The Misfits

In a scene between Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, Gable enters the bedroom and kisses Monroe on the neck while she sleeps naked under the covers. He then leaves. In the final edit, she stands up holding the sheet over her body and puts on her blouse. During filming, however, she decided to remove the covers, shocking the crew and camera by showing her naked body as she put on the blouse. Director John Huston insisted on a reshoot, feeling it was completely unnecessary for the scene. But Monroe kept dropping the sheet each time, and Huston grew angry and reminded her that she was supposed to stay covered. Gable and others were reportedly unsuccessful in trying to persuade her to keep the nudity. The risky footage was thought to have been destroyed, but according to a Deadline report it was saved by producer Frank E. Taylor, who kept it in a locked vault that his son Curtice Taylor has maintained since 1999. Curtice said his father believed it was very important and groundbreaking and preserved it. Taylor also agreed with Monroe's decision to be naked. "Why would a woman sitting on a bed with no one else in the room pull up the sheet while also trying to put on a blouse? It makes no sense at all," he said. Had they kept it in, it would have been the first nude scene by an American actress in a feature film since the Production Code banned nudity and heavy sexual content in American films in 1936.

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Clark Gable bonded with Montgomery Clift and was so impressed by his talent that he came to watch him work even on days when he himself was not called.

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One of Clark Gable's few outbursts on set occurred during the filming of the tug-of-war scenes. After Gable's stunt double was injured and John Huston insisted on doing another take, the actor left the set in disgust.

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Clark Gable went on a crash diet to lose 35 kilos before filming began.

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One of the most difficult scenes was a five-minute take between Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift that John Huston wanted to shoot in a single long take, the longest single take of his entire career. No one believed that two actors with problems remembering lines could pull it off. Monroe beforehand asked that all outsiders be cleared from the set and that no one stand in her line of sight. But each actor was so worried about the other that they managed it in only six attempts, giving Huston two perfect takes.

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Eli Wallach said in 1983: "I was one of the first people cast, thanks to Marilyn, and then I watched my name drop further and further down the credits as Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Thelma Ritter joined one by one. Now they're all gone, James Barton too. Marilyn Monroe and I had become very close friends years earlier while we were both working at the Actor's Studio. While I was shooting 'Teahouse.' Every night she came backstage to watch me. While preparing 'The Misfits,' she told Arthur Miller she wanted me in the film too. It was sad to watch her marriage fall apart while shooting this Valentine's greeting he wrote for her, and Monty too — he and Marilyn had the same self-destructive temperament; it was easy to make fun of these people; big stars — but very sad."

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Many people were shocked by the change in Clark Gable's voice, leading some to question whether he had lung cancer at the time of his death. Gable had smoked up to four packs a day for thirty years.

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Marilyn Monroe blamed herself for Clark Gable's death. It should be noted, however, that Gable's health was already poor when filming began. He had smoked continuously since his mid-teens and, despite being 59, still drank and smoked as much as ever. Twice in the previous decade he had suffered severe chest pains that may have been heart attacks.

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This film was on television the night Montgomery Clift died in July 1966. His live-in personal secretary, Lorenzo James, asked Clift whether he wanted to watch it. "Absolutely not!" was Clift's reply, the last words he said to anyone. He suffered a heart attack that night and was found dead the next morning.

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While developing his screenplay, Arthur Miller added details from Monroe's past and from their life together. As the character prepares for her divorce hearing, lines are lifted from the divorce case she filed against her second husband, Joe DiMaggio. Worse still, the script began to reflect Miller's growing frustration with his wife through scenes and lines depicting the character's neediness and insecurity. Some of Guido's speeches criticizing Roslyn could be read as Miller's personal assessment of his wife.

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During filming, a doctor was on call around the clock for both Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift, since both had health problems stemming from alcohol and prescription stimulants. Ironically, Clark Gable died of a heart attack immediately after production ended.

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Bored while waiting for Marilyn Monroe to arrive on set, Clark Gable chose to perform some of his own stunts, including being dragged by a truck traveling at 30 miles per hour.

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After Gay (Clark Gable) and Roslyn (Marilyn Monroe) argue about the rabbit in their garden, Guido (Eli Wallach) and Isabelle (Thelma Ritter) arrive home and Gable addresses Isabelle by Ritter's own name: Thelma.

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Marilyn Monroe reportedly told Montgomery Clift: "I've never met someone in worse shape than me."

