Tag: movies I have never seen

Honey, nothing can live unless something dies. – Clark Gable, The Misfits

What is it? The Misfits is a star-packed elegiac meditation on love, loss and the American dream, directed by John Huston and starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in their final film. A dusty urbanised western, it follows a young woman visiting Reno to get a quickie divorce (Monroe) and the older cantankerous Nevada cowboy she begins a tentative affair with (Gable). Packed with Hollywood talent, it’s a surprisingly thoughtful, eloquent film wrapped around its May-December romance. 

Yet it’s perhaps remembered most for the melancholy real-life fate of its three stars – Gable, 59, suffered a heart attack and died just 12 days after shooting wrapped. Marilyn, of course, died tragically at just 36 in 1962, and The Misfits was her final screen appearance. Co-star Montgomery Clift, whose life had already been speckled with so much tragedy, died himself suddenly at age 45 in 1966. Barely five years after The Misfits’ release, all of its lead actors were gone. 

Why I never saw it: Can we ever separate a movie entirely from what we know about its stars in real life? You watch The Dark Knight and mourn a bit the loss of Heath Ledger; My Own Private Idaho, we think of River Phoenix and all that might have been. Hell, even Good Morning Vietnam seems a bit sadder now with Robin Williams’ suicide. So it is with The Misfits, where at every turn you are confronted by Marilyn Monroe’s shooting-star beauty and fragility, and wiry Gable at the end of his career, old before his time yet still with a twinkle in his eye. You might write The Misfits off as one of those forgettable endless Hollywood epic dramas of yore, with more scenery than soul to it. But you’d be missing out.  

Does it measure up to its rep? Despite the legendarily chaotic production – with a drunken Huston gambling away in Reno, Monroe suffering several mental and physical health issues – The Misfits is something of a masterpiece. Those grand Nevada deserts shimmer in the black and white cinematography and playwright Arthur Miller’s script, filled with quotable lines, has a barbed, bittersweet wit to it that lifts the film higher. 

I have to admit when I think of Marilyn Monroe it’s of the frothy bubblehead she plays so well in Some Like It Hot or The Seven-Year Itch, a good-hearted soul but without a lot of deep emotional weight. So it’s a revelation to see how good she is here as the traumatised, sensitive Roslyn. You feel her exhaustion as she begins the picture as a new divorcee and the gentle rise in her spirits under the endless Nevada skies as she and Gable’s cowboy cobble together a kind of life out in the desert. Monroe portrays a woman who’s troubled, but hopeful. While she’s still stunningly beautiful and the camera loves her, she seems more human here than ever before, a woman with her own dreams rather than just an object. It makes you sad, to think of what might have been in her future instead. 

As for Gable, he harnesses all of his star power from classics like Gone With The Wind and It Happened One Night into a leathery old cowboy romantic who’s reduced to hunting down stray horses for dog food. With marvellous side characters – Thelma Ritter’s salty older divorcee, Eli Wallach’s prickly mechanic and Clift’s reckless doomed rodeo dude – The Misfits feels like nothing less than an exhausted pit stop on the road away from the American dream. It isn’t a cheerful movie, exactly, but it’s a staggeringly beautiful one, with every one of its hurt characters trying to find their way to a better tomorrow in the empty wasteland of Nevada’s scrub and dirt. 

Worth seeing? Definitely. It feels like a postcard from the final days of Hollywood’s golden age, but also strikingly modern in its mood of ennui and heartbreak. From Miller’s stark screenplay to the very final scene between Gable and Monroe, it’s a world long vanished, but the stars in it still shine with a bright light indeed. God, they were beautiful people, weren’t they? 

If I’m going to be alone, I want to be by myself. – Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits

What is it? The plot is simple: A peaceful alien arrives on Earth to deliver an important message, but is immediately met by fear and hatred. It’s an idea that’s been revisited countless times everywhere from E.T. to Starman to Arrival, but seldom with quite as much cool style as in 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still. Michael Rennie plays Klaatu, a seemingly human alien who arrives on Earth with an ominous robot sidekick, Gort, and who attempts to understand humanity. Klaatu grows close to an Earth boy and his mother, but fears that Earth’s warring nuclear powers threaten the rest of the universe’s stability. 

Why I never saw it: Some movies seep into the collective unconsciousness so much, you think you have seen them. Any somewhat movie-literate person recognises the image of Gort emerging from Klaatu’s spaceship. Yet when I was a teenager discovering all those old ‘50s sci-fi classics, this one wasn’t on the afternoon TV movie rotations. Somehow, the movie itself had slipped through my watchlist over the years but because it is so familiar, watching it felt a bit like rediscovering an old book you read and loved long ago. 

Does it measure up to its rep?  From the creepy theremin soundtrack to the bold and simple iconic designs of Klaatu’s flying saucer and Gort’s lurking menace, Day The Earth Stood Still is a template for what we think of when we think of smart science fiction. Don’t overlook Rennie’s quietly charismatic performance as Klaatu, one of the first of many cinematic “strangers in a strange land” to ponder the mysteries of us earthlings. Rennie anchors the movie when it threatens to dissolve into kitsch or sentiment (Keanu Reeves played the role in a widely ignored 2008 remake, which I haven’t seen). Sure, Klaatu’s relationship with naive little Earth child Bobby is a plot device that is a bit saccharine, but Patricia Neal’s thoroughly humane performance as his mother works very well, especially as she comes into her own in the final act. 

