Marilyn Monroe. Part 3: Westerns

It’s rare for a Hollywood star to not capture his image in at least one cowboy movie. For Marilyn Monroe, this hour came in 1954, when the film “River Of No Return” was released. One of the “great moguls” of Hollywood, as his founding fathers were called, Darryl Zanuck (the head boss of 20th Century Fox studios) identified Otto Preminger, an overachieving director of noir and melodrama films of the 1940s and 1950s, who had not tried his hand at the Western genre before. And this choice turned out to be very successful. A graduate of the law faculty of the University of Vienna, invited by Zanuck to his film studio back in the mid-1930s, was impressed by the script of Frank Fenton, who participated in the creation of westerns with such wonderful actors as Gary Cooper, Stewart Granger, Robert Taylor, William Holden, Richard Widmark.

River of No Return (1954)

Interestingly, the story behind the script was inspired by Vittorio de Sica’s first Oscar-winning film Bicycle Thieves, one of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism.

The performers of the two main roles in “The River of No Return” – Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum, were approved even before Preminger took the director’s chair. However, the venerable director absolutely agreed with the choice offered to him. Not too complicated in the plot, this western, in addition to the star cast (to which it is necessary to add the performer of the role of the main bad guy of the movie, Rory Calhoun), was most impressive by the formidable splendor of nature, captured in the widescreen “Cinemascope” format. At the center of the dramatic adventures of the heroes was the most dangerous rafting on a mountain river with numerous rapids, and the filming location was determined by the surroundings of the Canadian city of Calgary (the future capital of the 1988 Winter Olympics).

This time Marilyn appears on the screen as a saloon singer in a town crowded with fortune seekers, where Robert Mitchum‘s character arrives in search of his nine-year-old son. The time of action is the middle of the 1870s – one of the peaks of the “gold rush”. Kay, played by MM, sings many soulful ballads not only on the stage of the saloon, but also during the dramatic scenes of a super-dangerous journey along the river. By the way, during one of them, when the Indians were chasing a raft with a trio of heroes, Marilyn fell into the water and, hitting a rock ledge, damaged the ligaments in her leg, which even temporarily called into question her further participation in the project. But, in the most rapids scenes on the general plans, the stars were no longer risked and stuntmen replaced them.

Filming of the film was completed by the end of September 1953, and it was released in April 1954. The film reviewer of the New York Times newspaper, who watched the picture, noticed:

“It’s hard to say which is more attractive in the “River of No Return” — landscapes or Marilyn Monroe… The mountain scenery is impressive, but Miss Monroe is magnificent in her own way. The viewer’s preferences, if any, are likely to depend on what they are interested in.” Of course, screenwriter Frank Fenton did everything possible to maintain a balance between nature and Miss Monroe…”.

The Misfits (1961)

The second western, in which MM took part, was released in early 1961. John Huston‘s film “The Misfits” became the last for two main stars of the picture at once – Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.

The script for The Misfits was written by the great American playwright Arthur Miller. And it was created for his wife, Marilyn Monroe, whose marriage was falling apart right in front of everyone’s eyes. Miller was already finishing the script on the set in the Nevada desert, where the central episodes of this dramatic story are being played out. MM’s heroine, newly divorced Roslyn, finds herself in the company of several cowboys right on the day of the divorce, which she is painfully experiencing (one of them, however, saddles his unsightly “puddle jumper” instead of a horse). They are all loners, thrown overboard by the success of life, you can say “outcasts”. And they live in a modern world where the romance of westerns comes to life only on the screen, and their good cowboy skills provide only casual earnings at entertaining rodeos. However, for the pennies they receive there, the youngest of this restless company, Percy (he was embodied on the screen by Montgomery Clift), almost loses his life, taming a bull sentenced to become a steak. Sensitive and compassionate to the pain of others, Roslyn, like a flower in the desert, is completely alien to that semi–transparent life where the harsh reality forces her three new friends to struggle in the cruel craft of catching the same restless wild horses, mustangs, which are no longer needed as a means of transportation, but are required only as raw materials for pet food.

Marilyn, during the filming of the movie, was grievously worried about parting with Arthur Miller, who had already begun an affair with an Austrian photographer from the Magnum agency, who soon became his last wife and mother, Rebecca Miller, now known for her feature films and documentaries (we recommend watching her recently released five-episode “Scorsese”, a classic film biography of the world cinema). Monroe’s permanent depression and her resort to intoxicating means of forgetting her sorrows even led to the suspension of filming for almost two weeks while the actress recovered in one of the private clinics. Nevertheless, she managed and the filming was completed on November 4, 1960. And two days later, her partner in the film, the legendary Clark Gable, who did not allow the understudies to replace themselves in the riskiest scenes, suffered a heart attack and ten days later his life journey came to an end. In memory of the great actor, the premiere of the film took place on February 1, 1961, the day on which he would have turned sixty years old. But at the box office, The Misfits only barely recaptured the $4 million invested in them, and only decades later they began to be perceived as one of the best Hollywood films of the sixties.

However, the then chairman of the Association of American Film Critics, Paul Backley, after the premiere, paid tribute to the creators of the movie and, above all, the performer of the main female role:

“The Misfits clearly shows how Americans who have no weight in society strive to achieve this in their own way. I am sure that no one else but Houston could have made such a picture based on Arthur Miller’s original script, just as it is difficult to think that Miller could have written the script without Marilyn Monroe. The acting is brilliant. Marilyn Monroe is magical in this role. You forget that they are playing, and you feel that they “are”… There are many signs that her character has many of the traits of an actress, but even so, her acting is able to turn all doubts about her abilities around. This is a dramatic, serious and accurate reincarnation…”

But for viewers on the other side of the “Iron Curtain”, the acquaintance with the inimitable MM did not begin with this outstanding movie. Millions of Russian moviegoers instantly fell in love with Marilyn Monroe only four years after the end of her earthly life, when one of the main comedy hits of all time, “Some Like It Hot” appeared on Soviet screens. There is no way to talk about this movie and the MM myth in a separate way.