“A great performance piece, especially from Monroe”
There’s a very specific way younger audiences tend to find The Misfits. You go backwards. Maybe from darker modern cinema, maybe from the mythology around old Hollywood, maybe just from the name Marilyn Monroe. And then suddenly you land here: black and white, slow, emotionally exposed, and not quite what you expected.
On paper, it’s stacked. Directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller, and co-starring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. It’s also overshadowed by its own history: Gable died shortly after filming, Monroe not long after release, and Miller’s marriage to her collapsed in the process. That sense of endings seeps into every frame.
The story is simple but heavy. A newly divorced woman, Roslyn, drifts into the lives of three ageing cowboys in the Nevada desert, men clinging to a version of the West that no longer exists. They capture wild horses and sell them for slaughter, a brutal metaphor that the film never lets you ignore. It’s less a Western than a post-Western, a quiet dismantling of the myth.
And honestly, parts of it are great.
Monroe is the reason to watch. This is her final completed film, and it carries a weight that’s hard to separate from the performance itself. She brings a raw vulnerability to Roslyn that feels almost documentary. There’s a softness, but also a precision. You can see her working, shaping the character with intent. It’s a reminder that she wasn’t just an icon but a performer actively pushing toward something deeper.
Gable, too, is quietly devastating. His performance feels worn down, like he already knows the world he belongs to is disappearing. Clift carries that same fragility. Together, they turn what could have been a traditional Western into something far more melancholic.
But for a younger audience, this is where things get complicated.
Because The Misfits is still deeply rooted in a version of masculinity that hasn’t aged well. The film gestures toward critique. It shows loneliness, repression, emotional damage. But it never fully escapes the mindset it’s examining. A lot of what once read as tragic now reads as toxic. The casual cruelty, the treatment of the horses, the way Roslyn becomes both emotional anchor and moral outlet for the men around her. It’s frustrating in a way that feels very current.
Structurally, it’s uneven too. Scenes drift. Emotions linger too long. It feels less like a tightly built narrative and more like a collection of moments. At times, you can feel the film searching for its own shape.
And yet, it still works.
Partly because of the performances. Partly because of the atmosphere. But mostly because it feels like you’re watching something collapse. Not just these characters, but the mythology of the Western itself. Even the Hollywood system behind it.
That’s what makes it worth revisiting now. Not just as nostalgia, but as a re-evaluation of someone like Monroe. Watching it today, you can see the ambition behind her work. The control. The effort to move beyond being reduced to an image. There’s a clear sense of what she could have become had she been given more time.
Three stars feels right. A great performance piece, especially from Monroe, inside a film that hasn’t fully survived the shift in how we read masculinity on screen. But still compelling, still worth seeing, and still quietly influential.
The Misfits will be re-released in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 5 June 2026. It also forms a central part of BFI Southbank Marilyn Monroe Self Made Star season (1 June – 31 July), a two-month retrospective curated by Kimberley Sheehan that celebrates 100 years since Monroe’s birth.