The 1950s were an absolute golden age for science fiction movies. Sure, they had existed before that and SF’s roots date back at least to the Victorian work of Jules Verne, but in the devastated aftermath of World War II, SF became a way for us to work out our feelings about the brave new world of atomic energy, mass death and the cosmic unknown.

Anyone who calls themselves a science fiction fan has at least a few ‘50s movies they love, from the original Godzilla to the creepy creatures of The Blob, The Thing and Them to the more thoughtful, contemplative vibe of classics like Forbidden Planet, The Incredible Shrinking Man and War Of The Worlds. The Day The Earth Stood Still stands firmly in that company, as science fiction that asks questions and makes us question our own beliefs. It’s ahead of its time and thoroughly of its time all at once. 

Worth seeing? Absolutely, because while the cold war paranoia that coursed through the bloodstream of so much 1950s science fiction has eased a bit, the movie’s message hasn’t lost relevance. We humans are still self-destructive, often brutish creatures determined to sabotage our world’s possibilities, as the last few years have so thoroughly reminded us. When Klaatu says at the end, “the decision rests with you,” that’s a message that resounds still 70 years on. Hopefully eventually we’ll listen.

What is it? I’m a movie-loving goof, and I’m still on my post-Oscars coverage high this week. And as a movie goof, I sometimes find myself staring off into space mulling the big questions – such as, who was the greatest movie star of all time? And the answer almost always is, Cary Grant, of course. 

“We had faces,” goes the famous line from Sunset Boulevard, and iron-chinned Grant perhaps had the greatest movie face of all. Less rugged than Bogart, more confident than Jimmy Stewart, a bit harder than Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant could do broad comedy or bold adventure and rarely did a star make it all seem so effortless. Much of the DNA you find in Tom Cruise today comes straight from the Cary Grant foundation. 

Arsenic and Old Lace is a classic stage farce which still gets rolled out for local theatre productions on a regular basis, where two charming little old ladies are revealed to be disarmingly genial serial killers – plus, there’s a criminal on the run, a befuddled newlywed, fumbling cops and a confused fellow who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt. It’s a farce with a staggeringly high body count (13 bodies in the basement!) that somehow remains charmingly light on its feet. Frank Capra’s 1944 adaptation of the beloved play was originally going to star Bob Hope, and believe me, we’d barely remember it today if that bland hambone starred in it. Instead, Cary Grant signed on to play critic and playwright Mortimer Brewster (that name!) and it became one of his sweatiest, most frenetic performances. Turns out there’s few things funnier than watching smooth, smooth Cary Grant slowly come apart over the course of two hours. 

Why I never saw it: I’ve loved Cary Grant for decades, from his iconic Hitchcock roles to the early screwball stuff – The Philadelphia Story might be the single most starpower-packed comedy of all time, and surely Bringing Up Baby is the awkward height of the “meet cute” romance trope? His Girl Friday, still one of the best journalism movies of all time? But Arsenic and Old Lace somehow slipped through the cracks for me. Grant’s been gone for coming up on 40 years now, but there’s still gold in that there filmography to be mined for a movie goof. 

Does it measure up to its rep? I’ll make a slight confession – unlike other movies in this occasional series, I actually watched Arsenic and Old Lace twice before writing this up, a month or so apart. Partly that’s because of the bombastic pace of these witty old comedies, where the jokes and puns fly so fast that you barely absorb them all (seriously, if you’ve never watched His Girl Friday some time, it’s like a machine gun barrage of witty verbiage). So on the first viewing Arsenic is an energetic slap to the face, but it’s on a second viewing that the sheer craft of Capra’s stagecraft shows, with Grant’s immaculate comic timing, Raymond Massey’s jarringly sinister calm, Peter Lorre’s invaluable pop-eyed sidekick anxiety and the utterly hilarious Josephine Hull (who looks disarmingly like the late Rip Torn in drag) and Jean Adair as Grant’s dotty, murderous aunties. They’re quite convinced they’re doing the lord’s work by poisoning lonely old men, you see.  

Like most farces, it’s all a jumble of moving parts that somehow barely holds together. There are a few dated and strained comic gags (the Teddy Roosevelt stuff gets a bit much), but most of it still works beautifully. Filmed more than 80 years ago, it’s still stagey and broad (it never really lets you forget it was originally a play) but it’s also a masterpiece of comic chaos with a twisted, dark underbelly that lets it hold up better than some other farces of the era – a scene where Mortimer is about to be tortured by his sinister brother goes into some pretty darned dark places before the comedy kicks in again. 

Worth seeing? The thing with a broad farce is you absolutely have to be on its wavelength and roll with it. The densely silly farces of yesteryear with their rat-a-tat pace aren’t meant to be watched while also scrolling through Twitter and checking your emails. If you abandon distraction and go with the flow, Arsenic and Old Lace is a goofy blast of anarchy, with Cary Grant at his loosest and silliest.

In a week where Hollywood once again lined up to celebrate its stars and stories, it’s not a bad time to take a moment to salute the king, who shockingly never won a competitive Oscar. There was only one Cary Grant, after all.