Featuring the incredible pairing of Jack Nicholson as a feckless cattle thief and Marlon Brando as the Irish "regulator" hired to hunt him down, The Missouri Breaks is a rollicking and highly unusual Western that, in typical Penn fashion, strains the boundaries of the genre. Penn's empowerment of performers is taken to a wonderful furthest extreme by the subversive presence of Brando's cross-dressing and unpredictable assassin, who effectively turns codes of masculinity and narrative continuity upon their heads. Once dismissed as an "oddity" in Penn's career, The Missouri Breaks has been reevaluated as one of the more ambitious and original Westerns of its time, placing it in the company of Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand and Monte Hellman's The Shooting.