Once a decade I watch “The Misfits” with masochism combined with fleeting moments of pleasure and an attempt to see what I missed in a previous viewing. “The Extraordinary” (1961) is the type of film whose behind-the-scenes plot is more fascinating, surreal and tragic than what happens on the screen. There are films like this, and they are no less mesmerizing than films drowning in praise and awards.
His players are flawed in one way or another; The screenwriter was lost and the director who loved to abuse the production, enjoyed every moment. “The unusual” is the sum total of its flaws, the neuroticism of its participants and the reflection of the disintegration of their lives. It’s a disaster movie that wasn’t meant to be and yet once every fifteen minutes it shines with a light that blinds its flaws.
The “extraordinary” involves the lives of many creators, some of them whose time is limited and their life expectancy is short. It is held by John Huston, the director, who treated him laconically and sarcastically in his autobiographical book “Open Book”; Norman Mailer, who expanded on him in “Marilyn”, the biography he wrote about Marilyn Monroe; Arthur Miller, the author of the film and Monroe’s husband, contributed his part in “Time Bends”, a melancholic autobiography; and Patricia Bosworth in her book “Monty”, about his short and tormented life of Montgomery Clift.
Briefly: Rosaline Taber (Marilyn Monroe), comes to Nevada to divorce her husband (Kevin McCarthy) and meets Gay Langland (Clark Gable), a booker who is turning 60. Two other cowboys, Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift, Gable’s friends, are attracted to Monroe, flirting with her, waiting for her relationship with the elderly cowboy to go awry. The men go out into the desert to catch wild horses.
Monroe joins them, as she has nothing better to do, and becomes a witness to the brutal hunt. When Monroe realizes that no one will ride the noble horses and they are destined to be sold as dog food, she goes against Gable, who sees the hunt as his last mission. Under her heavy, hysterical and effective pressure, Gable was forced to formulate a new position towards his life.
Under a hot desert sun gathered in the summer of 1960 the best of the extraordinary of the American cinema. Montgomery Clift – who, if not for his suicidal and self-destructive nature, would have given Marlon Brando’s hegemony a worthy fight – arrived on set in Reno, Nevada, from the bottom of one of his many trials. His precarious state of mind is evidenced by an event where he invited one of his close friends to see his new home in New York. The guest arrived and Clift who was standing on the second floor threw himself down from the top of the stairs.
He was taken to a hospital, where he was dressed and underwent general tests. Through the intervention of his private physician, Clift confessed that he suffers from balance problems when he is not drunk and from memory loss. Hospital, drunkenness, memory loss and mental balance are key words in the dictionary of the “extraordinary”.
To lower the height of the flames on Clift’s horizon and spread a safety net under his fragile ego, John Huston – one of the greatest villains in Hollywood – remains faithful to his method. He cast in the film Kevin McCarthy (“Invasion of the Body Snatchers”), with whom Clift was romantically involved in the past. McCarthy’s presence on the set did not add to Clift’s liquid state of accumulation.
Marilyn Monroe of “The Extraordinary”, two years before her death, was a woman angry with her life, a cocktail of drugs and sleeping pills raging in her blood. The Kafkaesque torment of her husband, the talented and introverted playwright Arthur Miller, was seen in her eyes as a gaping black hole into which they were both about to fall. More than she needed a lover and a husband, Monroe needed a nanny and a bodyguard. With her life crumbling and one foot testing the temperature of the grave, her career was a missed promise of a good life and peace of mind. Monroe did not sleep at night and was not awake during the day.
Isolated in hot Nevada, surrounded by Hollywood’s macho elite, the film written for her became an ongoing nightmare. Her cries for help and signs of distress worried those around her; The production was stopped three times to allow her to be rehabilitated in different hospitals, mostly in Los Angeles, where her heart went out to Yves Montagne, whose romance she had with him she was unable to overcome.
When presented with the role of her life in Miller’s moment of supreme creative concentration, Monroe was too burned out to recognize his qualities. Despite the fainting state in which she was in most of the photographs, her deteriorating condition is not evident in the final product. Monroe of “The Extraordinary” was at her best. A strong woman, an actress, aware of her power. Every evening, at the end of an exhausting day of filming, an attempt is made to assemble her parts and restore her. Bringing her back to life were her personal masseuse and the fearsome Paula Strasberg, the New York-style game teacher, who camped on the edge of the frame and made signs to Monroe behind Houston’s shoulders.