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It was first written as a short story by Arthur Miller in 1956, while he was waiting in Reno for a divorce before marrying Marilyn Monroe.

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While the other actors in the film competed for John Huston's approval, Clark Gable saw him more as a rival. Both were known for their masculine adventures such as drinking, hunting and womanizing. The older Gable, on his fifth marriage, was at times surprised and irritated by the director's antics during the shoot, especially his habit of losing large sums at the gambling tables and boasting about it.

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Despite the advice of friends who thought the role was physically too demanding and not well suited to him, Clark Gable agreed to make the film. One of his friends suggested the reason he took it was the paycheck. At $750,000 plus ten percent of the gross, it was more than he had ever been offered for a film. Gable also planned to make only two more films before retiring, and he wanted one of them to be a great film. He sincerely hoped this would be that film.

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The production was plagued by problems throughout, chief among them temperatures above 100 degrees, the breakdown of the marriage between Marilyn Monroe and writer Arthur Miller, and Monroe's dysfunctional behavior.

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When Clark Gable learned that the film's publicist was prepared to quit because Marilyn Monroe was skipping or arriving late to set interviews, the publicist proposed that Gable meet the press while escorting him to the interviews. He not only kept the press happy but his presence also made it easier for Monroe to face the reporters.

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In the bedroom scene, Marilyn Monroe dropped her sheet and walked around naked, having decided to appear nude in a scene for the first time. The second time came a year later during the shooting of the unfinished Something's Got to Give (1962). Monroe's character, Ellen, was to swim naked to persuade her estranged husband Nick from a hotel room. She initially wore a flesh-colored bikini for the shoot but began to remove it. First she went bottomless, then removed her top. The film was never completed because Monroe died during production. At the time, foreign films included nudity, but had both scenes been used, Monroe would have been the first American star to go nude in a Hollywood film since the Production Code began censoring nudity and strong sexual content in US films in 1936. Jayne Mansfield shattered the long-standing nudity ban a year later by appearing topless in the swingers cruise-ship comedy Promises… Promises (1963). Mansfield had agreed to remain nude because her career was in decline at the time and she wanted to do something to shake it up.

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Clark Gable was paid $750,000 for the film (about $8.5 million in 2026) plus $58,000 (about $544,000 in 2026) for each week of overtime beyond his contract's end date of September 15, 1960.

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Director John Huston initially wanted Robert Mitchum to play "Gay Langland," but Mitchum disliked the script and turned it down. Huston and writer Arthur Miller rewrote the script, but by then Mitchum had seen the rewrite and was committed to another film. The role was instead offered to Clark Gable, who took it.

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United Artists executives were unhappy with the film's rough cut, so director John Huston, producer Frank E. Taylor and writer Arthur Miller agreed to reshoot several scenes. Clark Gable, however, had script approval and rejected the idea. Other disagreements over the final cut resulted in Marilyn Monroe's bare breasts being removed from the bedroom scene.

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As filming progressed, Marilyn Monroe became increasingly dependent on pills. Prescriptions were sent by her Los Angeles doctors every two days, and she obtained additional medication from local doctors. She was taking three times the normal dose of the sleeping pill Nembutal. The pills left her disoriented and unsteady and inconsistent on her feet. They also caused severe mood swings and rashes.

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The cast struggled with health problems worsened by the heat of the Nevada shoot. Marilyn Monroe was ill and had begun abusing alcohol and pills, which led to a 10-day hospital stay. Montgomery Clift was also ill, and Thelma Ritter fell ill from exhaustion on the final day of shooting and was hospitalized. Clark Gable skipped the wrap party and left; less than two weeks later he died of a heart attack. Columnist Louella Parsons suggested that Monroe's delays contributed to it.

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Clark Gable's close friend John Lee Mahin tried to dissuade him from making the film, insisting the role needed a better actor such as Spencer Tracy. Gable initially felt out of place because Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach all practiced the Method, which seemed to him like a foreign religion.

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During filming, Marilyn Monroe's marriage to Arthur Miller fell apart, partly over disagreements about the script and her feelings of betrayal over how he wrote her character. She also felt he had turned John Huston against her and led Huston to treat her like a fool. Within a few weeks of the start of production they were staying in separate suites. They had stopped speaking by August, with Monroe's acting coach Paula Strasberg serving as intermediary. Miller had also begun seeing photographer Inge Morath, who would become his third wife, while she documented the production.

