 | |
List Price: $14.95 | | Publisher: Tres Picos Press
Salesrank: 389581
|
| Our Price: $4.98 |
| Used Price: $3.30 |
|
| Media: Paperback |
|
Editorial Review:
In the summer of 1960 a legendary director took a cast of movie icons into the blistering Nevada desert to make a movie from a screenplay by a famed playwright. For some this would be a last chance at creating art. THE MISFITS was one of the most anticipated films of the 20th century, but difficult shooting locations, an unstable leading lady, an aging leading man, a crumbling marriage, and an undisciplined director all conspired to make behind-the-scene events as dramatic as the movie itself.
MISFITS COUNTRY explores the often turbulent relationships between the players and the fine line that exists between art and life. Marilyn Monroe is the central character and is portrayed in a more complex manner than in the numerous biographies of her life. As Norman Mailer observed, a novelist tells a lie to tell the truth, whereas a journalist tells the truth to tell a lie. Though a work of fiction, this may be the most honest depiction of Marilyn ever produced.
Misfits Country Reviews:
one word: AWFUL 
2009-09-29 - Misfits Country goes beyond bad and reaches a whole new level of terrible writing. The story is bland and repetitive. The characters are flat and predictable. The names of famous celebrities do nothing to help the book because NONE of the personalities that made the celebrities larger than life are present. Really, any name can be attached to the characters betwixt the binding, and the reader wouldn't be able to differentiate one from the other. These characters are lifeless and uninspired. I don't think I have ever been more disappointed in a book the way I was with this one. I won't even mention the numerous errors within the text. I was expecting a good story featuring larger than life figures in history and what I got was anything but... Avoid.
Sure, it's interesting, but kind of creepy too. 
2009-04-16 - The author plainly states that "Misfits Country" is a work of fiction. By using the names of extremely famous actors for his characters, however, he allows us to feel that we are voyeurs into the extraordinary lives of these larger than life stars from the fifties. This novelette does not fit into the genre of historical fiction; I really don't know how to classify it, except as expressed in the title of this short review.
Another winner from one of our best contemporary authors.. 
2008-07-05 - Those who enjoyed Knight's excellent "Johnny D." will again appreciate the rapid-fire style of storytelling as told from the rotating points of view of the central characters.
As mentioned in some of the other reviews, this would make a great movie, though the casting would indeed be difficult due to the sheer iconic nature of two of the principals. Maybe enough time has passed, though, for younger audiences (the largest portion of the movie-going public) would be willing to accept such a reach..
Movie historians should consider this book a "must-read." Casual readers will also quickly be drawn into the engaging narrative "flow" of the book, too. I'm already looking forward to Knight's next book.
this book is the best
2008-04-28 - I've read quite a bit on the subject of the making of THE MISFITS, and I cannot imagine a better book on the subject. Knight captures every aspect of the real persons involved in the making of the film, good, bad and appalling. Knowing that Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift will soon be dead adds to the poignancy of the story. I've never read a better treatment of Marilyn. She is exasperating, appealing, loving, caring and on the skids. Buy this book. It is riveting.
A Guided tour to the torments of 'Misfits Country'
2008-04-17 - REVIEW BY CHARLES ALVERSON:
`Misfits Country' by Arthur Winfield Knight (Tres Picos Press, March, 2008)
It was the boiling summer of 1960. Three famous actors, a celebrated director and a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright arrived in Nevada, USA, to make a film the playwright, Arthur Miller, had written for one of the stars, Marilyn Monroe, his wife at the time.
The film was `The Misfits,' the other stars were Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift and the director was John Huston, creator of many great films including `The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' and `The Maltese Falcon'.
The occasion was a fit setting for a classic motion picture and a personal disaster for most of the principals as portrayed by Arthur Winfield Knight in a work of fiction that reads as if it were a documentary written by someone who'd probed the mind and soul of those involved.
In Knight's imagination--bolstered by the mythology surrounding such luminaries:
Marilyn Monroe is a passive, drug-addled, constantly late nymphomaniac who despises her husband and can be consoled only by Paula Strasberg, the drama coach/masseuse who followed her from New York. `The Misfits' was her last completed film.
Clark Gable is an aging screen immortal whose youthful excesses and efforts to maintain a macho image at age 59 threaten his life and his happiness with his wife, pregnant with his first child. He was to die within two weeks after shooting finished.
Montgomery Clift is an insecure homosexual addict mourning the lost beauty of his face, reconstructed after a car wreck, and scorned by the he-men Gable and Huston. He would die at 45, having destroyed his system with drugs and booze.
John Huston is the hard-drinking, hard-gambling ringmaster of this circus of human wrecks. Despairing of maintaining order, he coddled Monroe and Clift, sometimes directed when drunk and took time out to go camel racing.
Arthur Miller is the odd man out, the Eastern intellectual in a nest of Hollywood neurotics, despised by his soon-to-be ex-wife and constantly rewriting scenes from the film to salvage Monroe's unraveling ability to play the heroine of the film.
This is Arthur Knight's raw material, the puppets he manipulates through gyrations that seem as familiar as they are bizarre. By chance, he was present in Dayton, Nevada, when `The Misfits' was being filmed, but Knight claims that did not influence the writing of this novel. We think we know a lot about Monroe's tragic life as a sex symbol and something about the lives of Gable and Clift. And certainly much of what Knight writes rings true to what we think we know, but the line between fact and fiction in `Misfits Country is imperceptible. This is perhaps the danger of this genre. Will Arthur Knight's imaginings fuse with the `reality' of the lives and events he portrays? Or are the facts and myths so conflated that one cannot tell--or care--which is which?
Knight's version of the making of `The Misfits' is exciting, sexy, torturous and almost as nervous-making as the endless wait to see if Monroe will show up on set. His puppets--Marilyn, Monty, Clark, John, Arthur and a small host of supporting characters--are revealed in chapters averaging less than two pages long. Though we know the film was finished and the fates of the principles, the tension remains high to the very end.
Critics may complain that Knight erases the line between fact and fiction by claiming well-known personalities as booster rockets for his imagination, but he makes them ring tragically true.
