Much was to be expected of The Misfits. With two men as talented as John Huston and Arthur Miller behind the cameras and two personalities as powerful as Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in front of them, the resulting film should have been a strong one. One might have expected it to be very good or very bad, but it was a surprise that it should have turned out so dull.

The original Miller story … out of which the book and movie grew is a reasonably effective moral tale that uses a pathetic roundup of wild horses as setting and device. The three men in the story—the aging Gay, the youthful Perce, the pilot Guido—are explicitly identified with the mustangs they capture. The men, like the horses, are misfits; none of them has a place in the world of job, home, and family…. The story suggests...