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After the film went over budget, production was halted in late August. Two weeks of meetings were held with United Artists executives in Los Angeles and New York to get things back on track. Part of the problem was that John Huston had exceeded his gambling allowance, so to cover his tracks he persuaded Marilyn Monroe's doctors to hospitalize her for drug problems, even though the production had contributed to them. At least the film's insurance company paid for her treatment.

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When the film was released in February 1961, Marilyn Monroe was being treated in a psychiatric hospital.

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After Clark Gable's funeral on November 20, John Huston, Arthur Miller and producer Frank E. Taylor decided to push hard to get the film released by December 31, 1960, so that Gable would be eligible for a Best Actor nomination at that year's Academy Awards. Post-production, however, had only just begun, and composer Alex North had not been given a chance to see the final cut, so he had not started writing the score. By early December, it was considered impossible to complete the dubbing and music by the proposed premiere date. North finished the score in three weeks, and the film missed the proposed premiere date by only a little over a month, opening on February 1, 1961.

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Contrary to what the studio said, Clark Gable did not do all his own stunts but was doubled by stuntman Jack N. Young. Young doubled for him when Gable fled the rodeo, when Gable turned the propeller, and when Gable worked with the wild mustangs. When Gable's face cannot be seen, that is Young.

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Marilyn Monroe and John Huston were to be paid the same fee: $300,000 (about $3.4 million in 2026). Huston also received a $50,000 gambling allowance (about $570,000 in 2026) for the Nevada shoot.

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When Marilyn Monroe went to the hospital for detox in August 1960, production was shut down for two weeks.

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Montgomery Clift arrived on location before filming began so he could research his role.

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Marilyn Monroe later said she hated both the film and her performance in it.

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Clark Gable was on holiday in Italy when his agent sent him the script. Although he was impressed by the writing, he did not actually understand it, but he was proud to have been offered such an intellectual screenplay.

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John Huston insisted on using real wild horses for the rodeo scene. The horse Montgomery Clift had to ride was too wild for the actor, but Huston insisted he sit on it for a close-up in the bull-riding chute. When the horse lost control, it threw Clift against the edge of the chute and tore his shirt. This was the approach Huston used on the film.

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John Huston appeared as an extra in the blackjack scene and pocketed $250.

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At first Clark Gable and Eli Wallach did not get along. They were so uncomfortable around each other that they initially had trouble remembering their lines in scenes together. In the end, though they mercilessly teased each other, they developed a grudging respect. Wallach would jokingly ask Gable, "Hey, King, can you lower my taxes?", and Gable once joked that they had boiled ham in Wallach's honor at lunch.

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Because of Marilyn Monroe's reputation for being late, John Huston set the daily call for 11 a.m. instead of the usual 9 a.m. Even so, she often arrived even later.

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Marilyn Monroe had to learn to ride a horse on the set of this film.

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Many people who knew of Arthur Miller's friendship with Montgomery Clift believed the playwright wrote the role of broken-down rodeo rider Perce Howland with the actor in mind. In particular, the character's phone call with his mother, in which she warns him she will not recognize him after a rodeo accident, bore an eerie resemblance to the change in the actor's life after a near-fatal car crash during the filming of Raintree County (1957) destroyed his famously handsome face.

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John Huston initially wanted Robert Mitchum for the role that Clark Gable would later play. Mitchum, who had worked with Huston on Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) and had been horrified by his director's disregard for his actors' safety, wanted nothing to do with the production.

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One factor contributing to Marilyn Monroe's lateness on set was Arthur Miller's habit of delivering his often complex rewrites to her the night before or the morning of a scene's shooting. The changes sent her into a panic and made it even harder for the actress to sleep.

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Montgomery Clift got a bruise on the bridge of his nose while rodeoing in Pocatello, Idaho. It was exactly the kind of injury his character was supposed to have in the film.

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Marilyn Monroe is said to have nagged her then-husband Arthur Miller to cut the scenes involving Eli Wallach's character, fearing that he would overshadow her performance, even though she was the one who had recommended him for the role.

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Clark Gable insisted on some strict terms in his contract. Not a single line of the script could be changed without his approval. He worked nine to five, and if the film went over schedule he would receive an additional $48,000 a week.

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Because they got along well during the making of this film, John Huston had no trouble casting Montgomery Clift in his next film, Freud (1962). That was a far unhappier production.

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The film was first released on Clark Gable's sixtieth birthday. He died at fifty-nine before the film was completed.

