Review of The Outlaw (1943) by Edith N — 20 Apr 2013

Just Make It Fiction Already.

The problem with this sort of thing is trying to figure out what angered the Code. It's probably the idea that a young, unmarried woman spent the night in a young, unmarried man's bed and suggested that the minister be called the next day. (I want to know what kind of minister would marry a woman to an unconscious man, but that's a different issue.) Now, he was unconscious, and she thought it was going to keep him warm and save his life, but I guess that was probably enough. And, yeah, there's the omnipresent joke about "two reasons to see this movie," but she was seldom wearing anything low-cut. And I don't know; maybe whatever-it-was has been cut from the print I saw, but in some ways, that makes it worse for me. After all, that implies that the original movie was even longer than the one I saw, and I already felt as though the movie went on at least half an hour too long.

Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) has just arrived on the stagecoach into Lincoln, New Mexico, where the sheriff is Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell). He and Pat are old friends, and he is planning to spend a nice, peaceful time in town, though he resents that his horse was stolen a while back. Then, Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel) rides into town on a certain little strawberry roan. He and Doc argue about the horse, which the Kid says he's bought fair and square. In the barn, he tussles some with one Rio McDonald (Jane Russell), whose brother he killed. Doc sides with the Kid in something, and Pat gets angry about it. Someone tries to ambush the Kid, and the Kid kills him. There's another fight, and Pat shoots the Kid. Doc and the Kid ride off, and Doc takes the kid to Rio's family's ranch when the Kid loses consciousness. Despite the fact that they are out of Pat's jurisdiction, Pat won't let them go. Rio is falling for the Kid, and Doc tries to warn her that it's a bad idea.

I had two major problems with this movie. The first was the need to force it to be about historical characters. While Pat Garrett was actually a year older than Doc Holliday, and while he did know Billy the Kid and did kill him, I don't know of any instance where Doc Holliday met either of the others. Which of course doesn't mean he didn't. Rio, of course, is a completely fictional character. The women in these things generally are, despite the fact that the historical story of Doc Holliday is overflowing with women to stick in. However, this is yet another movie that just wants the connection with a famous name and isn't at all interested in actually giving us the real story. After all, the way most Americans know the stories of historical figures is through the movies anyway, right? That means we'll never notice if they change things around, because we never knew what was being changed before they got to it. We know who Doc Holliday is, but we don't know why or how.Okay, I do--but I must confess, I do because a movie got me interested.

Look, I know why Jane Russell is in the movie, too. Obviously. Graham asked why I was watching it, and rather than get into cinematic history, I made the Required Joke. So then the next time she appeared onscreen, I nudged him, and he agreed that, yes, they were quite impressive. (More so on the poster, I have to say.) However, I don't think any of the characters have any chemistry with her. The Kid spends more time worrying about the horse than the girl. About the only person we ever see him look as though he's going to kiss is Doc. Indeed, Pat spends most of the movie acting like a spurned lover, and it isn't Rio he's jealous of. She's basically irrelevant for almost the entire movie, and her motivations aren't believable. I don't believe she'd go from wanting the Kid dead because he killed her brother to getting married to him as quickly as she does--and she never seems as though she used to be Doc's girl, either.

I just in general don't get it, I guess. The movie is moderately amusing, though it would be considerably more so if it were shorter. (It's slightly over two hours long.) The acting isn't as terrible as it could be, but the three performers I know are capable of more can only do so much with what they've been given. Jane Russell would, in later years, display a dry, witty sense of humour, most notably when trying to wrangle sense out of Marilyn Monroe in [i]Gentlemen Prefer Blondes[/i]. Both Huston and Mitchell were Oscar winners; Mitchell won in 1939, a year in which he easily could have been nominated twice. (He won for [i]Stagecoach[/i] and could easily have done so for [i]Gone With the Wind[/i].) Jack Buetel didn't go on to have much of a career, which is as much the fault of Howard Hughes as that Jane Russell did. It's also true that we don't get much of a sense of what he's capable of here, because not even the others could make the dialogue of this movie live. Really, the one who comes across the least embarrassed is the horse.