John Huston’s western hinges around Marilyn Monroe’s vulnerable, accomplished central performance. With Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. Celebrating 100 years of Marilyn.
Marilyn Monroe would have been 100 this year. This Classic Sunday we are joining the British Film Institute and National Portrait Gallery to celebrate the ultimate Hollywood icon with this 4K restoration of John Huston’s bleak and elegiac neo-western, Monroe's final completed film in which she plays a naive divorcee who meets three new suitors, in her most serious and poignant role.
Written by her then-husband Arthur Miller, this poignant, off-beat drama of broken-hearted cowboys and broken-down marriages, features Monroe’s most serious and poignant role. She plays Roslyn, a naive divorcee who meets a new suitor, starring alongside Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable.
The film is a heavyweight classic, made despite the taut, fraught relationships depicted in the film echoing Miller and Monroe’s real-life rocky marriage, and director John Huston’s struggles with alcohol and gambling. It was, famously, both Monroe’s and Gable’s last film.
This is one of Monroe’s finest performances, infused with a raw vulnerability and the promise of what could have been had she had more time to explore her skills as a dramatic actor.
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