passed away less than a year and a half later.
Gable was Monroe’s favourite actor as a child, but the opportunity to work with her idol was again tinged by tragedy when he suffered a massive heart attack just two days after the end of principal photography, before dying ten days later and three months prior to the film’s theatrical bow when he suffered another heart attack while recovering from the first.
Clift only made another three features after The Misfits, but even his death was purportedly tied to the film. Per The Telegraph, the actor’s companion and nurse Lorenzo James caught the movie showing on television in 1966 and asked him if he wanted to watch it. His reply was “absolutely not”, and he instead opted to take a bath, where he suffered a fatal heart attack, making his disinterest in the picture the last words he ever spoke.
For those reasons, it was entirely fair The Misfits would end up retrospectively gaining the label of being a cursed production, with the constant misery befalling its core cast members not exactly the legacy it wanted to leave behind.