While her two private Svengali work on her, the masseuse on her body and Strasberg on her spirit, her abandoned and battered husband wanders with his back to the walls. At the end of the treatment, the tenants retired to their beds and Miller went into action.
His wife threw the sheets over her and made the bed in her inability to sleep. He sat beside her and held her hand. Her marriage to Miller was clinically dead, and the desperate Monroe did not bother to feminize it. She had problems feminizing herself. For someone who was accustomed to liquid luxuries, from perfume to champagne, the tough Nevada colony was a Spartan exile and she escaped from it at every possible opportunity, often on a stretcher. Even the patience and help that Monroe received from the players who surrounded her were not there to bring her back to life.
Only her lady masseuse enjoyed; Her body, which had never been ripe, fuller and more radiant than the “extraordinary”, resembled to his eyes like a white cloud glowing in the moonlight. The massage therapist reported his findings. Her upper layer of skin was moist and deep, the massage therapist reported, I had never seen anything like it. At night it shone A body like an electric light source.
‘The unusual’ (photo: courtesy of Yes)
Miller was fading away in his screenwriter’s chair. “The Outliers” was born from his chance meeting with three cowboys in Nevada, 1956. The horse trappers told Miller how they capture the wild mustangs and sell them as dog food, and Miller asked to accompany them. Miller sold the first version of “Extraordinary” as a short story to “Esquire” magazine.
During one of Monroe’s frequent hospitalizations, which were their common bread during their marriage, Miller met Houston in the hospital corridor. Miller told Huston a sketch of the script, and Huston, always looking for a macho arena for action, suggested to Miller that they adapt the “extraordinary” into a film directed by him.
From her bed, Monroe asked her playwright husband to write a play for her. Miller wrote a movie for her. Because he had no filmmaking skill, Miller required freedom and time to improvise and rewrite the script as he worked. That’s what he did at night, when the stars of the movie and his wife fought their demons. Miller refused to admit that he had lost Monroe. After all, he wrote the “extraordinary” for her and also expected her to write some kind of gratitude in return. Miller’s mother also claimed in the cover that his marriage to the blonde Xixa was based on a mistake, but Miller preferred to shave his butt, what’s more, that love is blind.
During the “extraordinary” Miller suffered severe insults and angry attacks from Monroe. In one of them, she slammed the limousine door in his face. Many spectators came to witness the strange cinematography that Houston directed at the shooting site in Nevada. And what a strange show it was. In front of the wondering eyes of Clifford Odets, Frank Sinatra and journalists disguised as local bar patrons, the production created an uproar before a single foot of celluloid had passed the camera. Mainly the guests asked to collect small vignettes, a kind of souvenirs, from the disintegration of stardust.
The renowned stills photographer Elliott Erwitt sat down the wild bunch of “extraordinaries” for a publicity masterpiece against the wall of a local pub on a dusty street in 35 degree heat. Monroe suffered especially from the heat and began to show the first signs of an impending nervous breakdown. Clift, ever the gentleman, tried to ease her distress by simulating a burning passion for her. He fell off the box he was standing on and was left lying on the sand at Monroe’s feet, roaring with laughter.
Producer Frank Taylor knew that his stars could burn out at any moment, so he put a red emergency phone by his bed. The phone was connected to Monroe and Clift’s rooms. The idea proved itself. Clift got drunk in a tavern and escaped by the skin of his teeth before being destroyed. Taylor and his men dragged the star to the hotel and hospitalized him in his bed. The next morning, Taylor reported that Clift was seen running naked down the hall toward the elevator. He arrived at the scene with huge leaps, grabbed Clift and carried him in his arms to the elevator. “The elevator opened, a horde of tourists spilled out, and I’m holding Montgomery Clift’s naked butt in my hand.”
