"....Characters and theme do not congeal. There is a lot of absorbing detail in it, but it doesn't add up to a point. Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. (He died a few weeks after shooting was done.) 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."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
"A superbly shot anti-Western, constantly dragged down by Arthur Miller's verbose, cloyingly glib script about emotional cripples searching for a meaning to life in the twilight of the American frontier....it really comes good only in the mustang round-up at the end, an overly symbolic but nevertheless magnificent sequence."
- Tom Milne, “TimeOut Film Guide”
"The theme with its implications of an essentially male savagery suits Mr. Huston, and he has drawn extraordinary qualities from all his chief players."
- Dilys Powell
"Ill-fated melodrama....pretentious film which seldom stops wallowing in self-pity."
- “Halliwell's Film & Video Guide”
"The Misfits is essentially a life portrait of Marilyn Monroe...but its theme is also a demystification of the great American dreams of success and the West."
- Georges Sadoul, “Dictionary of Films”
"The superbly shot sequences of rodeo riding and particularly of the pursuit and roping of wild mustangs were outstanding visual set pieces in contrast to Arthur Miller's copious dialogue and lachrymose philosophy."
- “The Oxford Companion to Film”
"...[I]t is not the classic that it should have been....Like many Huston films, this picture contains Hemingway themes and characters; also the distinct European ambiance in the early group scenes is like something out of “The Sun Also Rises.” Miller's script is overwritten, without being insightful. It's full of gloom and doom; the mustang scene is truly unpleasant to watch....Monroe was having tremendous psychological problems during the filming, so it's amazing what a wonderful performance she gives....I'd like to think that this role comes closest to the real Marilyn Monroe."
- Danny Peary, “Guide for the Film Fanatic”
"The making of this film had more melodrama than the Christmas edition of most soaps but it is, at times, quite beautiful in a very melancholy way. Miller didn't really believe in the happy ending; nor do we."
- “The Rough Guide to Cult Movies”
"Unsatisfying but engrossing parable....." - “Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide”
"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"
- Variety
"An erratic, sometimes personal in the wrong way, and generally unlucky picture that is often affecting. Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay...about contemporary cowboys–"misfits" in the film's symbolism–who hunt down wild horses and sell them to be butchered for dog food. Marilyn Monroe is the lonely, emotionally unstable divorcée who is deeply upset by the men's determination to capture the horses. Monroe has never worked her vulnerability so fulsomely before; the film has an uncomfortable element of fake psychodrama–she's pushy about her own sensitivity....If there is a right tone in which to ply the Miller script, the director, John Huston, doesn't find it."
- Pauline Kael, “5,001 Nights at the Movies”
"The Misfits became a landmark after its 1961 release–but for the wrong reasons. It was the final film that both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable starred in, the latter succumbing to a heart attack aged just 59 only eight days after the shoot ended. The film's already poignant subject - the passing of a way of life–was therefore given a remarkable extra edge of sadness and tragedy."
- Daniel Etherington, Channel 4 Films
"A disturbing but captivating film about modern cowboys who have lost their purpose in a world that has robbed them of the West into which they were born. The Misfits was Gable's and Monroe's last film....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 still haunt one's viewing experience."
- TV Guide
Additionally, this film has received the following awards and/or honors:
Although both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable had great hopes that their performances in The Misfits would win them dramatic accolades, the film was completely ignored in that year's Oscar race.
John Huston received a Directors Guild nomination for his work on The Misfits, but lost to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story (1961).
In 1993, The Misfits's depiction of the capture of wild mustangs for sale to dog food companies won it a classic film award in The Fund for Animals' Genesis Awards.
