The Misfits - Arthur Miller

 An unusual find this, dating from a time when publishers were experimenting with publishing film scripts in book form.  Penguin went with a cleaned-up script for Tennessee Williams's Baby Doll (reviewed below) but for The Misfits opted for a hybrid - the movie described in present tense (like the screenplay) but with emotions written in and lyrical evocations of the landscape.  It works surprisingly well.

Roslyn is in Reno for a divorce.  She meets up with widower Guido and divorced Gay and later, the rodeo rider Perce.  They are all misfits.  Roslyn doesn't fit with ordinary married life, Guido flies a plane but there's nowhere really to fly to, and Gay and Perce are cowboys out of their era.  They end up trying to catch mustangs for dog food, an extraordinarily powerful concept, and all their subsumed emotions - their half-baked attempts to fit in - come to a head.

I've never seen the movie, put off because it's the last film for Monroe and Gable, but the sadness is present in the book, too.

Baby Doll - Tennessee Williams

Williams wrote several of the movie adaptations of his plays but Baby Doll is an original script for Elia Kazan and produced in 1956 with Eli Wallach, Carroll Baker and Karl Malden.  This published version followed in 1957 and proudly proclaims on the inside front cover, "We believe that the publication of Baby Doll marks the first occasion on which an original film-script has been published in book form to coincide with the showing of the film.  This in fact really is 'the book of the film'."

Cool.  I wonder how many it sold?

Anyway...  I haven't seen the film.  I was put off Tennessee Williams by the movie of Night of the Iguana and the playscripts of his late works.  But Baby Doll was the Fifties when Tennessee was in full pomp.  I was spellbound by its power.

The setting is cotton country.  Baby Doll, imminently about to turn twenty, is married to the much older Archie Lee.  She was clearly looking for a surrogate father and provider, but Archie Lee's cotton gin has been virtually put out of business by the local plantation building its own.  So all the credit-funded furniture has to go from the marital home. This threatens the long-promised consummation of the marriage when Baby Doll turns twenty tomorrow.

Archie Lee drowns his sorrow and that very night the plantation gin burns down.  Italian operator Silva Vacarro turns up at the Meighan home with dozens of trucks for Archie to gin.  But Archie needs a part and has to go out of town to get it.  Meanwhile Vacarro's men install their own in Archie's mill and take over the mill.  Vacarro stays with Baby Doll and attempts to take over Archie's wife.

The sexual game-play is off the scale.  Racist undertones are fully explored.  The ending is left wide open.  I really have to see the film.