The Misfits is showing at the historic World Theatre in Kearney, Nebraska on Thursday, November 5 at 7:00 pm. Admission is free with reservation. This event will be introduced by film critic Karina Longworth, and includes a post-screening Q&A. In ‘Lonelyhearts and Misfits,’ the latest episode of her You Must Remember This podcast, Longworth looks at Montgomery Clift’s life and career. Marilyn was previously featured on the show back in 2017 (see here.)
“The new season of the You Must Remember This is called ‘The Bisexuals,’ and it’s about torch singer — and accused murderess — Libby Holman, and her sexually-fluid group of friends and lovers from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s, which included Montgomery Clift, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, Nicholas Ray and many more.
Here are some words on The Misfits:
John Huston’s masterful revisionist Western has become notorious for showcasing the final performances of an aged Clark Gable and a troubled Marilyn Monroe. Montgomery Clift, the film’s third major star (and subject of the new season of You Must Remember This) would appear in two additional movies that were released before his own untimely death in 1966, but his work in The Misfits can still be seen as a bookend for his career. Clift became a movie star in 1948 playing a young cowboy who challenges his mentor in Howard Hawks’s Red River. By the time he was shooting The Misfits a dozen years later, playing an overgrown boy/self-destructive rodeo rider, Clift was struggling to reestablish himself in Hollywood, after a near-fatal car crash left him with a changed face and an increasingly debilitating reliance on booze and pills. The Misfits plays with what the audience knew about Clift’s troubles — including making reference to the actor’s supposedly unrecognisable post-accident visage — but Clift’s heartbreaking performance of a man who can’t get out of his own way transcends these meta winks.”