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As her marriage was collapsing, Marilyn Monroe was sinking into alcoholism and prescription drug addiction. Production had to be halted for two weeks while she dried out in hospital. Because she looked visibly drained by the experience, most of her close-ups after her release were shot in soft focus.

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Robert Mitchum later regretted turning the film down, saying he felt he could have helped Marilyn Monroe and that Clark Gable might not have died.

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According to an article in the July 19, 1960 issue of Daily Variety, the armed robbery at Harrah's in Reno lasted three days and cost the casino 21,600 customer gambling hours.

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John Huston and the crew once played a prank on Eli Wallach during filming. A quantity of oil from an aircraft engine was to be sprayed at him. When Huston called "Action!", the propeller released what Wallach thought was a firefighter's hose and sprayed black oil all over him. "Get him to sing Mammy!", one crew member said, laughing. Wallach glared angrily at one of the other crew members and the laughter stopped. He was not teased again after that.

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Although Clark Gable was 59 years old, his character was supposed to be in his forties.

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It was Arthur Miller's first original screenplay, based on a short story he had written years earlier and published in Esquire. The book, completed in 1958, was written specifically to showcase Miller's then-wife, Marilyn Monroe.

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At the start of production, Marilyn Monroe's entourage consisted of her husband Arthur Miller, a press agent, an acting coach, two hairdressers, a makeup artist, a seamstress, a body cosmetics specialist, an agent, a masseur, a secretary, a wardrobe girl and a personal secretary. Clark Gable, by contrast, had only one assistant: his friend Lew Smith, billed as a "dialogue coach."

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Marilyn Monroe was said to hate the character she played.

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One night, after John Huston's gambling at a local hotel was interrupted by a power outage, he asked the crew to connect the hotel to generators for the location shoot.

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The film was shot very close to where Clark Gable had made his first sound film, The Painted Desert (1931), thirty years earlier.

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During filming, John Huston took a break to take part in a camel race in Virginia City, Nevada. He won, beating among others the famous jockey Billy Pearson.

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Montgomery Clift was paid $200,000 for this film ($2.27 million in 2026).

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The biplane flown by Guido is a 1943 Meyers OTW-160, registration N34350. Only 104 were built between 1936 and 1944. As of 2026 it is still registered as airworthy.

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Marilyn Monroe's masseur, Ralph Roberts, played a small role as an ambulance driver.

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During a production delay, Clark Gable and John Huston went on a duck hunting trip, but each went to a different place.

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The river that Roslyn and Isabelle cross after the divorce, where Isabelle tells her to throw away her wedding ring, is the Truckee River. It runs through downtown Reno.

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John Huston celebrated his 54th birthday during the location shoot. Burl Ives and Mort Sahl flew in to enjoy the party, at which Huston was accepted as an honorary member of Utah's Paiute tribe.

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It was the first film John Huston shot in the United States since The Red Badge of Courage (1951).

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Clark Gable was 15 years older than his character.

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On November 6, 1960, Clark Gable was devastated to learn that his close friend Ward Bond had died unexpectedly of a heart attack.

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The film gave the punk band The Misfits its name.

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Every evening there was a conflict, John Huston gambled with the daily payroll. He once lost $25,000 and won it back the following night.

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Roslyn rents a 1957 Chrysler Windsor Town and Country station wagon to head into the country with Isabelle, following Gay and Guido in a 1954 Dodge C-Series truck.

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The trailer premiered on December 22, 1960, at the Capitol Theatre in New York City, playing before screenings of BUtterfield 8 (1960).

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Clark Gable was constantly upset during filming because of Marilyn Monroe's behavior: she was always late to the set, missed many days, and forgot her lines. At the end of the conflict, he said she nearly killed him.

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The film was included on the American Film Institute's 2005 list of 250 films nominated for AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores.

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Robert Altman was a fan of the film.

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This was one of the first Hollywood productions to be pre-packaged by an agency. George Chasin, who was instrumental in putting the film together, represented Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and producer Frank E. Taylor.

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Clark Gable was considered far too old for his character.

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The film received a "Class B" rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency, meaning it was "morally objectionable in part or all."

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On November 12, 1960, just one week after production on this film ended, Marilyn Monroe announced that she had separated from Arthur Miller. She went to Mexico in January 1961 to finalize her divorce.

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Italian censorship visa # 34290 was issued on March 16, 1961.

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It was the last film of Rex Bell, who was then Lieutenant Governor of Nevada and the husband of Clara Bow.

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