AMONG MANY enthusiasts of films that were clearly not just ‘entertaining’ venues for exaggerated events, a certain attitude emerged in regard to these sort of films, which were not typical ‘box office’ hits, but defined as ‘art films’. The term seemed to have emerged mainly from Anglo film viewers, who perhaps noticing that it was mostly European continental filmmakers whose films conceived of the art-form as explorations of real everyday life reflecting contact between people in some form of social milieu rather than film projections of events — however exciting they might seem — that were outside the realm of realistic contemporary experiences.
However, it would be an important mistake to think that American or Hollywood films escaped the inadequate definition of ‘art films’ applied to cinematic productions focused on practical, believable problems, which emerge with the formation of a modern temperament. Again, we have to admit the influential quality of much of the fiction and plays behind these special films, in conjunction with the choice of directors, actors, actresses, and screen-writers who help to carry these audio-visual adaptations of novels, short stories, and plays, into comprehensive demonstrations of the modern temperament.
The first example of such a special film is ‘THE MISFITS’ of 1961. The entire choice of cast to play Arthur Miller’s novella of the same title — Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach and Thelma Ritter — adds an immediate visual human vulnerability to the text’s descriptions. We grasp the film’s central topic of three outdoor, adventurous, fun-loving men, and two trusting, adventurous women, wise in their feminine self-confidence.
These characterizations by these actors point to the film’s central theme of personal and social changes in a modern context, even though the three males and two females express separate personal aspects of the same temperament they share. When the film begins with Marilyn Monroe and her aging chaperon, Thelma Ritter, about to leave for Monroe’s (Roselyn) divorce hearing, we are placed on the brink of the film’s unfolding topic of freedom. Freedom from what, and freedom to do what? By confronting us with this topic, ‘The Misfits’ shows what we do with our lives to be  an expression of inescapable freedom; whether we are employed or not, the same question persists, since it may refer to a career decision already made; a responsibility shouldered because of material necessity; or being resigned to doing nothing in particular.
To become self-conscious of these choices or situations is to develop the modern temperament. The five characters of ‘The Misfits’ spend a few days doing nothing, other than what they really want to do; which is to live without relying on routine wages or daily employment from others.
Obviously, the film is not saying this is how we should all live; what it is saying and showing is how this decision by these ‘misfits’ leads us to confront and consider some vital questions about how we feel about working for a living, and especially how we feel about working at something self-satisfying; also how we feel about changes in the world we seem unable to prevent; how we feel about solitude, and as individuals finding contentment and pleasure in living communally together, but outside the convention of blood-family ties.
The five characters in ‘The Misfits’ confront issues of the modern temperament by living  on the borderline between attitudes and experiences they already have, and ones they are about to develop, in a world that is pressurizing the freedom of their personal development. To experience the film is to encounter practical examples of a lifestyle, and this cinematic encounter is also to participate in art whose topic is the modern temperament.
Eli Wallach, one of Hollywood’s most exciting and versatile actors since the 1950s, is Guido, the mechanic and flyer of a small plane, who picks up Roselyn ( Marilyn Monroe) and her chaperon, Isabelle (Thelma Ritter), drives them to her divorce hearing, and shortly after meets his old friend, the homeless, nomadic ‘ladies man’ and aging modern cowboy, Gay, brilliantly played by Clark Gable in this his final masterpiece film.
Later, Roselyn and Isabelle accidentally meet Guido again in a bar with Gay, where they take a drink after the stress of the finalization of her divorce. It is here that ‘The Misfits’ gathers up its theme, which is the decision of these four characters, each with an undecided future, to leave the casino town of Reno in the Western state of Nevada, and drive to Guido’s (who leaves his city job) unfinished ranch/farmhouse on the outskirts of the town, at the edge of the vast silent Western wilderness. Guido is central to the film’s theme of the adventurous modern temperament, because it is from his unfinished house that all the characters confront the freedom of their evolving lives.
