Horseshoe Casino is the Reno setting for a late-night scene between Marilyn Monroe and John Huston during the last week of filming The Misfits. Amid their frequent on-set quarrels and the film’s uncertain prospects, the casino brings them together in a game whose movement from caution to continued risk echoes the night’s charged, unpredictable mood.

Setting and Context

Marilyn comes to the casino alone, accompanying the narrator and others as they move among Reno’s bars and casinos. At Horseshoe Casino they find John Huston playing dice, and he beckons them over. The visit takes place with about a week of filming left on The Misfits, a production Huston, drunk and given to tears that evening, imagines as having an equal chance of becoming either a masterpiece or a complete disaster.

The casino scene also shifts the pair out of their familiar set conflict. Monroe and Huston quarrel so often at work that, when they meet socially, neither can remember how they left things that day: who had got the better of the other, who owed an apology, or whether they had ended on equal terms. At the casino, that unresolved rivalry gives way to a shared game.

The Night of Dice

Huston is several hundred dollars ahead when he gives Monroe fifty dollars to wager. She initially refuses, convinced she will lose because the odds are against her. Huston urges her to throw the dice, and she does; she wins. The others have to explain how and why, since dice are a complicated game. Monroe smiles and thanks the people applauding, then says she wants to stop while ahead because she is sure another try will end in a loss.

Huston is surprised by her reluctance and tells her that this is not the Marilyn he knows: she should be sporting, because they have only just begun. Monroe appears frightened, but the narration distinguishes that fear from the attention around them. People are watching, and some are taking photographs; hearing them whisper that she is Marilyn Monroe makes her feel protected and safe. Her unease is about the gamble, not the public recognition.

Monroe asks whether Huston wants to keep playing until they lose. He says that they should continue until there is nothing left to lose. That is what they do at Horseshoe Casino that night, during their final week in Reno. The scene records no final tally; its decisive turn is Monroe’s passage from wanting to preserve a win to accepting Huston’s invitation to keep playing.

Narrative Significance

The casino gives a concrete form to the contrast between Monroe’s caution and Huston’s insistence on carrying the game further. Her first win might have offered a stopping point; instead, the night becomes an occasion to continue into risk. The movement from the odds she fears to the play she joins makes Horseshoe Casino more than a backdrop: it is where the pair’s antagonistic set relationship briefly becomes shared action, without resolving the quarrels that surround it.