The Misfits is a heart-breaking film with three doomed leads. Their characters capture mustangs so that they can become ingredients in pet food. You’ve reached the end of your usefulness as a human being in a line of work like that.

But the actors were incredible and indelible.

Montgomery Clift out-Deaned James Dean as Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the bugler who refused to box for the 219th Infantry Regiment at Schofield Barracks in From Here to Eternity. The erotic surf smoochery between Burt Lancaster’s Sgt. Warden and Deborah Kerr got all the attention, but in a later scene, the newfound friendship between 100% Army Lancaster and the prodigal Clift, both gloriously drunk, is touching. Clift was incredible, incredibly oily and deceitful in The Heiress, with poor delusional Olivia de Havilland, and twitchy and craven as a Nazi war criminal in Judgment at Nuremberg. Five years after Misfits, Clift was dead.

Gable was Gable. He survived the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco but sadly failed to strangle Jeanette McDonald as she began her solo near the film’s end. I saw It Happened One Night again a few weeks ago and somehow he and Claudette Colbert are as fresh and charming now as they were in 1934. (I love the Dad in that movie, too.) A film he made about journalists, Teacher’s Pet, with, of all people, Doris Day, made me want to become a journalist long before Woodward and Bernstein.

And then, of course, there’s GWTW. My parents started dating that year, 1939, were married in September 1940, and, if you Google “Famous Films 1939,” you will understand why Hollywood made me possible. Gable, who’d once played softball with giggly San Luis High girls on Pismo Beach during the filming of Strange Cargo with Joan Crawford, died the year of The Misfits’ release.

Marilyn. I was too young to understand it in 1962—and I don’t want to talk about the Kennedy dirt today— but her death, I think, touched my parents deeply. She was just a shade younger than they were–born in 1926–and I somehow think they, especially my Mom, sensed the intelligence behind the “sex goddess” image, and she sensed the actress’s fragility, too. Given my mother’s upbringing in the Great Depression, in a household wounded by my feckless, often drunken and sometimes violent Irish grandfather, she understood it.

I do know that my mother enjoyed, for example, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” later stunningly plagiarized by Madonna and by Nicole Kidman, from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (Our own AG music teacher Lee Statom played the piano for singer Jane Russell, Marilyn’s partner in that film, at the Radisson alongside the airport runway in Santa Maria.) While I love Blondes, a lesser-known film with Robert Mitchum, River of No Return, is another favorite. She is tough and courageous, despite the tight jeans that never would have passed muster in the Old West. I apologize for thus, because Billy Wilder also brought us a masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard, but I did not care for Some Like It Hot, except for the closing dialogue between Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon. On the other hand, I care a great deal about Bus Stop, another modern Western, and I will use this term again only because it fits: Marilyn breaks your heart.

In The Misfits, you realize you can never put it back together again.