Metacritic reviews

The film moves at a leisurely pace at first, but it accelerates as it moves towards its exciting climax.

What a multiple swansong and beautiful accident The Misfits is.

It’s a picture so precariously balanced on the edge of poetry and sentiment, of defiance and self-pity.

At face value, The Misfits, is a robust, high-voltage adventure drama, vibrating with explosively emotional histrionics, conceived and executed with a refreshing disdain for superficial technical and photographic slickness in favor of an uncommonly honest and direct cinematic approach. Within this framework, however, lurks a complex mass of introspective conflicts, symbolic parallels and motivational contradictions, the nuances of which may seriously confound general audiences.

For me, the film is itself a bit of misfit, full of big stagey speeches, contrived moments and some overemphatic performances, but opened out with muscular style by Huston. The faces of Gable, Clift and Monroe together in closeup have a Mount Rushmore look to them.

Many have called this film a brilliant mood piece of a dying Old West; that doesn't make it a masterpiece, but the ghosts of its cast do still haunt one's viewing experience.

An original script from Arthur Miller, The Misfits turns on the playwright’s usual concern: that of the individual trying to maintain his identity in a changing world.

The final screen outing for stars Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, this is a sparky but rather shallow story of emotional frailty in the Nevada desert.

Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. Miss Ritter, James Barton and Estelle Winwood are amusing in very minor roles, and Alex North has provided some good theme music. But the picture just doesn't come off.

A perplexing misfire more than a complete dud, The Misfits‘s true legacy remains in the personal histories of those involved with the production rather than in the far more exceptional careers of the artists who brought it to its dull fruition.