Rebelling Against THE OUTLAW

THE OUTLAW (1943; director: Howard Hughes)

As a sordid “sex western”, this hasn’t aged well. Also, there’s not one soul on Earth who praises it for good acting, tight pacing or making a nickel’s worth of sense.

Even Jane Russell’s legendary bra for this film, custom designed by hornball Howard Hughes to cantilever Russell’s already-abundant breasts to look like nothing short of two Boeing B-17 bombers in her dress, wasn’t actually used on camera (according to Russell).

See this in the 21st century and watch one of the cinematic scandals of the 1940s reveal itself as clumsy and quaint, impotent and befogged.

With its shocks worn down to nothing and its gasps turned into yawns, what’s left today is still one strange piece of pulp, nonetheless.

Fans of antique exploitation will have the easiest time sitting through its bloated near two-hour length. Some texts credit Howard Hawks as co-director with Hughes, but I am VERY skeptical on that matter. Hawks worked on the film in its early stages—before he clashed with Hughes and walked—but I’d be surprised if anything shot by him made the final cut. This has none of Hawks’s professional snap and polish. This is not a film from the director of His Girl Friday. The Outlaw is rough and graceless, barely a notch above a Republic programmer, which makes for a bad Hollywood movie, but also makes for something that weirdly achieves the hot-blooded kicks of old dime magazine stories. This is one memorable terrible film.

For one thing, it’s a rare mainstream American movie of the time to acknowledge sex. Romance in the Hay’s Code era is all about faces and banter and tender kisses, often to soaring music. Below the neck, everyone’s a paper doll.

NOT so in The Outlaw. Director/producer Howard Hughes couldn’t care less about witty dialogue between lovers, glowing shots of photogenic faces or any semblance of heartfelt romance. Hughes instead cuts to the chase and gives us stockings dropped to the floor and the sound of clothes ripping in the shadows—and it’s weirdly fascinating in its defiance.

Nobody here is in love. Jane Russell’s shapely peasant girl is Walter Huston’s woman in the wings, a warm body that his Doc Holliday can call upon when he’s had enough whiskey. When she’s drafted into caring for a wounded Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel, doing a great impression of a piece of wood in his film debut), she somehow falls for him in the process, despite the fact that he killed her brother some time ago and raped her when she tried to get revenge.

The result of her shifting affections is not anything that resembles a love triangle, but rather is a conflict between two prideful men over property. Jane Russell is frequently equated with Doc and Billy’s favorite horse. And that’s not even the worst insult. The worst insult is that Doc and Billy clearly care more about the horse! Russell is just a set of tits who will go wherever the wind blows. A man needs a maid and rape is love in The Outlaw. (The REAL love triangle here, by the way, is between Doc, Billy and Thomas Mitchell’s Pat Garrett, whose jealousy over being left out of the other two’s male bonding is all but shouted from a megaphone).

This is a feminist’s nightmare, but it was also a nightmare for its makers. It was finished in 1941, but Hughes’s male gaze was too much for the Legion of Decency, which resulted in the film being stuck in limbo for five years (a brief release in 1943 was squashed after one week). When it finally came out for real in 1946, many prints excised the Jane Russell cleavage that Hughes worked so hard to compose into his frames (the complete cut is readily available today). This wasn’t the first time that Howard Hughes threw down against film industry censors. He was in this fight before with the ultra-violent Scarface, another collaboration with Howard Hawks, back in 1932.

The big difference: Scarface is great and The Outlaw feels like a movie made by someone with a severe head injury that they refuse to see a doctor about.

I don’t recommend it, but you’ve got to see it.