Monroe and Clift recognized their mental closeness and behaved like twins. Huston and the rest of the crew didn’t know who would collapse during the day of filming, who would be hospitalized or sent to rehab. The catastrophe loomed before the eyes of Monroe and Clift. A five-minute scene took an entire day of filming. Clift was hooked on a thermos of vodka and grapefruit juice, and Monroe was at the height of her addiction to Nembutal and sleeping pills. To overcome insomnia, Monroe switched to taking pills in quarts, and when they didn’t work, she would break the capsules and lick the powder off her palm.
Clark Gable is the real hero of “The Extraordinary”. Not since Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind did Gable encounter such a crude grotesque of star roles as Marilyn Monroe. He was 59 years old, after a series of heart attacks, newly married and expecting a child; in the production, which was difficult and demanding for all its participants, Gable was The quintessential victim. To suit the role despite his advanced age, he slimmed down by 20 kilos on a murderous diet. He arrived at the filming site in a new Mercedes Sport and looked healthy and fit.
In the long and continuous breaks between filming, including long idle days when the crew awaited Monroe’s return from hospitalization, Gable toyed with the new Mercedes. He raced at a speed of 160 km/h in the desert. His time was limited, and Monroe buzzed him. With time running out on his hourglass, Monroe acted completely oblivious.
John Houston, out of uncharacteristic concern for her condition, approved the long breaks and in the meantime devoted himself to his hobbies: gambling and racing. Houston left 50 thousand dollars at the betting tables. The most surreal experience engraved in his cynical and selective memory of “the unusual” was a camel race in which he took part.
Gable began to drink. Miller retired to rewrite. When they gathered to film, during a particularly important scene for Gable, Clift lit a cigarette behind his back. Gable raged: “The little gay is stealing my scene with the cigarette!”, then apologized and returned to his correct professionalism. The script called for Gable to be dragged on a rope, belly on the desert floor, behind a truck. The driver asked Houston how fast he should drive. 50 km/h, answered Houston. Sick with a serious heart disease, suffocated by the desert dust, Gable was dragged about 200 meters.
The cover of the film (photo: no credit)
It was the first film of an important playwright. Gable’s best role since Rhett Butler. The first original screenplay written for Monroe. Eli Wallach and Thelma Ritter were the only actors who showed up to work every morning to give their best without concessions. At a cost of 4 million dollars, the film won the dubious record of the most expensive film shot in black and white (it grossed 4 million dollars). Viewers were spared Monroe’s red eyes. The photographer reported to Houston that Miss Monroe was unable to focus her eyes from many bullets.
Monroe and Huston were blamed for the death of a historic cinematic moment. Bedroom scene. Gable wakes Monroe up with a kiss for breakfast. Naked under a loose sheet, Monroe sits up in bed. Houston sought a documentary approach. An old man with a young blonde woman. Nothing too hot. Monroe fought for her artistic life. Gable for his life. Aware of the two cameras covering the scene, Monroe tried to formulate a personal statement. She exposed her right breast. It was her signature.
“Miss Monroe was wearing a sheet,” Houston reported, “but her right breast was exposed in the seventh take.” Until the day the film was distributed, there was a principled debate about the demon. Huston claimed that the viewer knows that women have breasts and that he would not compromise his aesthetic statement to expose her to unfair competition against Monroe’s breast. At the end of the film, Monroe’s humane approach prevails over Gable’s matter-of-fact professionalism.
He frees the last horse and chooses to start a new life with Monroe, who is pregnant by him. “I think it’s the best movie I’ve ever made,” Gable told Houston, “and all I want now is to see my son born.” The next day he had a heart attack and died on November 16, ten days later. He did not get to see his son. Monroe and Houston were charged with his death. “Where are you going?” Wallach asks Gable at the end of the film. “Home,” Gable replies. Maybe his best cinematic answer since “The truth, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
The review hated the film. “Time”: “terrible, careless, repulsive, heavy, dismal, too long, banal and embarrassing”. The “New Yorker”: “a dramatic failure out of proportion”. As happens with films that disappoint upon their release but later become iconic and mythical in a new era, this is what happened to the “extraordinary”. This is also excessive of course. The firepower of its stars is greater than the film says. The curiosity to see them in their decline is what makes “The Extraordinary” a film that is usually talked about favorably.