I just finished watching the new winning candidate for worst classic film ever. It's far more vomit-inducing than "The Last Tango in Paris" (see my review of that cinematic slime here) because the collective star power behind "The Misfits" gives it a higher status among cineastes.

My face was locked in a grimace for the entire run of "The Misfits," starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Eli Wallach, Montgomery Clift, written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston. Hollywood heavyweights, the lot of them. I had never seen it before, and as it's Monroe's last picture I put it on my Zip list. I've never been a huge Monroe fan but she does have under-appreciated comic timing and her skin looks like radiant cream onscreen. I would probably have watched a film where Clift clipped his toenails, I like his work that much, and Eli Wallach emotes so well. I adore the few scenes with Thelma Ritter (she was a firecracker in "All About Eve.").

I wouldn't use Arthur Miller's script to clean up Jack's poo, however. The narrative revolves around Monroe's character Roslyn Taber getting a Reno divorce and the three men that she meets up with, Guido (Eli Wallach), Gay Langland (no, it's not "Brokeback" but still funny, played by Clark Gable), and Perce Howard (Montgomery Clift). All three men try to win her affections. We are meant to understand that all of them are the misfits cited in the title along with the wild horses of Nevada that the men try to capture. But for this post, I want to concentrate on three things: the nature of "real women," "real men," and the camera work that the film captures and advances.

"Real women" are defined by their beauty, vulnerability, ignorance, and acquiesence. After Guido meets Roslyn on the day of her divorce her chats about her to his friend Gay saying that he liked her because he could get beyond all the "useless talking that you have to do" in order to pick up a woman. Roslyn is all trembling, naked vulnerability in the film. The patented Monroe upper lip quiver is put to frequent use here. When she meets Gay and he asks her about her education, she says that she never finished high school, to which he beams in approval. She asks why he doesn't like educated women. The problem, he points out is that they always want to know what he's thinking, and adds, "did you ever get to know a man by asking him questions?"

That's right folks, you will never get to know a man by asking him something. Real women shut their traps and know that they have no business in questioning men. Guido seconds this sentiment in the same scene by showing her his wedding portrait and noting that his dead wife was not like other women because she never complained. She suggests that maybe his wife should have, and that then maybe she'd still be alive, but Guido looks at her like she's mental. How can a woman with a voice be attractive? They all meet up and drink too much, resulting in Roslyn passing out, while Gay continues to leer at her in the car as he drives her home, kissing her, and when she protests that she doesn't like him like that, he assures her that she will. Is this the first date rape on film? The scene cuts to her naked (well, under a sheet) in his bed the next morning. Real women don't mind being raped when they are unconscious. To reward her willingness to be victimized, he makes her breakfast "just this once." Real women do all the cooking, after all. He compliments her appetite and tells her that "women generally pick" at food and he likes to see her eat. She tells him that he can go out if he likes and that he should do what he wants. Clearly, real women make no demands on men. She is praised when he coos "nice to meet someone who has respect for a man." Respect means letting him do whatver he wants without asking him to pay attention to her needs. Guido later tells her that she's special because she cares about other people and wants to care for them. Real women take care of men and always put men first.

Roslyn and Gay become a domestic couple (she looks 30 and he looks 60). She tells him that her fear is that one day he won't like her anymore, evidence of this appearing earlier when she cried as Perce was hurt by a bull he rode. Gay asks her "didn't your papa ever spank you and then turn 'round and give you a hug?" Real women go from daddy's authority to obeying their husbands. Real women don't mind a little abuse from their lovers.

Every scene depicts "real women" as childish, vacant, obedient, servile, fuckable, and non-confrontational.

"Real men" are equally reductive characters. We are told that the last real men are cowboys, but that the cowboys are utterly "unreliable." They come and go as they please. They have children that they never see, as Gay meets up with his almost adult children only at the rodeo when he's shit-faced. Real men don't answer to women. They abhor "wages" or any kind of steady employment, preferring to rustle wild horses that they sell for pet food. It's not their fault, as Gay answers Roslyn's objections. Cowboys used to rope horses for kids to have as pets (now they ride motor scooters), lamenting the passing of "real work" for men in the modern age in order to validate pillaging nature to stretch out their own outmoded frontier lifestyle. Real men bomb cities without seeing the consequences, as Guido describes his fighter pilot days in the war. Men's justification is that "nothing can live unless something else dies." It's better to hunt down the last family of mustangs in the desert than submit to the responsibilities of the family and women's demands. At the end, the weary old cowboy Gay beats a stallion into submission and then deigns to set them all free after all. Real men are savage brutes who then decide that you should be grateful for them not exercising their ability to obliterate and destroy. It's their right to decide life and death. Roslyn, earlier horrified by the men's brutality, now clings to Gay at the end in recognition of his masculine superiority.

The camera dehumanizes Marilyn Monroe, degrading her even more than women in outright pornography. I have never seen cameras leer so much and so long at an actress in Hollywood. Her jiggling boobs and ass are meticulously shot while she plays with the paddle ball (as pictured above), as she rides a horse, as she dances, and even as she cradles Perce's head in her lap and the camera stays fixed on her cleavage for the entire scene. The actors all marvel at the Nevada mountains, but the real landscape onscreen is Monroe's flesh. When she has her one big outburst of dissent, calling the men murderers and liars, the camera pulls far back from her body and then turns to the men clustered together. Then it is only her disembodied voice that we hear off-screen. It's as if the camera cannot reconcile her angry objections with her zatftig appearance. We don't get to see her as she denounces the men's cruelty. In turn, Guido observes that she is crazy, just like all the other women, and while men try to tell themselves the lie that they are not (because they need them) men know that women are crazy. The camera's unwillingness to move to her underscores the veracity of Guido's claim.

It's easy to regard the film as a literal document of her vulnerability as a human being that culminated in her suicide not long after the movie was completed.

This was an aesthetic affront on so many levels. There's no beauty here, only hate.