by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology
There's one film that leads the discussion of Famous Last Films, and that's The Misfits (1961). Arthur Miller originally wrote the screenplay as a Valentine's Day present to his then-wife Marilyn Monroe, and in the years since, The Misfits has acquired a misty nostalgic sheen to it; it stands as a kind of talisman that film buffs can point to and say, "Look. Here. This is when the change started."
Whether or not that's accurate, it certainly is a tempting mythology. Starring Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, the entire production seems like cinematic kismet, as the film details the efforts of an aging cowboy (Gable) to rustle up mustangs to sell, while befriending an aimless divorced woman (Monroe) and rodeo drifter (Clift). Here, the symbolism starts to work overtime: the horses are sold for dog food, but the cowboy can remember the days (the good old days, in case you were wondering) when these same horses would be sold for children's fairs.
All three of its stars were approaching the end of their careers, though of course none of them knew it: Gable was a lifelong alcoholic and would collapse from a heart attack two days after filming; Clift, whose had only escaped his matinée idol good looks by being uncommonly talented, had been very badly disfigured in a motorcycle accident some years before and had never quite found his footing in Hollywood after that.
And then, of course, there is Marilyn Monroe, whose troubled life have filled a thousand pages of a hundred books far more impressively than I could attempt here; I will mention, however, that she had to attend the film's premiere on a pass from the psychiatric ward she had checked herself into for narcotics abuse.
Gable, who'd begun his career as an extra in silent films, was one of the last leftovers from the studio system, one of the last holdouts of the traditional, stoic masculine screen image that actors like Clift had fought hard to reinvent. Watching him in The Misfits is a little like witnessing the end of an era. And it's not just Gable: in their own ways, both Monroe and Clift were also the last of their kind, both raised in a largely studio-based Hollywood system that would begin to crumble in just a few years.
It's hard to watch The Misfits without all of this in mind; I tend to judge it as a haunting punctuation to three bright and troubled lives. Is this always the case, I wondered? It's a morbid tendency I've always nursed: the minute I hear that a famous Hollywood name has passed on, it's usually my first instinct to check their IMDb page for the last movie they completed.
By 1989, Audrey Hepburn had begun the slow descendant of a successful star on the downswing; after her Oscar-nominated turn in 1967's Wait Until Dark, she worked only occasionally while raising her family or promoting the charities closest to her heart (as a child who'd grown up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the plight of impoverished children hit her especially hard). In a career marked by style, charm and gamine grace, this treacly remake of 1943's A Guy Named Joe is an oddity on an otherwise impeccable resume.
Hepburn plays an angel to Richard Dreyfuss' downed airline pilot, and her charming, ever so maternal grace is a comforting distraction. The first clue to the film's general quality is how many genres it straddles: billed as a romantic comedy drama, Always strikes me as a jack of a couple of trades, but master of none. Also, many critics consider it a direct forefather to Ghost, so at least we know who to blame for this:
There's one film that leads the discussion of Famous Last Films, and that's The Misfits (1961). Arthur Miller originally wrote the screenplay as a Valentine's Day present to his then-wife Marilyn Monroe, and in the years since, The Misfits has acquired a misty nostalgic sheen to it; it stands as a kind of talisman that film buffs can point to and say, "Look. Here. This is when the change started."
All three of its stars were approaching the end of their careers, though of course none of them knew it: Gable was a lifelong alcoholic and would collapse from a heart attack two days after filming; Clift, whose had only escaped his matinée idol good looks by being uncommonly talented, had been very badly disfigured in a motorcycle accident some years before and had never quite found his footing in Hollywood after that.
And then, of course, there is Marilyn Monroe, whose troubled life have filled a thousand pages of a hundred books far more impressively than I could attempt here; I will mention, however, that she had to attend the film's premiere on a pass from the psychiatric ward she had checked herself into for narcotics abuse.Gable, who'd begun his career as an extra in silent films, was one of the last leftovers from the studio system, one of the last holdouts of the traditional, stoic masculine screen image that actors like Clift had fought hard to reinvent. Watching him in The Misfits is a little like witnessing the end of an era. And it's not just Gable: in their own ways, both Monroe and Clift were also the last of their kind, both raised in a largely studio-based Hollywood system that would begin to crumble in just a few years.
It's hard to watch The Misfits without all of this in mind; I tend to judge it as a haunting punctuation to three bright and troubled lives. Is this always the case, I wondered? It's a morbid tendency I've always nursed: the minute I hear that a famous Hollywood name has passed on, it's usually my first instinct to check their IMDb page for the last movie they completed.
Why? I'm not entirely sure, though I think it may have more to do with my need for symmetry. It touches me deeply when a star's last film provides some kind of symbolic closure on a life lived in the public eye; it disturbs me greatly when it seems arbitrary, or happenstance.
Discuss!
Audrey Hepburn - Always
By 1989, Audrey Hepburn had begun the slow descendant of a successful star on the downswing; after her Oscar-nominated turn in 1967's Wait Until Dark, she worked only occasionally while raising her family or promoting the charities closest to her heart (as a child who'd grown up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the plight of impoverished children hit her especially hard). In a career marked by style, charm and gamine grace, this treacly remake of 1943's A Guy Named Joe is an oddity on an otherwise impeccable resume.
Hepburn plays an angel to Richard Dreyfuss' downed airline pilot, and her charming, ever so maternal grace is a comforting distraction. The first clue to the film's general quality is how many genres it straddles: billed as a romantic comedy drama, Always strikes me as a jack of a couple of trades, but master of none. Also, many critics consider it a direct forefather to Ghost, so at least we know who to blame for this:
