After a certain age, every artist works with injury. Marianne Faithfull, "Bored by Dreams"

The Misfits (1961) was Montgomery Clift’s fifth film after the traumatic May 12, 1956, automobile accident that destroyed his matinee idol looks but it is the only one of his eight post-accident performances in which the actor seems at peace with his compromised physicality. Playing an itinerant bronco buster whom Clark Gable and Eli Wallach pick up as a third hand for “mustangin,’” Clift’s rangy, easygoing demeanor is at first at odds with his well-publicized inner torment and physical discomfort, from which he sought relief in substance abuse. The producers of The Misfits had doctors on call 24 hours a day during production for both Clift and his equally troubled leading lady Marilyn Monroe, on the off chance one of them would slip over the edge. Neither did (although Monroe’s trademark tardiness caused Gable no small amount of grief) but it is the film’s sad legacy that all three of its stars would be dead within five years.

Clift’s rangy Perce Howland is a beautiful piece of acting and miles away from his signature roles of hard luck poor boy George Eastman in A Place in the Sun (1951) and hardcase pug Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity (1953). In The Misfits, Clift’s eyes never seem to line up right, which suits Perce’s sidelong look at the world, and the busted nose he never had fixed is a perfect fit for the cowboy. It’s difficult to tell from Arthur Miller’s script whether Perce is meant to be younger than Clift’s then 40 years or just mentally behind the curve but certainly Perce is a manchild whose wounded innocence is in direct contrast to his stiff, achy body habitus. When he saunters across a crowded bar, you can practically hear the bone chips rattling around like balls in a bingo cage – the painful sequelae of years spent following the punishing rodeo circuit.

When we first meet Perce, he is engaged in a tortured long distance telephone conversation with his mother, who has remarried following his father’s death to a man who has taken the family ranch for his own gain and condemned Perce to a life of rootlessness. The phone conversation seems tailored to Clift’s personal backstory, with some of Perce’s remarks hitting uncomfortably close to home:

No, No, Ma, I haven’t been in the hospital since I talked to you… oh, no, no, no, my face is fine, it’s all healed up. It’s just as good as new. You would too recognize me.

Homeless and aimless, Perce is just along for the ride in The Misfits, drinking and living hard and falling in love (as do all of the male characters) with Monroe’s dewy eyed divorcee, Roslyn. Looking at their performances posthumously has a grim fascination but the two do have a beguiling chemistry that hints not at sexual sparks but mutual appreciation. In fact, Montgomery Clift never really surfaces from beneath Perce’s Stetson until the bronco buster lays his head in Roslyn’s lap, as Clift had done so often with best friend Elizabeth Taylor. The two are soul mates; Roslyn needs a friend and Perce a pair of soft arms to die in some day. Perce Howland is one of Clift’s less tortured (and often sweetly humorous) roles but it’s precisely the character’s refusal to acknowledge his pain that makes the hurting so inescapable. When Roslyn tells him on parting, “Don’t get hurt anymore,” Perce just laughs and turns away, knowing that if he weren’t hurting like hell he wouldn’t know what to feel.

With this blog entry, I’m jumping the gun by a day on Monty Got a Raw Deal: The Montgomery Clift Blog-a-Thon at Film Experience. Tomorrow would have marked the 87^th birthday of the late actor.