Marilyn Monroe ‘s legacy is embodied by her final film

Then the narrative shifts. Roslyn is initially sold the idea that a man—whether it’s free-spirited Gay or wounded Guido—will save her, but she’s then given the opportunity to do a little self-saving when Guido offers her a house in the Nevada desert free of charge. There, with Gay by her side, she falls in love not just with Gable’s seasoned swagger but with the landscape itself. Away from the city and the trappings of her old life, she finds what Gay calls, at the end of the movie and under darker circumstances, “another way to be alive.” Reinvigorated by the freedom of this new life, her own joy and relative youth (Monroe was in her mid-30s at the time of filming, while Wallach was in his mid-40s and Gable was nearing 60) provides a charge to the broken down older men around her, reminding them what’s possible and how easy it can be to enjoy the little things. 

When the chief dramatic tension of the film finally arrives, Miller, to his credit, swerves. For a moment it feels like the chief conflict will simply be Guido’s jealousy over Gay’s relationship with Roslyn, putting Monroe in yet another film in which men fight over her. That’s still a part of it, but the greater conflict arises when Roslyn comes to understand the casual violence toward animals with which Gay lives his life. It starts with rabbits in the garden, but later swells to include wild mustangs in the desert, which Gay, Perce, and Guido plan to rope, wrangle, and sell to dog food companies for a quick buck. Roslyn sees this as needlessly cruel, and the audience sees the horses as embodiments of her own newfound freedom, which Gay wants to strangle out of existence. It’s a tremendous shock to Roslyn, who now sees that the men who showed her the way to freedom are no better than any other men, ready to tie down anything that’s free and tame it because, as Gay puts it, “nothing can live unless something dies.” In the end, Roslyn must put saving herself on hold in order to save Gay, who has a change of heart and rides off in the dark with Roslyn, following the North Star home. 

It’s worth laying Roslyn’s arc out like this, if only to see that it’s not so much a character arc as it is a series of wild emotional swings, capped off by Monroe’s screaming monologue in the desert as she curses her three cowboys as “dead men.” According to Monroe biographer Donald Spoto, she hated that scene, and felt that it reduced her character to nothing more than a “screaming, crazy fit,” taking all of the nuance and intelligence out of Roslyn’s life in that moment. 

As Spoto points out in Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, when Miller first began writing The Misfits in the late 1950s, he was deeply in love with his new bride, ready to build dream houses in the country designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and settle down with kids, while she played the perfect housewife and mother. By 1960, as The Misfits began shooting with a script so unfinished that Monroe had to stay up half the night to learn the pages written each day, the marriage was crumbling. Monroe and Miller had separate hotel rooms, Monroe was struggling with new levels of substance abuse, and with each new rewrite it seemed that Roslyn got further away from the character Miller had originally conceived, the one that would mark his wife’s return as a serious dramatic actress. Roslyn had lost much of her nuance, reduced to “pretty girl” in some scenes and “shrieking scold” in others.

Despite her reputation as a difficult actress to work with because of chronic lateness, drug addiction, and paralyzing insecurities, despite her bouts of illness and exhaustion and the sweltering Nevada heat, despite her need for many takes to get each scene exactly right and her reliance on the Strasberg family to serve as her constant acting coaches, Monroe was not swallowed whole by Miller’s writerly machinations. Nor was she intimidated or overshadowed by the male movie stars around her, even Gable, whom she’d often said she imagined to be her father when she was a girl. At one point, as the film’s budget ballooned and production threatened to close down, Huston—whose gambling addiction hindered the production in its own right—had Monroe hospitalized for a week in part so he had some time to finesse more money out of the studio, blaming her delicate condition in the press. Like Roslyn, her hope for a fresh start was pulled in many different directions by a cadre of older, often condescending men. 

And yet there is life in Roslyn, even at Monroe’s most exhausted and addled (some of Huston’s soft-focus shots deliberately mask her rougher days), even when she’s clearly chafing against everything her character must face. In a film starring multiple members of Hollywood royalty and directed by one of its early kings, she delivers the most compelling performance by far. Long devoted to Lee Strasberg’s method, she took all of her personal strife and channeled it into a heartbreaking depiction of a woman who slowly realizes she is nothing but a finite resource to these men, who draw strength from her youth and beauty and see it as a way to recapture days long since past. 

The scene in which Roslyn sits, looking up at the night sky with Perce’s head in her lap, is a particularly potent example. As Clift unloads his troubles on his co-star, Monroe listens with patience, her doe eyes glittering with vibrance, her face shifting subtly from icy calculation to passionate investment. Her “screaming fit” at the end aside, Roslyn’s strength as the men around her collapse, and her willingness to forgive and move forward, come across beautifully in Monroe’s patient performance, the cold fire to Gable’s ashen, crumbling fury.

When The Misfits wrapped in late 1960, Monroe was already developing other projects and getting used to the idea that her marriage was ending. She could not have known, any more than Gable could, that this thorny little revisionist Western, choppy and troubled though it was, would be the end for her career. This makes The Misfits an unintentionally profound finale. As both Roslyn Tabor and as herself, Monroe delivers a peek at another way to be alive, a chance to rise above the men who’d dare to control her, and to instead become an emotional driving force unto herself. We get a glimpse of the actress she would’ve become, a complex and thoughtful and mercurial figure capable of weathering storms. The Misfits is a mess, but Monroe, in her own quiet way, is its salvation.