The fifth ‘misfit’ is Montgomery Clift, one of Hollywood’s irreplaceable great actors, as Perce Howland, the California cowboy who drifts through Western states entering rodeos, living off prize money and other types of skilled riding work. Perce is an old friend of Gay’s and Guido’s, and they find him sitting on his saddle outside a phone booth, waiting on a call from his mother.
He is going into Reno for the upcoming rodeo competition, and we do see him ride; but re-uniting with Gay and Guido, and meeting the two women also integrates him with a whole new, unplanned communal spirit involving friendship and emotional benevolence, which emerges from their collective involvement with the modern temperament.
They each share in this temperament by being freed from their prior bonds, which came naturally in living. They drift off together into an experience in the Nevadan emptiness, where the difference between a personal manual lifestyle of skill, and a mechanical lifestyle of less personal involvement, generates the film’s theme of a new modern self-consciousness.
At the heart of ‘The Misfits’ is this modern theme of old lifestyles affected by new ones; its relevance to developing countries is obvious, yet its setting in the American west often produces a stereotypical awe of America, which blinds us to this film’s transcendent significance beyond its North American locale.
The stubborn good-natured cowboys acted by Gable and Clift, helped by Guido the flyer, once rounded up hundreds of mustangs which they sold as plough animals, or gifts for adolescents. The mechanical age changed all that; now machines plough the land, and the young ride motor scooters.
What Gable, Clift, and Wallach have gone out into the wilderness to do is round up a paltry number of wild mustangs that are still around, and sell them to a dealer, who turns them into dog food. This unromantic cruelty of the industrial age is eventually revealed at the mustang roundup to which Roselyn (Marilyn Monroe ) is taken, and it is her moral and emotional stand against such a callous development which illustrates a more serious and responsible side of the modern temperament, brilliantly acted by Marilyn Monroe, in this her final great performance in an outstanding career as one of Hollywood’s truly unique actresses.
Another modern-day Western film which perfectly presented the emerging modern temperament in a problematic way, is ‘HUD’ of 1963, starring Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas. Newman is Douglas’s egotistic, lecherous, materialistically charming  son, Hud, impatient with his ailing father’s stoic, old-fashioned morality and responsible social values. Newman’s role is not stereotypical, however, even though it clearly suggests a callous materialistic irresponsibility in its projection of Hud’s modern temperament revealed in contrast with his father’s fair and respectful attitude to others in general.
The film’s sharp moral challenge emerges when the family ranch’s livestock Hud is set to inherit, is found to be infected with hoof-and-mouth disease, and has to be destroyed. This angers Hud, who, unlike his father, finds little pleasure in minding cattle, and would prefer to sink oil wells all over their ranch land instead.
The subtle beauty of ‘HUD’, the film, however, is in its cinematic communication of the modern temperament as an artistic topic, linked to the film’s haunting acoustic guitar soundtrack coinciding with  James Wong Howe’s gorgeous black & white camera shots of long, quiet, wide, empty roads in the Western landscape; its trusting un-materialistic simple rural customs and enjoyable town life.
Neither ‘The Misfits’ or ‘HUD’ emphasize or stress violence or crime in a subjective, social, or political context. Their characters face themselves alone, which is a tougher critical theme of personal freedom, rather than a secondary socially dependent collective idea of freedom.
The characters of ‘The Misfits’ and ‘HUD’, two powerful classics of the highest black & white cinematic beauty, face their encounter with the modern temperament without leaning on easy criticism of society for their attainment of meaning and happiness.
The importance of these films stem from their relevance beyond North America into other less developed societies and nations that are too often in denial of problems born of the modern temperament, which coincide with the spread of general education, knowledge via literacy, art, and travel. Such nascent modern societies often become entangled in frustrating everyday problems and attitudes, precisely because they tend to re-assert specific traditional collective ethnic/cultural values which are incongruent with the necessary evolution of a new set of quotidian values born from the material/educational changes in the world, and which films like these ‘art films’ confront, explore, and potentially resolve.